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

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

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

Memory (Read)

Memory (Write)

File I/O

MySQL

Redis

Speed Test

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

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.

• 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!