Josh Sherman
HEADS-UP:
A ton has changed since this post was originally published!
Why not check out the latest comparison?
Why not check out the latest comparison?
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 you’ve decided to sign up, please use one of my referral links below.
- 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!
