Josh Sherman
Why not check out the latest comparison?
Switching it up this month. DigitalOcean recently released flexible plans at 15$ per droplet and I thought it would be fun to dig a bit deeper into them instead of just doing a side by side comparison of the different providers.
These droplets come in three varieties: 1 GB of RAM with 3 cores, 2 GB of RAM with 2 cores and 3 GB of RAM with just 1 core. All three come with 60 GB of storage and 3 TB of transfer.
As per usual, I spun up 3 of each size and gave them a whirl. All droplets were in the New York 1 data center and were all running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x64.
Normally I just show the averaged results but I had noticed some pretty interesting divergences I thought it would be nice to show the metrics for each instance on each plan.
1 GB of RAM, 3 vCPU cores
| Droplet 1 | Droplet 2 | Droplet 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 1 | New York 1 | New York 1 |
| RAM | 1 GB | 1 GB | 1 GB |
| CPU | 3 Cores | 3 Cores | 3 Cores |
| SSD | 60 GB | 60 GB | 60 GB |
| Transfer | 3 TB | 3TB | 3 TB |
| CPU Model | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz |
| CPU MHz | 1799.997 | 1799.998 | 1797.917 |
| CPU BogoMips | 3599.99 | 3599.99 | 3595.83 |
| CPU (time taken) (seconds) | 14.9508 | 14.9055 | 42.5499 |
| Memory (Read) (MB/sec) | 1853.11 | 1871.11 | 540.89 |
| Memory (Write) (MB/sec) | 1850.04 | 1943.42 | 582.12 |
| File I/O (MB/sec) | 99.257 | 88.977 | 21.797 |
| MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) | 5380.70 | 5181.59 | 1168.29 |
| ab (req/sec) (mean) | 1278.98 | 1272.78 | 738.03 |
| ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) | 14445.89 | 14173.45 | 7403.84 |
All three droplets had the same CPU Model, there was a slight variance in the reported clock rates. I assume a lot of that has to do with the servers being virtualized and all that. What is interested though is that the instance that reported the slowest CPU performed exceptionally worse than the other two.
2 GB of RAM, 2 vCPU cores
| Droplet 1 | Droplet 2 | Droplet 3 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 1 | New York 1 | New York 1 | ||
| RAM | 2 GB | 2 GB | 2 GB | ||
| CPU | 2 Cores | 2 Cores | 2 Cores | ||
| SSD | 60 GB | 60 GB | 60 GB | ||
| Transfer | 3 TB | 3TB | 3 TB | ||
| CPU Model | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz | ||
| CPU MHz | 1799.998 | 2199.998 | 2200.032 | ||
| CPU BogoMips | 3599.99 | 4399.99 | 4400.06 | ||
| CPU (time taken) (seconds) | 16.8264 | 11.9887 | 12.0212 | ||
| Memory (Read) (MB/sec) | 1556.33 | 2090.59 | 2190.45 | ||
| Memory (Write) (MB/sec) | 1617.56 | 2130.72 | 2213.51 | ||
| File I/O (MB/sec) | 43.591 | 87.279 | 78.372 | ||
| MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) | 1663.57 | 7626.88 | 7100.76 | ||
| ab (req/sec) (mean) | 1294.67 | 3416.73 | 1286.48 | ||
| ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) | 14503.99 | 38808.73 | 14467.76 |
Of the three instances I spun up, one had the same CPU as the 1 GB variety and the other two received faster CPUs. Not surprising, the droplet with the slower CPU performed the worst.
3 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU core
| Droplet 1 | Droplet 2 | Droplet 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 1 | New York 1 | New York 1 |
| RAM | 3 GB | 3 GB | 3 GB |
| CPU | 1 Core | 1 Core | 1 Core |
| SSD | 60 GB | 60 GB | 60 GB |
| Transfer | 3 TB | 3TB | 3 TB |
| CPU Model | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz | Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz |
| CPU MHz | 2199.998 | 2199.998 | 2199.998 |
| CPU BogoMips | 4399.99 | 4399.99 | 4399.99 |
| CPU (time taken) (seconds) | 15.4133 | 13.3255 | 20.8646 |
| Memory (Read) (MB/sec) | 1522.34 | 1963.28 | 1166.86 |
| Memory (Write) (MB/sec) | 1535.42 | 1999.21 | 1192.88 |
| File I/O (MB/sec) | 97.955 | 97.832 | 73.861 |
| MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) | 3788.11 | 4321.55 | 2140.37 |
| ab (req/sec) (mean) | 1149.32 | 1299.26 | 1937.64 |
| ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) | 12912.26 | 14633.08 | 19147.69 |
Got lucky on this one, all three droplets received the same CPU model and clock rate. Even with the exact same CPUs, one instance performed wildly slower than the others.
DigitalOcean vs. DigitalOcean vs. DigitalOcean
Now for a side by side comparison of each of the flexible plans:
| 1 GB + 3 vCPU | 2 GB + 2 vCPU | 3 GB + 1 vCPU | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 1 | New York 1 | New York 1 |
| RAM | 1 GB | 2 GB | 3 GB |
| CPU | 3 Cores | 2 Cores | 1 Core |
| SSD | 60 GB | 60 GB | 60 GB |
| Transfer | 3 TB | 3TB | 3 TB |
| CPU MHz | 1799.304 | 2066.676 | 2199.998 |
| CPU BogoMips | 3598.60 | 4133.35 | 4399.99 |
| CPU (time taken) (seconds) | 24.1354 | 13.6121 | 16.53447 |
| Memory (Read) (MB/sec) | 1421.70 | 1945.79 | 1550.83 |
| Memory (Write) (MB/sec) | 1458.53 | 1987.26 | 1575.84 |
| File I/O (MB/sec) | 70.010 | 69.747 | 89.883 |
| MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) | 3910.19 | 5463.74 | 3416.68 |
| ab (req/sec) (mean) | 1096.60 | 1999.29 | 1462.07 |
| ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) | 12007.73 | 22593.49 | 15564.34 |
Not too shocked here, the more well rounded plan ended up performing better in nearly every category. Obviously YMMV and you should pick a plan based on your needs.
Based on mixed lot of CPUs and the fact that I ran into instances that appeared to be duds compared to the others, I would highly recommend spinning up more than one server and running your own benchmarks to make sure you’re getting the best possible server. This goes for all VPS providers, not just DigitalOcean!
As always, if you found this post helpful and are thinking about pulling the trigger with DigitalOcean, pretty pretty please use my referral code.
Also, please comment if you liked the deeper comparison of a single VPS provider or if you think I should stick to just comparing across providers!
- DigitalOcean, new accounts receive $100 in credit (good for 60 days).
- Linode, new accounts receive $100 in credit (good for 60 days).
- UpCloud, new accounts receive $25 in credit.
- Vultr, new accounts receive $100 in credit (good for 30 days).
Or if you’re feeling really generous, show off your favorite tech stack by picking up a shirt!
