&gt; Four-year-old DigitalOcean now has more host computers in its cloud (almost 200,000) than any other company but Amazon (which has about twice that), says researcher Netcraft.<p>As someone who works on an IaaS offering, I&#x27;m really curious how Netcraft is doing this estimation. As a curiosity, I also wonder what they estimate our count of &#x27;host computers&#x27; at.<p>However, it&#x27;s also a meaningless number, given that VMs are sold in terms of (mostly) cores and RAM. If you&#x27;re buying an 8 core VM with 16 GB of RAM, do you care if the physical host has 8, 16, 32, or 64 cores? Probably not (and you shouldn&#x27;t). Those eight cores perform however they perform; you won&#x27;t know unless you benchmark them, and you won&#x27;t know what your variance is in prod unless you collect continuous metrics.