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?
I got a few bits of feedback recently that I took into consideration before doing this month’s benchmarks.
The first bit was to include some additional price points and plan types instead of just the $5 plan. The other (opposing) bit of feedback was to start including some content that factors in the previous month’s benchmarks.
As much as I’d love to go through and include every price point and the different types of instances (dedicated CPU and such), it does end up being a lot of work. I really love the idea of starting to show some month over month data at some point, so it made sense to just stay the course and keep reviewing the $5 and $6 plans that are available.
This particular month’s post marks the 18th birthday of Linode which did include some awesome announcements, but nothing that directly affects these particular posts (no additional storage or anything like that) aside from the availability of custom images. They are definitely moving forward with their infrastructure and offerings, which is really exciting.
Incidentally, Vultr is doing a bit of gauging of the market with a little survey asking folks if they are interested in managed databases. Given that some other folks in the space already offer this (DigitalOcean) and some have been talking about it for a while (Linode), it would make sense for Vultr to venture into that.
As per usual, this month’s benchmarks are the average results from three instances from each provider at the $5 and $6 price points. Each server is running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and is in or around the Newark / New York City area.
$5 VPS Showdown - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr
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 | 8.0.25 | 8.0.25 | 8.0.25 | 8.0.25 | 8.0.25 |
| 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 | Yes | 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 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 | 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 | 2,262.04 | 2,399.96 | 2,433.33 | 2,894.56 | 2,398.15 |
| Cache Size (KB) | 4,096.00 | 30,720.00 | 512.00 | 512.00 | 16,384.00 |
| BogoMips | 2,861.33 | 3,199.67 | 2,933.33 | 3,859.67 | 3,196.00 |
CPU
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 850.50 | 761.80 | 1,364.84 | 1,644.84 | 727.61 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.19 | 1.21 | 0.69 | 0.58 | 1.24 |
| Average (ms) | 1.27 | 1.31 | 0.75 | 0.61 | 1.37 |
| Maximum (ms) | 3.28 | 2.37 | 6.20 | 1.83 | 9.35 |
Memory
Read
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 4,006,511.04 | 525,673.18 | 4,276,172.88 | 5,391,832.40 | 3,342,613.45 |
| 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) | 1.49 | 0.23 | 4.13 | 1.60 | 5.43 |
Write
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 4,029,049.60 | 526,785.19 | 4,347,479.73 | 5,439,379.75 | 3,318,692.25 |
| 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) | 0.98 | 0.19 | 4.74 | 0.25 | 4.58 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 1,753.88 | 997.07 | 2,263.36 | 2,509.97 | 1,449.02 |
| Writes per Second | 1,169.25 | 664.71 | 1,508.88 | 1,673.30 | 965.99 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 3,742.55 | 2,135.13 | 4,835.75 | 5,361.39 | 3,096.06 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.17 | 0.26 | 0.12 | 0.10 | 0.18 |
| Maximum (ms) | 11.20 | 7.29 | 20.57 | 9.24 | 9.83 |
MySQL
Read Only
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 5,636.33 | 4,938.33 | 5,734.67 | 8,565.67 | 3,798.00 |
| Queries per Second | 90,181.33 | 79,013.33 | 91,754.67 | 137,050.67 | 60,768.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.59 | 1.71 | 1.46 | 0.91 | 1.85 |
| Average (ms) | 2.01 | 2.02 | 1.86 | 1.17 | 2.65 |
| Maximum (ms) | 19.01 | 22.19 | 24.05 | 7.17 | 19.31 |
Write Only
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 3,412.67 | 1,646.67 | 5,032.00 | 3,970.33 | 2,024.67 |
| Queries per Second | 20,476.00 | 9,880.00 | 30,192.00 | 23,822.00 | 12,148.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.71 | 3.21 | 1.06 | 1.38 | 2.04 |
| Average (ms) | 3.92 | 6.09 | 2.17 | 2.52 | 5.66 |
| Maximum (ms) | 22.92 | 29.38 | 23.06 | 13.06 | 29.88 |
Read Write
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 1,592.33 | 1,111.33 | 2,219.00 | 2,392.00 | 1,067.33 |
| Queries per Second | 31,846.67 | 22,226.67 | 44,380.00 | 47,840.00 | 21,346.67 |
| Minimum (ms) | 4.37 | 5.69 | 2.94 | 2.58 | 5.12 |
| Average (ms) | 8.27 | 9.00 | 4.83 | 4.18 | 10.02 |
| Maximum (ms) | 33.76 | 75.53 | 32.94 | 20.65 | 36.45 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 42,026.31 | 45,221.93 | 70,410.52 | 93,471.55 | 31,828.41 |
| PING_BULK | 39,244.33 | 45,284.31 | 65,437.97 | 86,586.58 | 31,077.01 |
| SET | 39,836.84 | 45,551.31 | 72,541.65 | 94,746.42 | 32,457.33 |
| GET | 41,232.72 | 45,345.46 | 68,276.66 | 90,025.10 | 31,532.83 |
