VPS Showdown - Germany - August 2020 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Josh Sherman
10 min read
VPS Showdown
HEADS-UP: A ton has changed since this post was originally published!
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Starting to feel like I’m taking a virtual vacation as I test out different data centers each month. This month we step into Europe to explore Frankfurt.

Next month may end up taking us to Australia, but head’s up, not every provider has a data center there.

Usual setup this month, I spun up three $5 instances per provider ($6 for Vultr), each running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (since Amazon still doesn’t support 20.04 LTS), ran my benchmarks and averaged the results where applicable.

Unfortunately, the SpeedTest command-line script gave me a ton of issues and didn’t properly collect data for about half of the tests. I suspect the server that I was targeting perhaps went down. Regardless, I dropped the SpeedTest section this month.

And away we go!

Overview

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Location Frankfurt 1 eu-central-1 Frankfort, DE DE-FRA1 Frankfurt
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

CPU Info

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
CPU MHz 2196.25 2400.01 2299.99 2894.56 3792.00
Cache Size (KB) 4096.00 30720.00 16384.00 512.00 16384.00
BogoMips 3192.67 3200.33 3066.33 3859.67 5056.33

CPU

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Events per Second 795.82 858.81 773.63 1656.24 1256.05
Minimum (ms) 1.10 1.04 1.28 0.58 0.74
Average (ms) 1.29 1.16 1.29 0.60 0.80
Maximum (ms) 4.12 4.00 2.82 2.78 3.30

Memory (Read)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 3176688.28 822112.13 3241157.14 5182076.59 5029845.12
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) 2.83 6.11 4.43 0.80 1.96

Memory (Write)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 3164971.91 815397.37 3223926.16 5164292.75 5047882.14
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) 1.57 0.86 7.22 2.69 2.25

File I/O

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Reads per Second 1234.73 1504.94 1835.07 3013.54 4202.23
Writes per Second 823.15 1003.27 1223.37 2009.03 2801.48
Fsyncs per Second 2624.91 3207.67 3906.24 6418.68 8958.43
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.21 0.17 0.14 0.09 0.06
Maximum (ms) 15.96 9.19 12.79 60.90 7.14

MySQL

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 1782.67 2685.67 3645.00 4779.67 5757.33
Queries per Second 35653.33 53713.33 72900.00 95593.33 115146.67
Minimum (ms) 2.77 2.10 1.87 1.28 1.15
Average (ms) 5.61 3.72 2.75 2.10 1.74
Maximum (ms) 55.47 28.71 31.19 75.10 56.23

Redis

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
PING_INLINE 35142.57 55192.17 39252.83 110829.70 54720.07
PING_BULK 36904.32 55648.73 39018.73 107958.88 53870.36
SET 38091.43 55341.75 39665.13 105347.49 54800.25
GET 37002.80 55941.07 38756.12 116131.84 48665.77
INCR 37029.76 56179.86 39298.63 110687.73 53370.25
LPUSH 37648.31 53930.28 39604.53 96161.02 55368.43
RPUSH 36745.21 55004.08 39683.38 102535.08 55388.51
LPOP 36751.45 54333.93 39422.63 96026.99 55056.53
RPOP 37530.17 55023.18 39371.35 103444.16 55351.11
SADD 37003.24 55644.28 39371.17 112630.07 54227.21
HSET 36827.00 53946.31 39396.93 97775.69 54544.89
SPOP 36741.67 56234.02 39257.20 113902.96 55454.06
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) 20198.93 29932.49 19254.92 46290.87 32051.84
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) 8440.43 11912.71 8209.52 16109.88 13435.43
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) 5948.84 8621.06 5843.99 11635.45 10235.54
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) 4524.29 6602.06 4444.69 8856.22 7992.06
MSET (10 keys) 28879.85 40072.73 35854.64 55070.02 47298.16

Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Requests per Second 204.56 246.65 188.25 202.10 169.77
Time per Request (ms) (mean) 2706.51 2042.65 2746.70 2506.81 3065.32
Transfer Rate (Kbyte/sec) 171.59 206.91 157.92 169.54 142.41

Conclusion

Generally speaking, Vultr’s High Frequency plan has been out performing nearly every month in nearly every category, but in this particular data center, UpCloud actually put up a bit more of a fight.

I think the most interesting thing here was how well Lightsail performed. While not the fastest, they didn’t bring up the rear in every category as they usually do.

You may remember, these posts started as Linode vs. DigitalOcean because I wasn’t able to find a decent comparison many moons ago. They are still the providers that I’m the most interested in, since I have used them both and am a big fan of what each of them are doing over the years.

What’s been interesting to see is that while Linode did fall behind at some point, they’ve continued to stay the course, and as of late, it seems like DigitalOcean is either trending down or Linode is trending back up. Or it’s a combination of both.

Or if you’re feeling really generous, show off your favorite tech stack by picking up a shirt!

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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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