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02-Jan-2022 in VPS Showdown

VPS Showdown - January 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

So 2021 was interesting. Not going to bore you with the details of my life, but I am ready to bore you with the details of the world of virtual private servers!

I forgot to do my "Christmas wish list" last month as I have in the past, but it's never too late, I say!

So in doing these posts, I spin up each server manually instead of using Terraform or some other infrastructure as code system. The reason for this is because, even though I don't report on it directly, I like to see what's going on with each provider's web interface. Linode's grown up a ton and if I was scripting everything, I would have missed out on these updates.

That being said, my biggest gripe that I really wish would be implemented in the next year would be the ability to spin up multiple instances at once on both Linode and UpCloud. DigitalOcean, Vultr and even Lightsail offer the ability to enter a quantity and you're off to the races.

Worth nothing that this isn't a feature that I need in my day to day server administration duties, but something that would save me a bit of time every month while doing those posts.

My own selfish desires aside, it's been really great to see the different providers grow over the last few years of monthly posts. Sounds like managed databases are still on their way from Linode, which would leave Vultr as the only provider without them.

If I had to attempt to predict the future, now that managed databases are becoming a standard offering, I suspect container hosting will be the next big feature we'll see become more standard.

And if I had to go full Nostradamus, I'd say that at some point we're going to start seeing message queues (like AWS SQS) starting to show up at some point. Message queues are extremely important for most major applications, especially as they scale up and one of those things that AWS does really well, but nobody else seems to be addressing.

Enough putting the pressure on the providers, there's also a few things on my wishlist (more like TODO list) that I'd like to get implemented this year.

First and foremost, with doing these posts monthly, I'd really like to start showing some month-over-month and year-over-year data comparisons. The whole point of doing these monthly is to see how things are going, and without any sort of context it's hard to say if things are getting better or worse.

The other thing I really want to get into the mix are some additional tests. Getting MongoDB and PostgreSQL into the mix would be great and at some point, maybe even starting to compare the managed database offerings from each provider.

On top of databases, I'm curious to try my hand at getting something like Node.js and PHP benchmarks in there. I know there's other languages out there, but those are the 2 I do 99% of my coding with.

Trying to figure out some way to test a real world application and/or Wordpress install would be pretty cool too.

But that's all for a later date, this month is a bit more of the same. As per the usual, I've spun up 3 server instances with each provider at the $5 price point as well as at the "premium" $6 per month price point as well.

Each server is in or around the New York / New Jersey area and is running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Stats are then averaged where applicable.

Speaking of Ubuntu, as we're back in an even numbered year, there will be a new LTS release of Ubuntu for our testing pleasure. That will drop in April, but it tends to take AWS a bit of time before they offer it up. In the past I've simply omitted Lightsail for a while, but I think this year I'll keep it in the mix, but running the older LTS version of Ubuntu.

$5 VPS Showdown - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr"

Overview

CPU Info

CPU

Memory

Read

Write

File I/O

MySQL

Read Only

Write Only

Read Write

Redis

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

Overview

CPU Info

CPU

Memory

Read

Write

File I/O

MySQL

Read Only

Write Only

Read Write

Redis

Conclusion

Fairly consistent results as we've seen recently. Would like to point out that I think it's great that Linode, UpCloud and even Lightsail are still advertising the processors they are running on. Knowing that you "get what you get" when you spin up a machine, it's nice to have that level of transparency.

As always, these are just some raw benchmarks, you need to consider your own application's needs when choosing your hosting provider. If this post did happen to help you in your search, be amazing and use one of my referral links below!

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