| INCR | 42,471.17 | 45,621.53 | 69,604.83 | 93,210.35 | 31,047.01 |
| LPUSH | 43,694.69 | 45,746.75 | 63,307.20 | 93,957.98 | 30,753.43 |
| RPUSH | 44,366.80 | 45,671.37 | 66,435.59 | 95,097.63 | 32,062.98 |
| LPOP | 43,438.61 | 45,553.48 | 63,397.99 | 96,409.57 | 32,297.27 |
| RPOP | 42,034.41 | 45,746.29 | 66,931.37 | 98,373.68 | 32,573.53 |
| SADD | 40,690.82 | 45,672.75 | 71,326.73 | 93,884.39 | 30,705.71 |
| HSET | 42,060.27 | 45,771.18 | 63,589.18 | 94,652.62 | 32,494.80 |
| SPOP | 41,160.20 | 45,463.21 | 69,815.39 | 91,232.34 | 31,173.81 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 27,471.30 | 29,762.53 | 30,120.54 | 36,238.71 | 20,488.84 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 11,340.89 | 12,882.89 | 9,251.86 | 11,251.62 | 9,004.24 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 8,075.35 | 9,327.05 | 6,795.24 | 8,824.82 | 6,162.60 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 6,722.96 | 7,604.19 | 5,483.66 | 7,350.64 | 4,932.90 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 34,644.19 | 38,004.63 | 33,081.59 | 48,128.60 | 25,688.02 |
$6 VPS Showdown - DigitalOcean - Premium Intel vs. DigitalOcean - Premium AMD vs. Vultr - High Frequency6 VPS Showdown
Overview
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 1 | New York 1 | 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 | 8.0.25 | 8.0.25 | 8.0.25 |
| 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 | 2,494.12 | 1,998.75 | 3,696.00 |
| Cache Size (KB) | 4,096.00 | 512.00 | 16,384.00 |
| BogoMips | 3,325.67 | 2,666.33 | 4,927.67 |
CPU
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 1,002.36 | 1,190.90 | 1,171.34 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.91 | 0.77 | 0.82 |
| Average (ms) | 1.00 | 0.84 | 0.85 |
| Maximum (ms) | 3.53 | 2.42 | 6.97 |
Memory
Read
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 4,624,815.12 | 3,608,892.48 | 5,472,757.36 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 3.89 | 1.66 | 1.53 |
Write
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 4,600,171.47 | 3,512,584.95 | 5,567,196.48 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 0.45 | 5.59 | 0.19 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 2,133.06 | 1,454.86 | 4,245.00 |
| Writes per Second | 1,422.02 | 969.91 | 2,830.00 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 4,557.96 | 3,108.59 | 9,061.99 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.13 | 0.18 | 0.06 |
| Maximum (ms) | 10.25 | 13.42 | 4.73 |
MySQL
Read Only
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 6,601.00 | 4,304.00 | 7,530.67 |
| Queries per Second | 105,616.00 | 68,864.00 | 120,490.67 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.24 | 1.67 | 1.06 |
| Average (ms) | 1.53 | 2.33 | 1.33 |
| Maximum (ms) | 8.84 | 11.33 | 11.54 |
Write Only
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 4,301.33 | 2,854.33 | 7,886.00 |
| Queries per Second | 25,808.00 | 17,126.00 | 47,316.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.95 | 1.33 | 0.68 |
| Average (ms) | 2.35 | 3.66 | 1.26 |
| Maximum (ms) | 17.41 | 22.09 | 20.02 |
Read Write
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 2,053.00 | 1,382.33 | 3,148.67 |
| Queries per Second | 41,060.00 | 27,646.67 | 62,973.33 |
| Minimum (ms) | 2.86 | 4.10 | 2.02 |
| Average (ms) | 4.92 | 7.44 | 3.18 |
| Maximum (ms) | 26.65 | 40.70 | 15.88 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 47,577.32 | 55,370.97 | 52,969.58 |
| PING_BULK | 47,367.38 | 56,207.78 | 53,580.91 |
| SET | 48,827.62 | 57,034.60 | 54,994.35 |
| GET | 48,202.12 | 54,635.85 | 54,717.83 |
| INCR | 48,625.61 | 58,436.12 | 55,258.38 |
| LPUSH | 49,058.17 | 51,230.95 | 55,786.98 |
| RPUSH | 48,397.61 | 52,871.31 | 55,872.81 |
| LPOP | 49,304.74 | 50,373.80 | 53,720.69 |
| RPOP | 49,344.24 | 52,903.91 | 54,721.71 |
| SADD | 48,891.29 | 60,792.75 | 51,002.01 |
| HSET | 50,422.41 | 52,037.30 | 50,789.60 |
| SPOP | 48,043.92 | 59,904.26 | 53,057.73 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 31,086.57 | 25,126.21 | 36,956.23 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 12,884.48 | 10,170.15 | 15,173.58 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 9,621.29 | 6,302.73 | 9,858.55 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 8,034.33 | 5,336.38 | 8,680.28 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 43,839.86 | 28,967.91 | 46,971.78 |
Conclusion
Similar to last month, this month’s results felt a bit all over the place. The one thing that’s starting to become very clear is that with everybody’s recently improvements, Lightsail, while offering more storage, really isn’t able to compete in terms of raw performance.
If you happened to have found this post helpful, and you’re panning to pull the trigger on a new hosting provider soon, please do me a huge favor and 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!
