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

Hot on the heels of Linode offering up AMD EPYC processors, DigitalOcean has started to offer “premium” CPUs as part of their Shared CPU Basic plans. Unfortunately, this new offering comes with a slightly elevated price, clocking in at $6 per month instead of $5.

This new product offering lines up with Vultr’s “High Frequency” plans, with not just a choice of Intel or AMD processor, but also NVMe SSDs. With the price being a bit higher, I won’t be reviewing that particular plan on this post. If the trend happens to continue with another provider, I’ll probably end up doing a $6 Showdown as well as this $5 one.

As always, I spun up 3 instances of each provider’s $5 instances, in or around the New York area, running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I’ve averaged the results where applicable.

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	8.0.23	8.0.23	8.0.23	8.0.23	8.0.23
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) Gold 6140 CPU @ 2.30GHz
DigitalOcean – Instance #2	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz
DigitalOcean – Instance #3	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz
Lightsail – All Instances	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz
Linode – Instance #1	AMD EPYC 7601 32-Core Processor
Linode – Instance #2	AMD EPYC 7542 32-Core Processor
Linode – Instance #3	AMD EPYC 7601 32-Core Processor
UpCloud – All Instances	AMD EPYC 7542 32-Core Processor
Vultr – Instance #1	Virtual CPU a7769a6388d5
Vultr – Instance #2	Intel Core Processor (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS)
Vultr – Instance #3	Intel Core Processor (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS)

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
CPU MHz	2,164.69	2,400.04	2,433.33	2,894.56	2,396.30
Cache Size (KB)	4,096.00	30,720.00	512.00	512.00	16,384.00
BogoMips	3,129.33	3,200.33	2,933.00	3,859.67	3,196.00

CPU

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
Events per Second	758.11	763.18	1,386.49	1,665.64	760.38
Minimum (ms)	1.28	1.25	0.69	0.58	1.19
Average (ms)	1.36	1.31	0.73	0.60	1.31
Maximum (ms)	3.43	2.33	7.20	3.72	8.12

Memory

Read

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
Ops per Second	3,662,302.48	525,691.64	4,163,626.43	5,556,338.55	3,383,752.71
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)	0.32	0.27	4.86	1.34	5.94

Write

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
Ops per Second	3,602,487.76	525,047.02	4,132,793.04	5,568,582.30	3,431,841.97
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)	0.46	0.23	3.91	0.53	3.40

File I/O

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
Reads per Second	1,948.70	959.74	3,132.38	2,861.80	1,598.98
Writes per Second	1,299.11	639.81	2,088.23	1,907.82	1,066.00
Fsyncs per Second	4,164.21	2,054.00	6,688.80	6,110.15	3,417.16
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.14	0.28	0.08	0.09	0.16
Maximum (ms)	40.27	13.45	19.09	10.67	14.30

MySQL

Read Only

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
Transactions per Second	4,609.00	5,050.67	5,597.67	9,838.33	4,357.00
Queries per Second	73,744.00	80,810.67	89,562.67	157,413.33	69,712.00
Minimum (ms)	1.78	1.72	1.40	0.87	1.69
Average (ms)	2.20	1.98	1.92	1.02	2.31
Maximum (ms)	17.04	38.73	14.09	9.88	18.80

Write Only

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
Transactions per Second	3,479.00	1,624.00	4,178.67	4,734.33	2,844.00
Queries per Second	20,874.00	9,744.00	25,072.00	28,406.00	17,064.00
Minimum (ms)	1.45	3.00	1.07	1.22	1.55
Average (ms)	2.94	6.27	2.81	2.11	3.65
Maximum (ms)	61.36	55.28	25.01	17.72	30.28

Read Write

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
Transactions per Second	1,496.33	1,137.33	2,052.33	2,877.00	1,355.33
Queries per Second	29,926.67	22,746.67	41,046.67	57,540.00	27,106.67
Minimum (ms)	3.96	5.24	2.98	2.30	4.33
Average (ms)	6.89	8.81	5.47	3.47	7.71
Maximum (ms)	24.43	73.13	35.32	23.81	35.33

Redis

	DigitalOcean	Lightsail	Linode	UpCloud	Vultr
PING_INLINE	37,623.93	45,410.72	58,974.25	108,098.48	36,846.00
PING_BULK	36,338.74	45,387.63	56,870.26	105,789.30	36,213.10
SET	36,366.64	45,677.55	62,516.67	109,102.45	37,936.87
GET	36,247.54	45,573.94	56,339.54	107,345.52	36,711.14
INCR	36,519.17	45,532.74	60,133.03	108,692.23	37,143.15
LPUSH	37,881.55	46,002.30	55,345.30	101,592.25	37,707.68
RPUSH	38,489.30	45,967.64	59,719.33	103,248.32	38,963.22
LPOP	37,874.34	46,052.12	54,242.48	101,869.93	38,879.93
RPOP	37,912.41	45,809.46	63,470.60	104,476.81	38,996.45
SADD	37,923.99	45,775.36	64,030.47	108,744.83	37,557.08
HSET	37,716.42	45,938.61	61,750.35	101,183.30	39,689.59
SPOP	36,321.39	45,419.66	59,478.74	107,349.57	36,904.29
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)	25,235.75	29,826.36	26,382.81	40,908.73	24,286.55
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)	9,883.37	13,019.92	8,492.53	21,648.22	9,801.93
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)	7,400.12	9,163.60	6,286.67	14,328.88	6,880.06
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)	5,421.27	7,663.72	5,083.62	11,296.33	5,725.78
MSET (10 keys)	30,076.42	37,789.90	31,406.88	55,119.18	27,981.76

Conclusion

Remember, YMMV and you should do your own benchmarks as well as weigh out the needs of your particular use cases when deciding on a hosting provider. If you happened to have found this post helpful in your journey to find a new hosting provider, please use one of my referral links below.

Until next month, happy hosting!