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$6 VPS Showdown - April 2021 - DigitalOcean - Premium Intel vs. DigitalOcean - Premium AMD vs. Vultr - High Frequency

By popular demand, I am now doing a $6 VPS Showdown to compare the "premium" offerings from both DigitalOcean (which are fairly new) and Vultr (which have been around for a while).

In the past, I did include Vultr's High Frequency plan in my $5 VPS Showdowns, but it always felt a bit off to compare a plan that was 20% more expensive than the rest of the bunch. Sure, they performed better in a lot of ways, but wouldn't you expect that when you're paying the premium?

Similar to my other posts, I went ahead and spun up 3 instances with each provider. In DigitalOcean's case, I spun up instances for both of their "premium" CPU offerings.

Each instance is running Ubuntu 20.04 and I averaged the results accordingly.

Overview

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
Location New York 1 New York 3 New York (NJ)
Distro Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Kernel 5.4.0 5.4.0 5.4.0
MySQL 8.0.23 8.0.23 8.0.23
Redis 5.0.7 5.0.7 5.0.7
Base Price $6/month $6/month $6/month
Hourly Price $0.009/hour $0.009/hour $0.009/hour
RAM 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB
CPU 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core
Storage 25 GB 25 GB 25 GB
Storage Type NVMe NVMe NVMe
Transfer 1 TB 1 TB 1 TB
Transfer Overage $0.01/GB $0.01/GB $0.01/GB
Backups $1.2/month $1.2/month $1.2/month
DNS Yes Yes Yes
Firewall Yes Yes Yes
Load Balancer $10/month $10/month $10/month
Block Storage $0.1/GB $0.1/GB $0.1/GB
Object Storage $5/month $5/month $5/month
Managed Databases Yes Yes No
2FA/MFA Yes Yes Yes
One-click Apps Yes Yes Yes
Custom Images Yes Yes Yes
Kubernetes Yes Yes No
Container Registry Yes Yes No

CPU Info

Model Name
DigitalOcean - Premium Intel - All Instances DO-Premium-Intel
DigitalOcean - Premium AMD - All Instances DO-Premium-AMD
Vultr - High Frequency - All Instances Intel Core Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
CPU MHz 2,494.11 1,996.25 3,696.00
Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 512.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 3,325.67 2,661.67 4,927.67

While I'm sure they aren't up to no good, I always bothers me when a provider obscures the underlying CPU information the way that DigitalOcean is these days.

CPU

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
Events per Second 974.84 1,314.47 1,181.49
Minimum (ms) 0.95 0.68 0.82
Average (ms) 1.02 0.76 0.85
Maximum (ms) 2.11 3.42 3.45

Memory

Read

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
Ops per Second 4,403,842.58 3,909,823.76 5,595,089.19
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 0.23 0.76 0.33

Write

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
Ops per Second 4,452,066.79 4,015,504.14 5,557,045.17
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Maximum (ms) 0.63 1.85 0.35

File I/O

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
Reads per Second 2,313.50 1,432.07 4,366.21
Writes per Second 1,542.33 954.68 2,910.79
Fsyncs per Second 4,941.38 3,062.58 9,323.75
Minimum (ms) 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average (ms) 0.12 0.19 0.06
Maximum (ms) 9.19 12.77 4.62

MySQL

Read Only

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
Transactions per Second 6,038.00 5,141.00 8,163.00
Queries per Second 96,608.00 82,256.00 130,608.00
Minimum (ms) 1.27 1.39 1.04
Average (ms) 1.67 1.95 1.22
Maximum (ms) 14.46 10.69 7.94

Write Only

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
Transactions per Second 3,982.00 2,226.33 8,617.33
Queries per Second 23,892.00 13,358.00 51,704.00
Minimum (ms) 1.03 1.37 0.67
Average (ms) 2.59 4.66 1.16
Maximum (ms) 18.51 25.12 7.98

Read Write

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
Transactions per Second 1,828.67 1,356.33 3,530.33
Queries per Second 36,573.33 27,126.67 70,606.67
Minimum (ms) 3.14 3.67 1.94
Average (ms) 5.57 7.46 2.83
Maximum (ms) 31.67 31.47 14.32

Redis

DigitalOcean - Premium Intel DigitalOcean - Premium AMD Vultr - High Frequency
PING_INLINE 42,091.78 66,939.90 54,741.46
PING_BULK 41,960.62 65,019.08 54,025.02
SET 44,614.32 67,460.12 54,990.27
GET 42,979.66 68,870.40 54,201.25
INCR 42,642.47 71,145.02 55,175.35
LPUSH 43,002.11 65,165.26 54,876.24
RPUSH 44,014.24 64,902.74 55,400.03
LPOP 45,335.40 62,386.11 55,633.36
RPOP 44,716.85 68,014.15 55,952.98
SADD 43,552.36 70,470.46 55,225.86
HSET 44,875.59 66,660.21 56,115.41
SPOP 43,316.76 70,470.13 55,093.55
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) 28,250.70 32,232.07 38,101.55
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) 12,291.71 11,756.78 15,874.25
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) 8,892.80 7,979.11 11,196.87
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) 7,408.29 5,986.45 9,003.92
MSET (10 keys) 39,249.01 33,579.14 47,762.62

Conclusion

This was an interesting one as it was the first time benchmarking DigitalOcean's new premium instances, and the first time this year that I had put my eyes on Vultr's High Frequency offering.

As always, these benchmarks are a great starting point for making a decision on a hosting provider, but it's also good to weigh out your own application or website's needs.

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