VPS Showdown - May 2019 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Josh Sherman
7 min read
VPS Showdown
HEADS-UP: A ton has changed since this post was originally published!
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Changing it up a bit this month. No new providers have been added, but by request, I’ve moved the entire operation overseas to test out data centers in London.

Incidentally, every provider covered has a data center that’s actually in London so there’s no concession on location by having to pick a data center that’s near a certain location, as I have to when comparing US-based data centers.

As per usual, I’ve spun up 3 instances with each provider, all running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and have averaged the results together.

Another request I didn’t quite get to, but am hoping to include next month, are benchmarks of NoSQL databases / caching stores, specifically MongoDB and Redis (and maybe even Memcached).

Overview

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Location London 1 London, Zone A London, UK London #1 London
RAM 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB
CPU 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core
SSD 25 GB 40 GB 25 GB 25 GB 25 GB
Transfer 1 TB 2 TB 1 TB 1 TB 1 TB

CPU Info

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
CPU MHz 2329.74 2400.14 1999.99 2999.98 2394.45
Cache Size (KB) 22016.00 30720.00 512.00 16384.00 16384.00
BogoMips 3129.67 3200.33 2666.67 3999.67 3192.33

CPU

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Events per Second 822.67 862.97 1257.41 1064.70 792.91
Minimum (ms) 1.03 1.05 0.77 0.91 1.13
Average (ms) 1.24 1.16 0.79 0.94 1.26
Maximum (ms) 12.45 2.63 1.33 2.68 6.20

Memory (Read)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 3580840.03 820462.49 3780496.79 4495479.80 3316380.32
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 2.85 0.10 1.21 1.18 5.97

Memory (Write)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 3606109.89 816121.10 3780543.62 4484131.67 3330445.50
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 5.46 0.41 0.94 1.63 2.18

File I/O

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Reads per Second 1292.30 1342.85 1816.20 3833.18 1987.88
Writes per Second 861.52 895.22 1210.78 2555.46 1325.23
Fsyncs per Second 2751.33 2856.59 3869.16 8170.37 4233.94
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.26 0.20 0.14 0.07 0.13
Maximum (ms) 56.30 6.86 12.52 4.97 10.46

MySQL

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 1521.00 2354.33 3154.00 4230.33 2993.33
Queries per Second 30420.00 47086.67 63080.00 84606.67 59866.67
Minimum (ms) 3.64 2.30 2.29 1.64 2.04
Average (ms) 8.00 4.25 3.17 2.37 3.35
Maximum (ms) 112.40 47.12 17.80 19.98 55.58

Speed Test

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Distance (km) 7877.22 7914.01 7914.01 7913.11 7916.01
Latency (ms) 128.095 125.635 127.272 117.742 122.570
Download (Mbit/s) 507.37 230.73 401.72 303.20 564.88
Upload (Mbit/s) 200.98 149.58 204.85 141.72 220.02

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Requests per Second 174.89 160.50 196.02 194.58 175.18
Time per Request (ms) (mean) 2911.50 3133.61 2570.81 2585.30 2858.36
Transfer Rate (Kbyte/sec) 146.71 134.63 164.43 163.23 146.95

Conclusion

Linode crushed the CPU benchmark this time out, and barely inched out on the ab benchmarks.

UpCloud pulled ahead in nearly every other category with the exception of the speed test. Latency was trivially better than the rest, but Vultr’s upload and download speeds came in at the top.

Amazon Lightsail is still the top provider if you’re looking for the most storage and transfer allotments.

Something quite interesting to note is that both Linode and Lightsail’s distance’s came in exactly the same. Even though those numbers are an average, that particular number usually reports the same distance for each of the servers for a provider. I did verify that was the case this time. I’m guessing they are sharing a data center.

Or if you’re feeling really generous, show off your favorite tech stack by picking up a shirt!

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Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.

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