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$10 VPS Showdown - June 2018 - DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr

It's already that time again!

This month, I'm comparing $10 VPS offerings instead of the smaller $5 plans.

Linode recently upgraded all of their "standard" plans and I wasn't entirely sure if their $5 instance, deemed a "Nanode" qualified as standard.

Didn't help that their blog post announcing the resource increase didn't actually show the before and after of the offerings.

As always, I spun up 3 instance per hosting provider and averaged the results. Each instance was in or around the New York area and was running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Also, was still having issues with getting sysbench working with MySQL on the latest Ubuntu so it's been omitted again this month.

I'm happy to report that I'm a bit closer to getting the kinks worked out, just wasn't quite there to include in this month's post.

Overview

DigitalOcean Linode Vultr
Location New York 1 Newark, NJ New York (NJ)
RAM 2 GB 2 GB 2 GB
CPU 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core
SSD 50 GB 50 GB 40 GB
Transfer 2 TB 2 TB 2 TB

CPU Info

DigitalOcean Linode Vultr
CPU MHz 1931.94 2366.66 2597.97
Cache Size (KB) 30720.00 16384.00 16384.00
BogoMips 2665.00 3199.67 3462.67

CPU

DigitalOcean Linode Vultr
Events per Second 437.11 705.31 1092.54
Minimum (ms) 1.37 1.26 0.85
Average (ms) 3.26 1.43 0.91
Maximum (ms) 10.20 14.51 7.95

Memory (Read)

DigitalOcean Linode Vultr
Ops per Second 1793171.07 2908557.54 2022154.20
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 3.67 2.69 2.88

Memory (Write)

DigitalOcean Linode Vultr
Ops per Second 1871790.18 3018305.96 2039872.37
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 4.84 2.56 3.31

File I/O

DigitalOcean Linode Vultr
Reads per Second 2759.04 2687.44 2992.11
Writes per Second 1839.34 1791.62 1994.70
Fsyncs per Second 5880.78 5726.39 6381.19
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.16 0.10 0.09
Maximum (ms) 30.10 63.69 6.11

Speed Test

DigitalOcean Linode Vultr
Distance (km) 2434.90 2421.10 1881.83
Latency (ms) 50.540 155.593 46.688
Download (Mbit/s) 1052.88 556.78 1338.12
Upload (Mbit/s) 379.99 175.78 555.01

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

DigitalOcean Linode Vultr
Requests per Second 4331.00 5915.96 5636.08
Time per Request (ms) (mean) 344.95 171.67 177.48
Transfer Rate (Kbytes/sec) 3608.59 4962.70 4727.92

Conclusion

With the recent resource increase, Digital Ocean and Linode have both left Vultr's SSD offering behind.

Digital Ocean's CPU speed came in way behind while Vultr is now advertising (and seemingly delivering on) Intel Skylake CPUs.

Vultr excelled in a lot of ways this month, I suspect because of the CPU upgrade but still fell short to Linode's memory (read/write) performance.

With that, Linode's file I/O was dragging with max requests taking twice as long as Digital Ocean (which were already 5 times slower than Vultr).

Vultr's network speed was consistent with recent benchmarks and still validates their marketing about how fast their network performs.

Linode's ab results edged out Vultr, but not by much.

Last month's results had me leaning towards Digital Ocean, but this month I feel like we're back into YMMV territory.

There's a ton of great things happening across the board, between Linode's resource bump, Digital Ocean's Spaces and Vultr's CPU upgrade.

Hard to say that you're making a bad decision with any of these providers, especially now that it seems like they are all pushing eachother.

As always, if you've found this post helpful and you're planning on signing up for one of the covered hosts, pretty please sure sugar on top, use my referral links below.

If you're not ready to sign up and still want to help support my blog, please consider supporting me and my debauchery on GitHub.

We'll catch up about all things VPS next month ;)

Until then, happy hacking!

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