$10 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean (July 2016)

Been a minute since my last $10 Showdown. Since then,
Linode has turned thirteen and doubled the RAM offered on all of their
servers for new and existing customers. This means that Linode is offering twice
the RAM as DigitalOcean at the ten dollar price point! Here’s
the plan overview:

Linode may be offering double the RAM but they are still lighter than
DigitalOcean for storage and network out.

Since my last post, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has been released so that’s what I used for
the comparison. I went with the default data centers for both as they don’t
share a city domestically. Linode was Newark, NJ and DigitalOcean was New York
3.

In the past I’ve documented getting the server up to date and all of that but
will be omitting it this go around as I don’t feel it adds much value. Both
servers were brought up to date and I installed the necessary packages to be
able to run the following tests.

CPU

sysbench --test=cpu run

Linode’s CPU out performed DigitalOcean’s. In comparison to the last comparison,
DigitalOcean’s total execution time seems to have dropped by a few seconds and
the maximum request for both companies went up. Linode’s doubled while
DigitalOcean’s went up nearly 350%.

Memory (read)

sysbench --test=memory run

Reading from memory was twice as slow on DigitalOcean as it was on Linode. That
being said, Linode’s maximum request time was slower and both companies had
maximum request times that were significantly larger than my last benchmarks.

Memory (write)

sysbench --test=memory --memory-oper=write run

Writing to memory was fairly consistent with the speeds seen while reading.
Linode’s time to execute was lower but DigitalOcean had lower maximum request
times.

File I/O

sysbench --test=fileio prepare
sysbench --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw run
sysbench --test=fileio cleanup

Both companies saw an improvement to their total execution time as well as the
maximum number of requests. Linode performed the same operations nearly twice as
fast.

OLTP with MySQL

mysql -uroot -e "CREATE DATABASE sbtest;"
sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-user=root prepare
sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-user=root run
sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-user=root cleanup

Compared to the last benchmarks, both companies read/writes per second were
worse, Linode significantly so. Regardless, Linode still outperformed
DigitalOcean.

Network

Something I haven’t tested in the past and I think is pretty important
considering DigitalOcean is offering 1 Gbps both up and down is network
performance. To benchmark the network I ran ran speedtest-cli:

YMMV with this one as different servers were used by speedtest. That being said,
DigitalOcean’s upload speeds were faster than Linode’s. The stats as a whole
seem fairly consistent with the advertised speeds from both companies.

Conclusion

For the most part, it seems like Linode outperforms DigitalOcean in most
categories. As with my previous comparisons, I’m just presenting the data and
you will need to figure out which provider makes the most sense for you. If you
need MOAR RAM, Linode’s probably the right pick. Faster network, perhaps you
should go with DigitalOcean.

Regardless of what you pick, I’d definitely appreciate it if you used my
referral links for Linode and DigitalOcean. If you
sign up for Linode, don’t forget to use coupon code LINODE10 to get ten bucks in
credit. DigitalOcean will hook you up with ten bucks too, but you don’t need a
coupon code.

If you do sign up, hit me up on Twitter and let me know!