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

Never a dull moment in the world of VPS providers. In the past month, DigitalOcean switched up their C-suite and Linode opened up a data center in Mumbai, India.

I’m switching things up a bit as well, bringing things back to the east coast. Well mostly, since not everybody has a New York-based data center.

I’ve also left the slightly more expensive high frequency instance on the comparison. Since it performed so well last month for a trivial amount more per month, I was curious if it would stack up again this month.

As always, I’ve built out three servers with each provider, running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The results are an average of the results from each of the instances.

Also, I usually don’t talk much about the support from the different providers, since I find it hard to truly test, but I did get some insight from my buddy Justin (from ReviewCycle) about his recent DigitalOcean support interaction.

He happened to have borked a configuration file that locked him out of his box (couldn’t SSH in directly, only via their console) and DigitalOcean’s support sluffed it off as him needing to enter his password in when prompted (which he wasn’t).

Took me about 5 minutes to walk him though some SSH configuration stuff, after a day of back and forth with DigitalOcean’s support.

Overview

CPU Info

CPU

Memory (Read)

Memory (Write)

File I/O

MySQL

Redis

Speed Test

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

Conclusion

Lightsail still stacks up best if you’re looking for the raw product offering, but Vultr’s high frequency instance stomped the competition in nearly every category.

The big exception being Redis, where UpCloud stole the show for the majority of the operations that were run. UpCloud also had some of the lowest latency during the speed tests.

Not to be forgotten, DigitalOcean put up a great showing overall and Linode put up some great numbers during this month’s Apache Benchmarks.

As always, you should weigh our your personal needs and do your own independent research and benchmarks when choosing your hosting provider.

If you happened to have found these benchmarks helpful in your own quest to find your perfect VPS hosting provider and have decided to sign up, please please please do so with one of my referral links. It’ll be greatly appreciated!

Also, comment below if you do, I love hearing about who everybody has picked.

• 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!