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

Wow, pretty big news week for DigitalOcean last week, after some strongly worded accusations about ruining somebody’s business.

If we learned anything, it’s that off-site backups are an absolute must, especially if you’re serving Fortune 500 companies and/or providing SLAs.

Okay, now that I got that out of the way, it’s June and I’ve been receiving a TON of great feedback on these posts. Obviously I can’t make everybody happy every month, but I am chipping away at some improvements.

First, I went ahead and expanded the overview to include pricing for the base instances as well as some of the other services the providers offer.

The other big update is the inclusion of some benchmarks around Redis on the instances. Nothing terribly fancy, just using redis-benchmark. You can check out the arguments I’m using as well as everything else I use in this post [here][bench].

As per usual, I try to keep the data centers are close together as possible and all server instances were running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The metrics presented below are the average of the benchmarks run on 3 different servers.

Overview

DigitalOcean does not appear to be charging for bandwidth in 2019, so the price is reflective of how much bandwidth overage costs will be starting next year.

Bandwidth overage prices are reflective of North American traffic and depending on the provider, the price could be a bit more depending on where your traffic is coming from.

Amazon is generous enough to include automatic backups with 7 days of retention for free. Manual backups, which persist until you delete them, carry a $0.05/GB per month price tag.

UpCloud offers a bit more flexibility with their backup offering. They charge for the storage of your backup instead of a flat rate, meaning you could go crazy and have hourly snapshots if you wanted. Doing the math, if you kept a single backup of a 25 GB instance, you’d paying $1.50.

Even though Vultr and UpCloud don’t offer managed load balancers, you could still very well run your own load balancer on one of their servers.

CPU Info

CPU

Memory (Read)

Memory (Write)

File I/O

MySQL

Redis

The following values are the number of requests per second for the command listed on the left.

Speed Test

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

Conclusion

The last few months have been pretty consistent with UpCloud taking the crown in just about every category. This month the speed tests weren’t nearly as favorable with upload and downloads speeds nearly as slow as that of Lightsail.

I know raw metrics aren’t always a good indicator of how good a provider is, so factoring in things like managed services and overage pricing, DigitalOcean is still standing tall as a good mix of performance and platform offerings.

As always, YMMV so it’s always encouraged to run your own benchmarks and weigh your needs before making a decision on providers.

If you did find this post helpful and plan to sign up, please use one of my referral links below.

• 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!