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

September already! Linode was tangled up with StandardJS’s funding experiment. DigitalOcean added some new managed databases (still no MongoDB).

Nothing else to report from the other providers, but honestly, month to month, most of the other providers don’t usually have a ton of movement.

Sticking to previous months, I’m including the $6 high frequency plan from Vultr. Was planning to expand a bit to include both their $5 and $6 plans, but was extremely short on time with a ton of travel this month.

Next month, I’m hoping to include both Vultr plans as well as expanding a bit to include the lower priced ($3.50/month) Lightsail instance. Also probably about time to add in another provider (ton on my list, so not sure which it will be).

As per usual, I spun up 3 instances with each provider, as close to the New York / New Jersey area. All are running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and the results are averaged.

Overview

CPU Info

CPU

Memory (Read)

Memory (Write)

File I/O

MySQL

Redis

Speed Test

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

Conclusion

Pretty consistent with recent months, the Vultr high frequency instance crushed it in nearly every category. UpCloud shined with a lot of the Redis operations as well as the Apache Benchmarks.

Thought the speed test results this month were pretty interesting, with both DigitalOcean and Vultr putting up download speeds over 1000 MBit/second and the rest of the bunch below 100 MBit/second.

Something else worth noting. I actually do the creation and tearing down of the server instances manually every month, and I tell ya, the DigitalOcean user interface is hands down the best of the batch. The ease of both creation and removal of instances is damn near frictionless.

As mentioned, hoping to expand the post next month a bit as I haven’t done so in a minute. And as always, if you found this post helpful in your decision making process and are planning to sign up for one of the providers mentioned, please do so using 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!