VPS Showdown - Singapore - October 2019 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

One of my bigger pain points with doing these comparisons is that it’s really hard to line all of the providers in the same geographical region. Things tend to be close, but there’s always an outlier (looking at you Amazon Lightsail).

With that, decided this month to switch it up and run benchmarks in the Singapore area, as all of the covered providers actually have a data center there.

I’ve also included both the Vultr Cloud Compute and High Frequency plans this month, as I’ve been curious as to how they stacked up against each other.

In usual fashion, I spun up 3 instances with each provider for each plan, all of which are running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The following results are an average of the benchmarks, where applicable.

Overview

CPU Info

CPU

Memory (Read)

Memory (Write)

File I/O

MySQL

Redis

Speed Test

Worth noting, that DigitalOcean’s distance was showing as being way off compared to the rest of the pack. We’ve seen this before in past comparisons and is probably due to the IP data used by the speed test being out of data and not indicative of the server potentially being in a different geographical region.

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

Conclusion

Was nice to see the Vultr Cloud Compute in comparison to their High Frequency plan. Vultr’s Cloud Compute still but up a good showing, but the High Frequency plan continues to impress.

Hard to not consider it with the price being a mere buck more per month so I’ll probably go back to omitting the Cloud Compute plan entirely and just continuing to include the High Frequency plan.

Everybody’s been putting some pretty consistent numbers for the last few months, so I’m probably going to start delving a bit more into the advanced features and user interfaces in the coming months. I’ve been trying to include a bit more of that in the overview section, slowly building that out.

Something else I wanted to point out this month, as I struggled to find the block storage pricing for UpCloud (which I ended up calculating myself, so it may not be 100% accurate), I happened upon a series of pages of theirs with comparisons to other providers.

That said, the page comparing themselves to Linode happened to tout that they offered more storage than Linode, even though Linode bumped their plan to offer the same size SSD in May of 2018.

This shit happens, so I’m not trying to point a finger at UpCloud. Really just wanted to take the opportunity to remind folks that it’s always a good thing to run your own independent benchmarks to make sure you’re seeing the same results as what providers are advertising.

Every few months I get somebody raging at me about their benchmarks not matching up with mine, which does happen. Even when you pick a provider, it’s also worth it to spin up a handful of instances to make sure you’re getting the best they have to offer.

And as always, if you found this review helpful in your quest to find a new hosting provider, it’d be greatly appreciated if you used 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!