Josh Sherman
Why not check out the latest comparison?
This month is some what of a special one. First, DigitalOcean recently had their IPO, which helps further legitimizes them as a company. Also, this marks the first month where I’m doing both a $5 and $6 VPS Showdown.
I know some of you probably want to see a comparison of the $5 plans along side the $6 dollar plans. While that is still a good comparison to make, I do like keeping the comparisons more apples-to-apples. If nothing else, the $6 plans, while they tend to perform a bit better, they aren’t just a buck extra, they are 20% extra. Thus, when you scale up from the $6 plan, things actually get a lot pricier than they do with the “standard” plans.
As per usual, I spun up 3 instances of the $5 plan with each provider, each running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and averaged the results.
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 | 40 GB | 25 GB | 25 GB | 25 GB |
| Storage Type | SSD | SSD | SSD | SSD | 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 | DO-Regular |
| 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 7601 32-Core Processor |
| Linode - Instance #3 | AMD EPYC 7542 32-Core Processor |
| UpCloud - All Instances | AMD EPYC 7542 32-Core Processor |
| Vultr - Instance #1 | Intel Core Processor (Haswell, no TSX, IBRS) |
| 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 | 2,196.26 | 2,396.75 | 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 | 2,729.67 | 3,196.67 | 3,399.67 | 3,859.67 | 3,196.00 |
It’s really interesting to see DigitalOcean obscuring their underlying CPU model now that they are offering “premium” CPUs. Definitely makes me wonder if they are hosting their “DO-Regular” instances on the same servers, just simply scaled down / throttled differently.
CPU
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 849.08 | 775.39 | 1,322.94 | 1,644.70 | 730.78 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.19 | 1.20 | 0.70 | 0.58 | 1.24 |
| Average (ms) | 1.26 | 1.29 | 0.78 | 0.61 | 1.37 |
| Maximum (ms) | 2.95 | 7.41 | 6.42 | 3.51 | 11.37 |
Memory
Read
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,991,025.35 | 533,982.97 | 3,184,228.72 | 5,446,708.38 | 3,388,382.39 |
| 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) | 0.31 | 0.23 | 5.62 | 0.26 | 8.70 |
Write
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,954,633.62 | 530,507.02 | 3,177,298.37 | 5,378,615.97 | 3,401,329.14 |
| 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) | 0.45 | 0.20 | 3.52 | 0.23 | 4.46 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 1,891.04 | 1,001.61 | 1,705.29 | 2,960.67 | 1,357.56 |
| Writes per Second | 1,260.70 | 667.72 | 1,136.84 | 1,973.78 | 905.02 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 4,041.02 | 2,139.60 | 3,645.77 | 6,319.86 | 2,902.52 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.14 | 0.28 | 0.16 | 0.09 | 0.22 |
| Maximum (ms) | 6.28 | 11.65 | 122.91 | 11.39 | 13.12 |
MySQL
Read Only
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 5,302.67 | 5,160.00 | 5,394.33 | 9,855.67 | 4,346.67 |
| Queries per Second | 84,842.67 | 82,560.00 | 86,309.33 | 157,690.67 | 69,546.67 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.59 | 1.67 | 1.59 | 0.87 | 1.74 |
| Average (ms) | 2.04 | 1.93 | 2.23 | 1.01 | 2.31 |
| Maximum (ms) | 14.66 | 22.98 | 14.65 | 6.07 | 20.68 |
Write Only
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 2,908.33 | 1,653.00 | 4,251.33 | 4,898.67 | 3,091.33 |
| Queries per Second | 17,450.00 | 9,918.00 | 25,508.00 | 29,392.00 | 18,548.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.43 | 3.47 | 1.29 | 1.22 | 1.52 |
| Average (ms) | 3.56 | 6.41 | 3.69 | 2.05 | 3.28 |
| Maximum (ms) | 56.17 | 34.28 | 34.50 | 14.64 | 73.48 |
Read Write
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 1,470.33 | 1,121.67 | 1,820.33 | 2,911.00 | 1,282.00 |
| Queries per Second | 29,406.67 | 22,433.33 | 36,406.67 | 58,220.00 | 25,640.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 3.94 | 5.41 | 3.86 | 2.29 | 4.10 |
| Average (ms) | 7.51 | 9.09 | 7.37 | 3.44 | 8.26 |
| Maximum (ms) | 70.71 | 108.90 | 39.98 | 14.84 | 38.51 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 38,009.06 | 47,197.66 | 54,921.25 | 103,417.22 | 32,481.31 |
| PING_BULK | 37,617.27 | 47,049.64 | 55,599.32 | 98,498.97 | 31,671.99 |
| SET | 37,174.28 | 46,837.29 | 54,562.23 | 106,713.88 | 32,678.41 |
| GET | 37,061.07 | 47,344.05 | 55,777.75 | 103,392.73 | 31,944.38 |
| INCR | 36,898.19 | 47,366.42 | 53,934.46 | 105,849.26 | 31,897.50 |
| LPUSH | 38,327.49 | 47,587.11 | 47,765.21 | 101,942.64 | 34,119.10 |
| RPUSH | 39,314.05 | 47,050.38 | 50,249.89 | 104,036.58 | 33,777.74 |
| LPOP | 37,641.74 | 47,427.99 | 49,108.06 | 101,815.94 | 33,195.97 |
| RPOP | 37,898.88 | 47,557.49 | 49,916.99 | 102,581.72 | 32,908.14 |
| SADD | 38,430.05 | 47,114.07 | 50,779.37 | 105,701.05 | 32,480.64 |
| HSET | 37,930.52 | 47,943.94 | 43,830.60 | 99,886.76 | 34,291.38 |
| SPOP | 37,920.55 | 47,146.62 | 54,398.88 | 101,325.82 | 32,066.63 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 25,240.10 | 29,751.27 | 23,042.68 | 42,917.50 | 22,806.70 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 10,418.76 | 13,235.65 | 8,519.84 | 21,092.68 | 9,482.68 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 7,559.11 | 9,616.15 | 6,125.26 | 13,902.79 | 6,673.36 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 6,098.82 | 7,730.08 | 5,042.65 | 11,164.67 | 5,302.17 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 34,462.84 | 38,910.11 | 25,706.77 | 55,289.93 | 29,068.27 |
Conclusion
As always, these benchmarks provide some good insight to what these VPS hosting providers offer, but your mileage may vary for your own website or application. Always take your own needs into consideration when choosing a hosting provider, and if you happen to have found this post helpful in making your decision, 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!
