VPS Showdown - November 2020 - DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr
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It's that time of the year again, new version of Ubuntu has been released!
Sadly (and expectedly) both UpCloud and Amazon are slow to add the latest and greatest (albeit, not LTS) version of Ubuntu to their Linux distro offering.
With that, this month I'll be omitting both providers as I'm really excited to see how well the new version of Ubuntu performs.
As always, I've spun up three instances with each provider, at the smallest / lowest price tier. All instances are running Ubuntu 20.10 and the results are an average of the results were applicable.
Overview
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 1 | Newark, NJ | New York (NJ) |
| Plan | Basic | Shared CPU | High Frequency |
| RAM | 1 GB | 1 GB | 1 GB |
| CPU | 1 Core | 1 Core | 1 Core |
| Storage | 25 GB SSD | 25 GB SSD | 32 GB NVMe SSD |
| Transfer | 1 TB | 1 TB | 1 TB |
| Base Price | $5/month | $5/month | $6/month |
| Backups | $1/month | $2/month | $1.20/month |
| Transfer Overage | $0.01/GB | $0.01/GB | $0.01/GB |
| Load Balancer | $10/month | $10/month | $10/month |
| Block Storage | $0.10/GB | $0.10/GB | $0.10/GB |
| Object Storage | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Managed Databases | Yes | On 2020 Roadmap | No |
| 2FA/MFA | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| One-click Apps | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Images | Yes | Yes | Yes |
I've been mentioning for months that Linode has managed databases on the roadmap for this year. Considering I will only be doing one more review this year, I'm skeptical that we'll be seeing anything new from them in that regard.
CPU Info
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU MHz | 1799.30 | 2300.00 | 3792.00 |
| Cache Size (KB) | 4096.00 | 16384.00 | 16384.00 |
| BogoMips | 3598.60 | 3066.33 | 5056.33 |
CPU
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 454.04 | 238.58 | 776.14 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.47 | 1.32 | 0.74 |
| Average (ms) | 2.74 | 4.24 | 1.52 |
| Maximum (ms) | 9.12 | 14.01 | 10.20 |
Memory (Read)
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 1943953.40 | 787701.33 | 4394710.07 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 6.23 | 97.56 | 4.76 |
Memory (Write)
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 2231255.51 | 985994.38 | 4778990.54 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 7.65 | 69.41 | 2.98 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 1551.60 | 986.83 | 3746.30 |
| Writes per Second | 1034.40 | 657.86 | 2497.51 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 3315.29 | 2108.87 | 7998.89 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.19 | 0.33 | 0.07 |
| Maximum (ms) | 5.67 | 65.62 | 6.08 |
MySQL
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 870.67 | 1481.67 | 3080.33 |
| Queries per Second | 17413.33 | 29633.33 | 61606.67 |
| Minimum (ms) | 6.96 | 3.96 | 2.11 |
| Average (ms) | 12.86 | 7.07 | 3.33 |
| Maximum (ms) | 70.58 | 134.81 | 23.04 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 19681.68 | 28508.94 | 44554.26 |
| PING_BULK | 22058.23 | 28477.63 | 43203.51 |
| SET | 24017.24 | 29845.38 | 46470.28 |
| GET | 24844.55 | 29481.53 | 45630.63 |
| INCR | 24527.91 | 30470.35 | 45617.27 |
| LPUSH | 27611.37 | 31799.16 | 47508.62 |
| RPUSH | 29380.50 | 31564.61 | 48207.03 |
| LPOP | 30473.41 | 31486.69 | 48997.52 |
| RPOP | 29727.63 | 31488.74 | 48977.57 |
| SADD | 29405.48 | 30554.56 | 46706.73 |
| HSET | 29572.97 | 31450.70 | 46809.01 |
| SPOP | 28407.46 | 29515.67 | 45409.90 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 19263.58 | 16306.38 | 29548.58 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 7554.87 | 6818.10 | 11553.35 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 5388.73 | 5412.06 | 9032.47 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 4482.08 | 4411.12 | 7776.48 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 24602.01 | 26706.55 | 38424.04 |
Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)
| DigitalOcean | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Requests per Second | 279.15 | 261.22 | 238.53 |
| Time per Request (ms) (mean) | 1791.72 | 1934.14 | 2142.66 |
| Transfer Rate (Kbyte/sec) | 234.17 | 219.12 | 200.10 |
Conclusion
I was really surprised to see that Linode performed so poorly this month in a handful of categories, considering they've been showing improvements over DigitalOcean as of late.
Considering the drastic downturn, I suspect that this month's benchmarks were probably includes by a noisy neighbor or two (or I was the noisy neighbor ;).
Consistent with previous months, Vultr's well worth the extra buck in terms of raw performance metrics.
Unless something significant happens before next month, I'll go back to using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS so we can end the year with all of the providers in the mix again.
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)
- UpCloud, new accounts receive €25 in credit (yes, that’s in Euros)
- Vultr, new accounts also receive $100 in credit (good for only 14 days)