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

Not a ton of movement since last month, other than DigitalOcean’s announcement of their memory-optimized droplets being generally available.

I decided to bring things back state-side again, targeting the west coast data centers for each provider.

As always, I’m using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for the operating system and the metrics below are the average of running benchmarks on 3 separate instances.

Overview

CPU Info

CPU

Memory (Read)

Memory (Write)

File I/O

MySQL

Redis

Speed Test

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

Conclusion

The Vultr High Frequency instances are still continuing to impress, even with the trivially higher price tag. UpCloud has continued to do fairly well, especially with the Redis benchmarks and DigitalOcean and Linode both shined in network speed and Apache benchmarks respectively.

That said, from a user experience standpoint, both DigitalOcean and Vultr are really leading the way. Linode’s new dashboard is an improvement, but still missing the mark when it comes to spinning up multiple servers in one shot.

UpCloud’s interface feels like it’s a bit speedier than I remember, but I had noticed a bug when creating a new instance, that allowed me to click the deploy button twice, and I ended up creating more servers than I needed. Keep an eye out for that one if you’re creating new servers.

As always, if you found this benchmarks to be helpful in your quest for a hosting provider, please consider 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!