VPS Showdown – June 2020 – DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

After a few months of without Lightsail and UpCloud, it’s time to bring them
back into the fold and subsequently roll back to benchmarking on Ubuntu 18.04
LTS instead of 20.04 LTS.

That said, the only provide that doesn’t support the latest and greatest version
of Ubuntu is Amazon Lightsail as UpCloud did start to include it recently.

This past month also saw the introduction of the 3rd San Francisco-based
data center from DigitalOcean, so it seemed fitting to do a west coast showdown
to see how the new data center stacks up against the rest.

Usual deal, I’ve spun up 3 server instances with each provider, running Ubuntu
18.04 LTS, ran my benchmarks and averaged the results.

Unfortunately the data center locations are a bit all over the place since not
everybody has a data center in San Francisco, but I did pick locations that were
fairly close together.

Overview

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Location San Francisco 3 Oregon, Zone A Fremont, CA San Jose 1 Silicon Valley
RAM 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB
CPU 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core
Storage 25 GB SSD 40 GB SSD 25 GB SSD 25 GB SSD 32 GB NVMe SSD
Transfer 1 TB 2 TB 1 TB 1 TB 1 TB
Base Price $5/month $5/month $5/month $5/month $6/month
Backups $1/month N/A $2/month $2/month $1.20/month
Transfer Overage $0.01/GB $0.09/GB $0.01/GB $0.01/GB $0.01/GB
Load Balancer $10/month $18/month $10/month N/A $10/month
Block Storage $0.10/GB $0.10/GB $0.10/GB $0.223/GB $0.10/GB
Object Storage Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Managed Databases Yes Yes On 2020 Roadmap No No
2FA/MFA Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
One-click Apps Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Custom Images Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Something to note this month, I attempted to “normalize” UpCloud’s backup
pricing a bit instead of listing it’s per gigabyte price. After some digging
around, it does seem like UpCloud offers a ton of different backup options that
vary in price based on data retention periods and even offer a rate for one time
backups.

For the most part, it seemed like you could take a snapshot which would cost you
$1.40 per month and for automatic backups, the prices start at $2 per month
which is actually broken up into 20% of your instance cost (like most providers)
plus an additional $1 for the “week” plan with 7 days of data retention.

UpCloud touts their “simply pricing” but given their “unlimited flexibility”, I
feel like their pricing ends up being about as confusing as AWS in a lot of
ways.

CPU Info

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
CPU MHz 2294.61 2400.12 2300.00 2992.97 3792.02
Cache Size (KB) 4096.00 30720.00 16384.00 16384.00 16384.00
BogoMips 3059.67 3200.33 3066.33 3990.33 5056.33

A bit different than other months, but every instance for a given provider
actually reported a clock speed within 1 MHz of each other.

I still recommend spinning up multiple systems to help ensure you’re getting the
best server specs available with a provider, but definitely nice to see a bit
more consistency than I have in the past.

CPU

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Events per Second 987.67 861.63 772.05 1242.44 1268.67
Minimum (ms) 0.92 1.04 1.28 0.78 0.74
Average (ms) 1.01 1.16 1.29 0.80 0.79
Maximum (ms) 1.70 1.34 3.59 1.94 1.90

Memory (Read)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 3850846.60 821539.13 3297194.89 4852790.31 5091482.00
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 0.46 5.70 2.33 1.50 4.13

Memory (Write)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 3867968.93 826381.11 3298685.44 4869077.86 5076823.86
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 1.14 0.39 2.46 0.50 0.38

File I/O

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Reads per Second 933.49 1424.70 2084.80 3699.99 4450.29
Writes per Second 622.33 949.78 1389.88 2466.67 2966.84
Fsyncs per Second 1984.46 3029.11 4439.30 7888.29 9486.68
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.33 0.19 0.13 0.07 0.06
Maximum (ms) 25.29 8.66 10.34 11.43 4.37

MySQL

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 1525.67 2257.33 3496.33 5468.67 5520.33
Queries per Second 30513.33 45146.67 69926.67 109373.33 110406.67
Minimum (ms) 2.40 2.31 2.09 1.24 1.30
Average (ms) 6.81 4.43 2.86 1.84 1.82
Maximum (ms) 110.78 30.62 29.70 19.17 13.88

Redis

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
PING_INLINE 51499.97 56226.05 39485.47 73155.85 57564.65
PING_BULK 46478.72 55561.90 39490.78 72240.04 56206.80
SET 45086.00 54896.07 39720.27 73056.23 57332.73
GET 47626.46 53976.69 39204.95 71985.87 57240.24
INCR 47932.64 56787.03 39591.47 71900.84 57757.26
LPUSH 49315.35 52294.15 39840.92 69294.05 58883.22
RPUSH 47034.03 56107.43 39817.10 70383.56 58646.15
LPOP 49073.48 52519.40 39751.02 71351.18 56782.88
RPOP 48198.61 56310.15 39724.60 71490.44 55947.17
SADD 47452.21 56743.83 39677.42 70500.08 56937.49
HSET 47491.04 55033.47 40010.87 72774.86 56730.64
SPOP 47644.53 56911.96 39677.77 72793.17 54955.73
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) 24336.19 30223.93 19877.37 36627.44 32359.22
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) 10439.72 11839.68 8635.56 15764.84 13936.57
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) 7175.95 8369.94 5892.90 10753.62 10342.99
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) 5810.69 6657.73 4635.87 8642.34 8305.88
MSET (10 keys) 38996.94 40765.83 37294.96 63455.52 46973.91

Speed Test

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Distance (km) 1360.68 2573.93 2372.79 1515.67 2357.97
Latency (ms) 56.973 63.736 60.953 81.759 47.812
Download (Mbit/s) 995.59 136.99 713.76 53.29 952.32
Upload (Mbit/s) 371.19 92.85 240.91 128.89 453.20

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Requests per Second 213.19 250.77 2037518.96 220.18 2038895.83
Time per Request (ms) (mean) 2583.59 2001.27 1340.80 2602.90 2029.45
Transfer Rate (Kbyte/sec) 178.84 210.37 146.86 184.70 103.39

Conclusion

I went into this with high hopes for DigitalOcean as I would have assumed that
“new data center” could potentially mean “new hardware” as well. Seems like that
wasn’t necessarily the case, as they did perform fairly in line with previous
benchmarks.

Vultr’s High Frequency plan continues to impress me at this particular price
point, since a buck per month extra is pretty trivial. Lightsail still rules the
day if you’re in need of extra storage or bandwidth for the same price as the
rest.


If you have found these posts informative and helpful in searching for a new hosting provider, please consider using one of the links below when signing up:

  • DigitalOcean, new accounts receive $200 in credit (good for 60 days)
  • Linode, new accounts receive $100 in credit (also good for 60 days)
  • Vultr, new accounts also receive $100 in credit (good for only 14 days)
  • UpCloud, new accounts receive €25 in credit (yes, that’s in Euros)
Josh Sherman - The Man, The Myth, The Avatar

About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.


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