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

I hope you have enjoyed this month’s VPS Showdown post. If you found this
information helpful and it helped sway your decision for a new VPS hosting
provider, please help me out by signing up via one of my referral links below:


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)
  • Vultr, new accounts also receive $100 in credit (good for only 14 days)
  • UpCloud, new accounts receive €25 in credit (yes, that’s in Euros)
Josh Sherman - The Man, The Myth, The Avatar

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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