By "the size" I meant to say "the size of the infrastructure", meaning that AWS has to manage orders of magnitude more instances than Hetzner. This might as well contribute to "things" being slower.
Arguably it can also make things faster. A small provider might need to migrate other instances around to make space for your new instance, whereas a big provider almost certainly can satisfy your request from existing free capacity, and it should therefore be a matter of milliseconds to identify the physical machine your new VM will run on.
I understand that, apologies for not making that clear.
I guess I'm just struggling to see how having more VMs means it takes longer to provision one? A database query to find the space and get an allocation should be milliseconds in either case.
