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VPS Showdown - January 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

New year, new VPS Showdown!

While I don't usually make big changes to these posts month to month, I do try to refresh them every year or so. This year's improvements include commas (on the larger numbers) and charts!

I've also made the decision to drop the High Frequency plan from Vultr in favor of their less expensive plan that marries up with the other provider's price point. Since I've avoided certain providers because they don't offer the same price point, it didn't make sense to include the differently priced Vultr plan.

With regard to the data, there are a couple of metrics that I've decided to drop. The ab benchmark, which was always at the mercy of my own Internet connection and the Speed Test. The Speed Test may make a come back in the future, but since not every provider has a server in the same geographical region (looking at you AWS), it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison since Speed Test only works against close servers. Close servers for one provider may not be close for another.

As per usual, I've spun up 3 server instances and averaged the results. Additional information about which distro and software versions have been moved down to the overview section.

Also, for the sake of being a non-biased reviewer, I am no longer going to be "picking a winner" and will be letting the data stand on it's own. If nothing else, I'm tired of typing out "YMMV and you should weigh the needs of your application against these benchmarks, yadda yadda blah blah blah" every month.

Overview

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Location New York 1 Virginia, Zone A Newark, NJ US-NYC1 New York (NJ)
Distro Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Kernel 5.4.0 5.4.0 5.4.0 5.4.0 5.4.0
MySQL 8.0.22 8.0.22 8.0.22 8.0.22 8.0.22
Redis 5.0.7 5.0.7 5.0.7 5.0.7 5.0.7
Base Price $5/month $5/month $5/month $5/month $5/month
Hourly Price $0.007/hour $0.007/hour $0.0075/hour $0.007/hour $0.007/hour
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 25 GB SSD
Transfer 1 TB 2 TB 1 TB 1 TB 1 TB
Transfer Overage $0.01/GB $0.09/GB $0.01/GB $0.01/GB $0.01/GB
Backups $1/month $2/month $2/month $1/month $1/month
DNS Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Firewall Yes Yes in beta Yes Yes
Load Balancer $10/month $18/month $10/month No $10/month
Block Storage $0.1/GB $0.1/GB $0.1/GB $0.223/GB $0.1/GB
Object Storage $5/month $0.023/GB $5/month $5/month $5/month
Managed Databases Yes Yes No No No
2FA/MFA Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
One-click Apps Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Custom Images Yes No No Yes Yes
Kubernetes Yes Yes Yes No No
Container Registry Yes Yes No No No

CPU Info

Model Name
DigitalOcean - Instance #1 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz
DigitalOcean - Instance #2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6140 CPU @ 2.30GHz
DigitalOcean - Instance #3 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz
Lightsail - All Instances Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz
Linode - All Instances Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2697 v4 @ 2.30GHz
UpCloud - All Instances AMD EPYC 7542 32-Core Processor
Vultr - All Instances Intel Core Processor (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS)
DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
CPU MHz 2,164.69 2,400.11 2,300.00 2,894.56 2,396.30
Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 30,720.00 16,384.00 512.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 2,666.33 3,200.33 3,066.33 3,859.67 3,192.33

CPU

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Events per Second 774.74 756.19 680.86 1,656.71 696.10
Minimum (ms) 1.28 1.17 1.35 0.58 1.20
Average (ms) 1.34 1.32 1.48 0.60 1.46
Maximum (ms) 2.19 2.03 8.58 3.31 8.07

Memory

Read

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 2,795,691.79 518,886.12 3,236,535.21 5,508,920.49 3,113,451.43
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) 0.59 0.19 5.36 0.24 5.01

Write

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 2,784,300.29 518,783.53 3,309,380.29 5,518,340.76 3,095,818.49
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) 0.66 4.11 2.92 0.24 7.37

File I/O

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Reads per Second 1,831.41 1,151.42 1,827.94 2,941.27 1,187.74
Writes per Second 1,220.88 767.58 1,218.62 1,960.82 791.82
Fsyncs per Second 3,912.04 2,458.69 3,904.29 6,277.97 2,543.86
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.16 0.23 0.14 0.09 0.25
Maximum (ms) 22.31 41.16 19.23 8.33 33.01

MySQL

Read Only

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 4,845.00 4,967.67 4,673.00 9,986.00 4,345.00
Queries per Second 77,520.00 79,482.67 74,768.00 159,776.00 69,520.00
Minimum (ms) 1.77 1.77 1.76 0.85 1.65
Average (ms) 2.16 2.01 2.19 1.00 2.32
Maximum (ms) 13.14 27.90 12.81 8.37 19.07

Write Only

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 3,262.33 1,830.00 4,276.67 4,729.67 2,659.33
Queries per Second 19,574.00 10,980.00 25,660.00 28,378.00 15,956.00
Minimum (ms) 1.58 2.82 1.29 1.22 1.66
Average (ms) 3.57 5.49 2.41 2.11 4.11
Maximum (ms) 59.84 66.92 17.23 16.78 42.90

Read Write

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 1,483.33 1,158.00 1,833.33 2,971.33 1,350.00
Queries per Second 29,666.67 23,160.00 36,666.67 59,426.67 27,000.00
Minimum (ms) 4.14 5.30 3.73 2.28 4.00
Average (ms) 7.36 8.69 5.63 3.37 7.69
Maximum (ms) 74.32 92.03 24.35 15.02 54.58

Redis

DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
PING_INLINE 37,467.59 44,725.46 33,059.91 105,898.31 29,047.98
PING_BULK 35,346.20 44,392.14 32,380.69 104,245.26 27,620.23
SET 37,304.98 44,364.88 33,737.66 109,179.92 30,326.64
GET 36,177.53 44,484.49 33,286.67 105,763.57 30,147.23
INCR 36,529.12 44,546.42 33,823.21 108,389.54 30,653.05
LPUSH 37,067.48 45,184.20 34,941.31 101,703.12 30,878.10
RPUSH 37,160.57 45,009.44 34,508.68 101,129.41 30,698.56
LPOP 37,200.35 45,034.71 34,506.43 101,000.86 30,967.45
RPOP 37,043.53 44,970.25 34,107.09 103,404.06 30,817.55
SADD 37,243.79 44,281.57 33,413.33 105,949.33 29,377.70
HSET 37,255.24 45,225.38 34,684.87 99,664.97 30,599.20
SPOP 35,316.91 44,707.34 32,978.49 106,994.62 28,421.16
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) 23,561.11 28,754.26 17,517.02 42,870.39 20,503.34
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) 10,412.71 12,664.05 7,105.71 21,035.19 8,300.07
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) 7,358.50 9,114.44 5,499.13 13,687.73 6,022.17
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) 5,993.42 7,459.68 4,552.03 11,243.44 4,792.29
MSET (10 keys) 29,789.73 36,399.52 31,170.10 56,074.07 23,943.22

Conclusion

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