It’s about that time again, folks!
Based on the feedback I’ve received on previous “VPS Showdown” posts, I’ve
changed a few things up!
First off, I’m offering up data on both the $5 and $20 price points to paint a
decent picture of how things can scale up on a provider.
Next, I’ve also went through the trouble of spinning up 3 instances of each
server and am offering up an averaged result for each metric.
And speaking of metrics, I’ve cut out a ton of the cruft! This post will feature
a single metric (mostly X per second) for each of the benchmarks. I’m hoping the
brevity will make things a bit easier to interpret.
Oh! And since it has been such a hot topic, I adjusted the ab test to be from
my local machine to the server instead of running it directly on the machine.
Probably not perfect, but better than before.
The plan is to start doing this comparison on a monthly basis, so feel free to
comment below and let me know how I can make things even better!
Each server was spun up in the New York / New Jersey data center for the
respective provider and was running a fully updated Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x64
instance.
$5 Showdown
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 3 | Newark, NJ | New York (NJ) |
| RAM | 512 MB | 1024 MB | 1024 MB |
| CPU | 1 Core | 1 Core | 1 Core |
| SSD | 20 GB | 20 GB | 25 GB |
| Transfer | 1 TB | 1TB | 1 TB |
| CPU (time taken) (seconds) | 11.8339 | 12.0545 | 12.71033 |
| Memory (Read) (MB/sec) | 1,462.59 | 2,049.88 | 1,718.41 |
| Memory (Write) (MB/sec) | 1,504.85 | 2,053.13 | 1,720.32 |
| File I/O (MB/sec) | 119.477 | 48.861 | 50.074 |
| MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) | 6,890.17 | 6,460.07 | 4,937.67 |
| ab (req/sec) (mean) | 1,804.85 | 1,300.25 | 2,329.79 |
| ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) | 2,0374.86 | 14,566.39 | 26,397.50 |
Mixed lot with this one. Linode performed the best for memory reads and writes
while DigitalOcean ran the CPU benchmark the fastest and was able to process
more during the File I/O and MySQL benchmarks. Vultr fell behind on the system
benchmarks but pulled ahead on the ab benchmarks.
$20 Showdown
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 3 | Newark, NJ | New York (NJ) |
| RAM | 2 GB | 4 GB | 4 GB |
| CPU | 2 Cores | 2 Cores | 2 Cores |
| SSD | 40 GB | 48 GB | 60 GB |
| Transfer | 3 TB | 3 TB | 3 TB |
| CPU (time taken) (seconds) | 12.7766 | 11.9487 | 11.9536 |
| Memory (Read) (MB/sec) | 1,189.03 | 2,281.60 | 1,752.63 |
| Memory (Write) (MB/sec) | 1,182.31 | 2,292.24 | 1,766.57 |
| File I/O (MB/sec) | 96.404 | 110.245 | 102.282 |
| MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) | 5,422.42 | 6,369.15 | 6,042.50 |
| ab (req/sec) (mean) | 1,303.47 | 1,195.85 | 1,283.06 |
| ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) | 14,620.47 | 13,322.92 | 14,332.82 |
Interesting to see the different tiers side by side. Going from the $5 to $20
tier, Linode was able to scoop up every benchmark except ab which DigitalOcean
took with a slight advantage over Vultr.
Conclusion
Like all of my VPS comparison comparisons, YMMV.
Looking at the raw data, DigitalOcean seems like a solid bet at the $5 price
point while Linode appears to have better stats as you scale up.
That’s not to say Vultr’s not worth it though. They put up solid numbers and
consistently came in second for the benchmarks they didn’t take first in. I’d
argue that they are the best all around of this comparison.
Also, as you probably have guessed, these posts do take time to put together. If
you found the post helpful in any way and plan on signing up for service with
one of the aforementioned providers, please please please use one of my
affiliate links below.
Until next time!
