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?
Even though the year is drawing to a close, these showdowns continue. Nothing very exciting this month other than it seems Linode took their firewall offering out of beta and Vultr did the same with their Kubernetes offering.
DigitalOcean continues to lead the pack in terms of their “managed” offerings, which further establishes them as a viable alternative to Amazon Web Services. Obviously AWS continues to offer a more robust set of services, but for most simple web applications, DigitalOcean’s offering is more than enough.
As always, I’ve spun up three instances with each provider at each price point, all running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and averaged the results where applicable.
$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 | 8.0.27 | 8.0.27 | 8.0.27 | 8.0.27 | 8.0.27 |
| 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 | Yes | 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 | Yes | 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 | Yes |
| 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 - All Instances | Intel Core Processor (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS) |
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU MHz | 2,361.10 | 2,400.04 | 2,433.32 | 2,894.56 | 2,394.45 |
| Cache Size (KB) | 4,096.00 | 30,720.00 | 512.00 | 512.00 | 16,384.00 |
| BogoMips | 3,192.67 | 3,200.00 | 3,399.67 | 3,859.67 | 3,192.33 |
CPU
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 778.61 | 759.93 | 1,458.83 | 1,651.09 | 763.50 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.03 | 1.20 | 0.61 | 0.58 | 1.16 |
| Average (ms) | 1.31 | 1.32 | 0.69 | 0.60 | 1.31 |
| Maximum (ms) | 10.77 | 2.85 | 4.50 | 2.63 | 8.92 |
Memory
Read
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,635,931.09 | 515,538.39 | 4,486,590.82 | 5,536,808.39 | 3,366,483.38 |
| 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) | 5.51 | 3.61 | 3.82 | 0.24 | 4.91 |
Write
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,336,627.22 | 476,663.32 | 4,577,295.34 | 5,508,318.77 | 3,497,682.42 |
| 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) | 7.59 | 4.73 | 3.63 | 0.32 | 4.05 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 1,234.47 | 987.66 | 3,139.53 | 2,527.03 | 1,968.19 |
| Writes per Second | 822.95 | 658.44 | 2,092.98 | 1,684.67 | 1,312.11 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 2,640.79 | 2,110.21 | 6,708.73 | 5,399.07 | 4,206.21 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.22 | 0.27 | 0.11 | 0.10 | 0.13 |
| Maximum (ms) | 24.41 | 32.45 | 98.54 | 7.84 | 10.79 |
MySQL
Read Only
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 3,898.67 | 4,892.00 | 6,618.33 | 8,703.67 | 4,593.33 |
| Queries per Second | 62,378.67 | 78,272.00 | 105,893.33 | 139,258.67 | 73,493.33 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.48 | 1.73 | 1.19 | 0.94 | 1.72 |
| Average (ms) | 2.73 | 2.04 | 1.59 | 1.15 | 2.18 |
| Maximum (ms) | 22.04 | 49.40 | 13.23 | 6.29 | 14.07 |
Write Only
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 1,850.67 | 1,695.67 | 5,695.00 | 4,287.00 | 3,918.33 |
| Queries per Second | 11,104.00 | 10,174.00 | 34,170.00 | 25,722.00 | 23,510.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.72 | 3.23 | 0.94 | 1.35 | 1.31 |
| Average (ms) | 5.74 | 5.92 | 1.96 | 2.33 | 2.56 |
| Maximum (ms) | 41.82 | 68.29 | 22.24 | 12.71 | 50.81 |
Read Write
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 1,021.33 | 943.00 | 2,537.00 | 2,540.33 | 1,717.67 |
| Queries per Second | 20,426.67 | 18,860.00 | 50,740.00 | 50,806.67 | 34,353.33 |
| Minimum (ms) | 4.05 | 5.45 | 2.53 | 2.53 | 3.74 |
| Average (ms) | 10.21 | 10.62 | 4.28 | 3.94 | 5.82 |
| Maximum (ms) | 50.02 | 120.64 | 75.98 | 22.07 | 56.66 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 34,183.47 | 45,310.46 | 73,768.25 | 64,079.40 | 34,934.43 |
| PING_BULK | 30,096.64 | 44,735.72 | 67,141.86 | 62,297.49 | 33,315.97 |
| SET | 31,590.30 | 44,832.94 | 70,607.45 | 65,727.20 | 35,383.60 |
| GET | 29,560.45 | 45,283.45 | 69,172.74 | 64,232.22 | 34,759.18 |
| INCR | 32,370.08 | 45,269.47 | 71,007.45 | 64,980.95 | 35,141.70 |
| LPUSH | 33,949.60 | 45,565.02 | 64,240.50 | 69,819.43 | 37,234.32 |
| RPUSH | 33,282.57 | 45,538.15 | 69,544.17 | 69,306.74 | 36,966.82 |
| LPOP | 35,367.88 | 44,957.92 | 64,428.42 | 69,113.51 | 36,446.35 |
| RPOP | 34,300.57 | 44,992.75 | 68,790.26 | 69,087.62 | 35,922.36 |
| SADD | 33,229.31 | 44,984.91 | 71,573.09 | 64,881.62 | 34,423.75 |
| HSET | 30,613.74 | 44,876.11 | 67,138.92 | 69,416.00 | 35,532.81 |
