VPS Showdown – February 2021 – DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

It was just last month that I had added a bit more information about the CPUs
that each provider was reporting. Wouldn’t you know it, this month the Linode
instances tested were reporting AMD EPYC 7542 32 Core Processors, same as
UpCloud has been offering.

As one would expect, this change has propelled Linode quite a bit in terms of
these benchmarked performance metrics. I really can’t wait to see how things
continue to heat up if/when other providers start to roll out similar hardware.

Similar to previous posts, I’ve spun up three instances on each provider at the
$5 per month price price in or around the New York / Newark region. Each
instance is running the latest Ubuntu LTS release and where applicable, the
results were averaged.

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 – All Instances Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6140 CPU @ 2.30GHz
Lightsail – All Instances Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz
Linode – All Instances AMD EPYC 7542 32-Core Processor
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 2,494.10 2,400.10 2,900.00 2,894.56 2,396.30
Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 30,720.00 512.00 512.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 3,325.67 3,200.33 3,866.67 3,859.67 3,196.00

CPU

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Events per Second 963.23 762.67 1,631.78 1,670.46 750.38
Minimum (ms) 0.95 1.21 0.58 0.58 1.19
Average (ms) 1.04 1.31 0.61 0.60 1.33
Maximum (ms) 5.99 2.45 6.31 3.32 6.57


Memory

Read

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 4,465,638.37 527,919.23 5,026,915.15 5,569,502.47 3,363,197.62
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) 1.22 0.32 2.91 0.66 4.18


Write

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Ops per Second 4,329,643.88 527,901.96 5,059,798.29 5,555,934.21 3,330,281.68
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) 0.68 0.17 5.17 1.24 4.20


File I/O

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Reads per Second 2,915.42 1,165.01 2,524.55 2,981.80 1,622.89
Writes per Second 1,943.59 776.66 1,683.03 1,987.85 1,081.89
Fsyncs per Second 6,226.73 2,492.38 5,393.10 6,370.13 3,466.09
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.09 0.22 0.12 0.09 0.16
Maximum (ms) 16.97 10.82 18.45 108.41 17.51


MySQL

Read Only

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 5,812.33 5,169.67 7,878.00 10,593.33 4,389.00
Queries per Second 92,997.33 82,714.67 126,048.00 169,493.33 70,224.00
Minimum (ms) 1.21 1.70 0.97 0.84 1.71
Average (ms) 1.73 1.93 1.27 0.94 2.31
Maximum (ms) 15.36 26.01 11.92 6.21 16.00


Write Only

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 4,615.00 1,871.33 6,120.00 4,979.67 3,241.67
Queries per Second 27,690.00 11,228.00 36,720.00 29,878.00 19,450.00
Minimum (ms) 0.92 2.81 0.76 1.23 1.53
Average (ms) 2.22 5.38 2.13 2.02 3.26
Maximum (ms) 44.38 29.08 36.47 14.67 30.31


Read Write

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
Transactions per Second 2,000.67 1,276.33 2,615.00 3,122.67 1,604.67
Queries per Second 40,013.33 25,526.67 52,300.00 62,453.33 32,093.33
Minimum (ms) 2.72 4.84 2.03 2.23 3.95
Average (ms) 5.19 7.85 4.42 3.20 6.43
Maximum (ms) 68.30 72.15 65.39 16.19 30.72


Redis

  DigitalOcean Lightsail Linode UpCloud Vultr
PING_INLINE 42,065.01 45,531.02 79,530.13 107,523.43 32,804.83
PING_BULK 37,730.41 45,759.94 80,116.59 105,527.86 31,494.72
SET 39,402.83 45,760.23 81,418.92 110,732.60 32,276.10
GET 39,908.67 45,829.71 84,997.06 107,049.68 31,596.08
INCR 43,562.67 45,851.11 88,433.41 108,973.26 32,899.66
LPUSH 43,206.18 46,217.91 76,578.54 101,877.73 34,350.03
RPUSH 44,055.71 46,332.11 77,137.46 101,947.76 33,252.18
LPOP 44,844.19 46,268.19 73,829.66 100,102.51 33,757.67
RPOP 44,186.93 46,204.04 74,265.14 101,561.78 33,799.30
SADD 44,867.88 45,984.84 86,552.45 109,838.27 32,007.65
HSET 43,548.42 46,333.97 71,887.29 100,990.57 33,598.64
SPOP 42,400.73 46,211.22 79,597.99 106,901.03 32,053.17
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) 28,496.96 29,867.94 34,187.41 42,442.13 21,768.00
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) 11,448.61 13,104.48 11,086.41 21,762.64 9,002.17
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) 7,610.56 9,357.86 8,215.64 14,000.47 6,182.23
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) 7,210.28 7,696.70 6,614.15 11,415.54 5,230.29
MSET (10 keys) 41,246.28 37,481.60 40,226.54 55,140.78 26,890.51

Conclusion

If you found this post helpful in your quest for a new hosting provider and
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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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