I don’t see any performance details in your write up. Is the SL server actually comparable to the GC one? I don’t know how to equate vCPUs to real world performance.

Memory is easy to compare. But how does it stack up CPU-wise.

Another question is whether lower tier servers compare favorably or not. How does a $200-500/month server compare?

Lastly, is it possible that SL is just not competitive anymore, but another provider is? I have gotten out of that gig a few years ago so I honestly don’t know, but is it possible that Hetzner or someone similar is now the leader in leased hardware?

CPUs are in the same ballpark. They are all recent generation Intel Xeon with a lot of cores. The providers each have a few different builds, you'd need to provision the machine and check the model number if you want the details.

SoftLayer is a disaster on lower tier servers. You only go to them for higher tiers.

The market is very competitive and moving fast. Both Google Cloud and AWS have been rolling out high memory hardware recently at a reasonable rate.

Hetzner is amateur tier. It's cheap second hands servers with no ECC. It's not comparable to enterprise infrastructure.

I think you misunderstand, I agree Softlayer is terrible - I was merely pointing out that when their pricing wasn't bad, their tooling has always been pants.

(But then they were bought by a company who's "cloud strategy" is to put the word "cloud" in as many DB2 and mainframe contracts as possible.)

Yes, I agree that the tooling is subpar but the price point and the servers with terabyte of memory were decent arguments, when the competition didn't have them.

It's noteworthy that SoftLayer is now worse on all aspects.