VPS $5 Showdown – October 2018 – DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. Vultr

After many months of enduring inquiries about why I was no longer including
Amazon’s Lightsail VPS offering, I’m giving up in and including it in the mix again.

Originally it was dropped because they don’t currently offer Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
which I was doing my benchmarks against.

For me personally, I prefer to run the latest and greatest version of my distro
of choice when I can, so it made sense to do these reviews on the latest and
greatest Ubuntu LTS release.

So yeah, got tired of being asked why it was dropped, so I spent some time today time today retrofitting my [server benchmarks script][bench] to allow for
testing with sysbench 0.4.x, as found on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and 1.0.x, as found
on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

To get that apples to apples comparison as I prefer, all hosting providers were
running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and as per usual, I spun up 3 instances of each and
averaged the results.

Overview

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
Location	New York 1	Virginia, Zone A	Newark, NJ	New York (NJ)
OS	Ubuntu 16.04 LTS	Ubuntu 16.04 LTS	Ubuntu 16.04 LTS	Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
RAM	1 GB	1 GB	1 GB	1 GB
CPU	1 Core	1 Core	1 Core	1 Core
SSD	25 GB	40 GB	25 GB	25 GB
Transfer	1 TB	2 TB	1 TB	1 TB

Right out of the gate, Lightsail is offering up double the included bandwidth
and nearly double the storage as everybody else.

CPU Info

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
CPU MHz	2066.66	2400.07	2466.66	2798.15
Cache Size (KB)	30720.00	30720.00	16384.00	16384.00
BogoMips	2666.33	3200.33	3267.67	3999.67

Vultr’s processor upgrades earlier in the year are still holding strong.

CPU

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
Events per Second	686.04	861.32	776.33	920.52
Minimum (ms)	1.28	1.06	1.20	1.01
Average (ms)	1.50	1.16	1.30	1.12
Maximum (ms)	12.15	1.30	10.26	7.04

Even though Lightsail was edged out by Vultr, Lightsail’s maximum execute time was leaps and bounds better than everybody. If you’re doing a ton of CPU heavy work, Lightsail should give you a more consistent experience without any random slow downs.

Memory (Read)

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
Ops per Second	1832488.45	610450.95	1204406.60	2308807.56
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Maximum (ms)	11.88	8.06	11.47	12.44

On the other hand, if you’re doing anything that’s read or write intensive on
the memory, Lightsail wouldn’t be a great choice. Vultr was able to put up some great numbers with DigitalOcean and then Linode taking up the middle.

Memory (Write)

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
Ops per Second	1855140.50	610214.85	1194220.77	2436094.29
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Maximum (ms)	12.88	12.36	24.68	9.58

Pretty consistent with the Memory (Read) data, Vultr up front with Lightsail way
behind.

File I/O

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.22	0.15	0.19	0.16
Maximum (ms)	9.90	5.85	10.79	10.60

Vultr and Lightsail practically even but Lightsail’s maximums clocked in way
lower.

MySQL

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
Transactions per Second	251.08	250.25	336.84	296.80
Queries per Second	4770.60	4754.80	6399.92	5639.20
Minimum (ms)	2.65	2.87	2.04	2.27
Average (ms)	4.37	4.04	3.48	3.74
Maximum (ms)	48.04	100.65	36.55	30.65

This is the test that gave me the most amount of grief. Partly because it’s the
test that worked differently depending on which version of sysbench works but also because Lightsail doesn’t let you log in as root over SSH, which threw a wrench into some of my scripts.

All that said, Linode really shined on this one coming in ahead of Vultr and
really far head of DigitalOcean and Lightsail. Even though DigitalOcean and
Lightsail were fairly comparable, Lightsail really struggled with the maximum
time.

Speed Test

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
Distance (km)	2434.90	2090.30	2421.10	2390.76
Latency (ms)	72.359	43.846	62.632	51.852
Download (Mbit/s)	1033.27	197.62	291.52	899.09
Upload (Mbit/s)	478.15	295.33	374.91	484.25

Since Amazon doesn’t have a New York / New Jersey based data center, they got a bit of an edge in regard to distance. Even with said advantage, they clocked in as the slowest of the bunch.

Vultr touts their network speed in comparison to the rest, but couldn’t make good on that, at least in regard to their download speed. Uploads they did fine, but not orders of magnitude better or anything.

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	Vultr
Requests per Second	239.01	235.96	231.79	286.31
Time per Request (ms) (mean)	2111.80	2152.55	2161.79	1764.76
Transfer Rate (Kbytes/sec)	200.50	197.94	194.44	240.18

The most subjective review of the bunch, since I’m running ab from my home
machine and with a decently connected house and family, a lot of things could
factor into this value.

Taken with a grain of salt or two, Vultr was better than the batch while the rest were all clumped up in essentially a tie for second place.

Conclusion

The usual disclaimer here, YMMV and you really should take the time to analyze these benchmarks and make a decision based on your specific needs for your use case.

That said, feel like Vultr put up some really good numbers this month coming in the top 2 slots for most of the categories.

Linode also had a good showing, especially for MySQL, but fell short on the
speed test and memory interaction.

DigitalOcean, while putting up some decent metrics, didn’t seem to stand out
except for the speed test, but even still, their latency was the worst.

Lightsail for the most part, showed a lot more consistency between their minimum and maximum times, but really fell short in the memory category. With that, if you’re looking for more storage or bandwidth for your buck, they are the obvious call.

Got something special in store for next month’s comparison, stay tuned!