Josh Sherman
Why not check out the latest comparison?
Bringing things back around to the price point that I had started with many moons ago, the $20 plan.
While the lower priced systems are sufficient enough for a lot of use cases, moving up to a meatier server instance can provide instant performance gains, give you better priority on a shared server and overall, just give you some breathing room as you scale.
This month saw the inclusion of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on Amazon Lightsail, so this month’s comparison features the latest Ubuntu LTS across all providers.
As per the usual, I’ve spun up three server instances with each provider featured, ran my benchmarks and averaged the results. All instances were at the twenty dollar price point with the exception of Vultr’s High Frequency plan which lands at just four bucks more, and historically, performs extremely well.
Overview
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 1 | Virginia, Zone A | Newark, NJ | US-NYC1 | New York (NJ) |
| RAM | 4 GB | 4 GB | 4 GB | 4 GB | 4 GB |
| CPU | 2 Cores | 2 Cores | 2 Cores | 2 Cores | 2 Cores |
| Storage | 80 GB SSD | 80 GB SSD | 80 GB SSD | 80 GB SSD | 128 GB NVMe SSD |
| Transfer | 4 TB | 4 TB | 4 TB | 4 TB | 3 TB |
| Base Price | $20/month | $20/month | $20/month | $20/month | $24/month |
| Backups | $4/month | N/A | $5/month | $4/month | $4.80/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 | 2294.61 | 2333.48 | 2366.66 | 2894.56 | 3792.00 |
| Cache Size (KB) | 4096.00 | 40960.00 | 512.00 | 512.00 | 16384.00 |
| BogoMips | 3059.67 | 3134.00 | 3266.33 | 3860.00 | 5056.67 |
CPU
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 885.77 | 832.79 | 1419.70 | 1655.98 | 1194.06 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.99 | 1.19 | 0.70 | 0.58 | 0.80 |
| Average (ms) | 1.15 | 1.20 | 0.71 | 0.60 | 0.84 |
| Maximum (ms) | 4.63 | 2.35 | 3.25 | 1.99 | 1.17 |
Memory (Read)
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 4153626.98 | 524217.89 | 4460053.85 | 5351711.43 | 5605890.53 |
| 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) | 0.44 | 0.07 | 1.15 | 0.35 | 0.23 |
Memory (Write)
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 4158080.60 | 523428.57 | 4484378.28 | 5490339.70 | 5642008.12 |
| 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) | 0.45 | 0.52 | 1.30 | 0.30 | 0.41 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 3477.28 | 2015.90 | 5539.98 | 4325.24 | 8109.10 |
| Writes per Second | 2318.19 | 1343.93 | 3693.32 | 2883.49 | 5406.06 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 7420.73 | 4306.64 | 11826.63 | 9234.62 | 17308.66 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.09 | 0.13 | 0.05 | 0.06 | 0.03 |
| Maximum (ms) | 261.22 | 46.35 | 55.33 | 8.40 | 5.63 |
MySQL
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 1528.67 | 1271.00 | 2808.33 | 2591.67 | 3648.33 |
| Queries per Second | 30573.33 | 25420.00 | 56166.67 | 51833.33 | 72966.67 |
| Minimum (ms) | 3.46 | 4.78 | 2.52 | 2.39 | 1.84 |
| Average (ms) | 7.73 | 7.89 | 3.86 | 3.86 | 2.77 |
| Maximum (ms) | 470.58 | 79.35 | 22.22 | 15.98 | 10.68 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 75848.82 | 82734.41 | 101881.82 | 111870.92 | 107169.49 |
| PING_BULK | 77584.38 | 82159.06 | 77060.94 | 116194.15 | 104968.17 |
| SET | 79359.08 | 82290.53 | 95773.74 | 110175.60 | 110974.19 |
| GET | 80797.11 | 81891.62 | 102992.17 | 113684.81 | 106559.26 |
| INCR | 85215.46 | 82207.50 | 90070.52 | 121896.42 | 110088.80 |
| LPUSH | 83904.20 | 82369.52 | 94331.72 | 121543.27 | 107899.92 |
| RPUSH | 73723.86 | 82865.68 | 102096.96 | 118348.37 | 108012.30 |
| LPOP | 71525.06 | 83229.07 | 95996.28 | 119714.02 | 110559.75 |
| RPOP | 79838.26 | 82283.56 | 104608.00 | 115689.26 | 110730.55 |
| SADD | 79122.90 | 82174.34 | 74390.93 | 102896.37 | 109110.69 |
| HSET | 78454.37 | 82527.44 | 104566.54 | 95832.30 | 112657.97 |
| SPOP | 80077.52 | 82228.30 | 95563.07 | 95964.10 | 108263.28 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 48504.20 | 57026.80 | 53334.38 | 65267.59 | 72134.48 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 22012.04 | 27240.80 | 20939.13 | 32962.14 | 34141.08 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 15968.53 | 18591.22 | 14279.08 | 23837.04 | 23979.69 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 13019.83 | 15337.47 | 11701.03 | 19413.70 | 19398.44 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 67419.19 | 74411.37 | 65318.64 | 89863.71 | 107013.35 |
Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Requests per Second | 184.41 | 230.75 | 213.62 | 207.38 | 183.18 |
| Time per Request (ms) (mean) | 2853.78 | 2180.71 | 2404.97 | 2510.66 | 2912.78 |
| Transfer Rate (Kbyte/sec) | 154.70 | 193.57 | 179.21 | 173.96 | 153.66 |
Conclusion
While Vultr’s High Frequency plan offers a ton more storage, they actually fall a bit behind in terms of bandwidth / transfer allotment.
While typically Vultr’s offering takes nearly all categories, UpCloud really shined this month with the number of CPU events per second their instances could handle.
The big shocked, and yes, this particular metric should still be taken with a grain of salt, Amazon Lightsail actually performed quite well on the Apache Benchmarks.
I’ve mentioned before that it seems like DigitalOcean is seemingly falling behind, or everybody else’s improvements are really starting to show through. That’s not too different this month with the higher priced instances.
Even though the base metrics aren’t as great as they used to be, the DigitalOcean offering is still one of the more feature rich with managed databases and everything else.
- 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!
