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?
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!
- 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!
