der8auer has a somewhat recent video on yt about one of their data centers for the curious.
Really enjoyed the video, thanks for the suggestion!
Provisioning of cloud instances is pretty much instant.
[1] https://docs.hetzner.cloud/ [2] https://github.com/hetznercloud/cli
(the bare metal offering does not have terraform support)
Edit: ahh someone already mentioned this. Didn’t read that comment before posting
AWS offers that with placement groups for EC2 [1].
It's also probably worth mentioning the Dedicated Hosts [2] and Dedicated Instances [3] features of EC2 in this context which allow you to ensure that EC2 instances run on the same physical hardware.
[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placemen...
[2]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicate...
[3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicate...
I think this information is outdated - I just did a quick and dirty test and it took 8 seconds to have a new instance up and a second to shut it down.
My small Hetzner VM has been reliably running for years now, so I'm super happy with them, don't get me wrong.
In US there is https://phoenixnap.com/
In UK there is https://www.heficed.com/
I am sure there are more.
They have VMs and sell them as "cloud" but provisioning happens like you fill out a form and they give you a server. It's not instant but fast enough if you don't spin VMs up and down like crazy.
The thing to remember with Hetzner is that they are cheap. Low prices and good infrastructure but you have to do quite a bit yourself and many features one expects from a cloud provider aren't available. Last time I checked they don't have an API to change DNS settings for your domains. You can write GPG signed emails to a bot but I don't know how well that works.