| SPOP | 26,546.50 | 44,202.19 | 69,363.07 | 64,133.55 | 33,055.40 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 19,513.52 | 29,345.66 | 29,513.05 | 31,593.00 | 23,981.88 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 8,360.97 | 12,922.26 | 9,773.04 | 11,767.82 | 9,883.92 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 5,596.35 | 9,244.85 | 7,057.01 | 9,150.14 | 6,997.74 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 4,757.96 | 7,566.60 | 5,885.80 | 7,598.84 | 5,625.59 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 27,078.88 | 36,647.03 | 35,084.87 | 64,111.08 | 28,372.51 |
$6 VPS Showdown - DigitalOcean - Premium Intel vs. DigitalOcean - Premium AMD vs. Vultr - High Frequency”
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 | 8.0.27 | 8.0.27 | 8.0.27 |
| 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 | Yes |
| 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 | 2,494.14 | 1,997.47 | 3,696.00 |
| Cache Size (KB) | 4,096.00 | 512.00 | 16,384.00 |
| BogoMips | 3,325.67 | 2,664.00 | 4,927.67 |
CPU
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 757.00 | 1,261.40 | 1,405.59 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.99 | 0.66 | 0.70 |
| Average (ms) | 1.33 | 0.80 | 0.72 |
| Maximum (ms) | 5.38 | 10.39 | 2.29 |
Memory
Read
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,562,920.33 | 3,851,656.60 | 6,741,491.95 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 6.00 | 0.73 | 0.24 |
Write
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,588,588.29 | 3,960,193.77 | 6,707,211.45 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 4.59 | 5.11 | 0.15 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 1,252.92 | 1,624.49 | 4,759.90 |
| Writes per Second | 835.27 | 1,082.97 | 3,173.24 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 2,682.74 | 3,467.31 | 10,166.68 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.21 | 0.17 | 0.05 |
| Maximum (ms) | 20.04 | 13.72 | 3.30 |
MySQL
Read Only
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 4,287.67 | 4,348.67 | 9,247.33 |
| Queries per Second | 68,602.67 | 69,578.67 | 147,957.33 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.41 | 1.47 | 0.91 |
| Average (ms) | 2.35 | 2.32 | 1.09 |
| Maximum (ms) | 16.90 | 14.85 | 8.38 |
Write Only
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 1,997.33 | 3,148.00 | 9,778.67 |
| Queries per Second | 11,984.00 | 18,888.00 | 58,672.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.62 | 1.20 | 0.58 |
| Average (ms) | 5.38 | 3.40 | 1.04 |
| Maximum (ms) | 49.57 | 24.91 | 11.65 |
Read Write
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 926.67 | 1,522.33 | 4,015.33 |
| Queries per Second | 18,533.33 | 30,446.67 | 80,306.67 |
| Minimum (ms) | 4.41 | 3.27 | 1.71 |
| Average (ms) | 11.01 | 6.81 | 2.53 |
| Maximum (ms) | 60.29 | 40.78 | 19.68 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 38,065.81 | 48,813.01 | 66,199.32 |
| PING_BULK | 38,318.74 | 50,539.81 | 63,580.83 |
| SET | 54,302.40 | 55,497.01 | 65,959.47 |
| GET | 52,878.01 | 60,476.05 | 64,555.75 |
| INCR | 53,784.35 | 55,406.82 | 64,435.33 |
| LPUSH | 54,273.16 | 47,525.66 | 66,403.51 |
| RPUSH | 55,552.43 | 48,341.00 | 66,866.10 |
| LPOP | 47,352.36 | 53,176.23 | 66,336.54 |
| RPOP | 47,139.16 | 56,980.49 | 65,369.15 |
| SADD | 49,573.90 | 64,504.96 | 65,126.92 |
| HSET | 54,788.46 | 54,079.69 | 66,240.23 |
| SPOP | 51,476.10 | 56,339.69 | 64,765.84 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 20,550.18 | 25,655.40 | 43,496.16 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 9,132.44 | 10,645.23 | 18,982.86 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 6,078.93 | 6,853.55 | 13,019.66 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 5,253.30 | 5,300.32 | 10,968.73 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 22,593.18 | 31,421.08 | 59,111.71 |
Conclusion
Pretty consistent with previous months, the notable exception being Linode and UpCloud battling with their Redis metric, all while Lightsail actually snuck in to take a few commands for themselves.
As always, I recommend taking your own application’s needs into consideration and even running your own benchmarks when making a decision on a new hosting provider. I also recommend spinning up multiple instances to help ensure that you’re getting the latest and greatest system specs from the provider.
If you happened to have found these benchmarks helpful, and they helped you make a decision on a new hosting provider, 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!
