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?
The biggest news this month is that Linode was recently acquired by Akamai Technologies for a whopping $900M. What that will do to the VPS landscape is yet to be seen. The most immediate impact I’ve noticed is that Linode is going to start charging sales tax in May.
I don’t think it’s a direct result of the acquisition, but Linode did perform noticeably slower this month than in previous months. Seemed like two of the three servers (both reporting an AMD EPYC 7601 32-Core Processor) were under performing.
They very well may have both been on the same physical host, they also could have been affected by noisy neighbors. Heck, running my benchmarks could have been the noisy neighbor as well.
Regardless the cause, Linode’s performance this month took a noticeable dip that I anticipate will bounce back next month.
Oh, and Linode’s managed MySQL databases are now in open beta, finally!
As for the benchmarks below, like previous months, I’ve spun up 3 instances for each provider at the 5 and 6 dollar price points. All instances reside in or around the New York / Newark area, are running the current LTS version of Ubuntu and the metrics are averaged 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 | 8.0.28 | 8.0.28 | 8.0.28 | 8.0.28 | 8.0.28 |
| 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 | MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis | MySQL, PostgreSQL | MySQL | MySQL, PostgreSQL | 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 |
| Container Hosting | 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 7642 48-Core Processor |
| Linode - Instance #2 | AMD EPYC 7601 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 (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS) |
| Vultr - Instance #2 | Intel Core Processor (Haswell, no TSX, IBRS) |
| Vultr - Instance #3 | Intel Core Processor (Haswell, no TSX, IBRS) |
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU MHz | 2,494.14 | 2,399.94 | 2,233.33 | 2,894.56 | 2,398.15 |
| Cache Size (KB) | 4,096.00 | 30,720.00 | 512.00 | 512.00 | 16,384.00 |
| BogoMips | 3,325.67 | 3,200.33 | 3,000.00 | 3,859.67 | 3,196.00 |
CPU
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 865.24 | 757.40 | 1,026.80 | 1,650.72 | 738.06 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.95 | 1.23 | 0.68 | 0.58 | 1.21 |
| Average (ms) | 1.18 | 1.32 | 1.18 | 0.60 | 1.37 |
| Maximum (ms) | 8.24 | 6.78 | 37.44 | 1.82 | 6.61 |
Memory
Read
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,940,906.88 | 520,685.91 | 3,127,523.19 | 5,488,591.60 | 3,661,383.57 |
| 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) | 3.17 | 2.71 | 20.75 | 0.35 | 3.45 |
Write
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,987,403.78 | 522,620.92 | 2,902,942.47 | 5,502,535.75 | 3,735,334.37 |
| 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) | 2.34 | 1.80 | 21.25 | 0.25 | 3.61 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 1,635.67 | 1,102.48 | 189.27 | 2,486.43 | 2,080.12 |
| Writes per Second | 1,090.44 | 734.96 | 126.16 | 1,657.59 | 1,386.71 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 3,493.31 | 2,360.41 | 409.20 | 5,310.48 | 4,444.61 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.17 | 0.24 | 1.38 | 0.11 | 0.13 |
| Maximum (ms) | 11.15 | 13.15 | 84.95 | 8.66 | 6.47 |
MySQL
Read Only
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 4,799.67 | 4,680.00 | 3,542.67 | 8,178.67 | 4,171.00 |
| Queries per Second | 76,794.67 | 74,880.00 | 56,682.67 | 130,858.67 | 66,736.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.28 | 1.78 | 2.12 | 0.96 | 1.75 |
| Average (ms) | 2.15 | 2.13 | 4.24 | 1.22 | 2.42 |
| Maximum (ms) | 21.24 | 30.00 | 77.74 | 8.09 | 52.53 |
Write Only
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 2,679.33 | 1,671.67 | 779.67 | 3,997.00 | 3,356.00 |
| Queries per Second | 16,076.00 | 10,030.00 | 4,678.00 | 23,982.00 | 20,136.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.34 | 3.02 | 4.70 | 1.38 | 1.57 |
| Average (ms) | 4.64 | 6.00 | 35.68 | 2.50 | 3.25 |
| Maximum (ms) | 32.69 | 26.31 | 199.82 | 16.70 | 40.61 |
Read Write
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 1,092.00 | 1,151.33 | 593.00 | 2,427.00 | 1,497.67 |
| Queries per Second | 21,840.00 | 23,026.67 | 11,860.00 | 48,540.00 | 29,953.33 |
| Minimum (ms) | 3.90 | 5.40 | 9.19 | 2.58 | 4.29 |
| Average (ms) | 10.07 | 8.69 | 45.57 | 4.12 | 7.04 |
| Maximum (ms) | 86.99 | 58.53 | 267.42 | 20.49 | 31.26 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | UpCloud | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 38,771.02 | 45,213.34 | 41,655.54 | 64,068.72 | 36,233.87 |
| PING_BULK | 38,411.35 | 44,769.48 | 45,235.77 | 62,161.46 | 34,980.11 |
| SET | 39,533.44 | 45,078.09 | 42,231.22 | 66,013.03 | 36,702.78 |
| GET | 39,510.67 | 45,143.03 | 45,362.17 | 64,118.48 | 35,263.73 |
| INCR | 38,829.12 | 44,964.05 | 48,527.07 | 65,632.14 | 35,641.15 |
| LPUSH | 34,285.24 | 45,665.88 | 37,962.69 | 69,152.36 | 37,003.51 |
| RPUSH | 33,427.85 | 45,408.70 | 38,505.82 | 68,340.20 | 37,780.57 |
| LPOP | 35,488.26 | 45,333.56 | 38,468.03 | 69,412.01 | 36,798.13 |
| RPOP | 38,397.89 | 45,300.44 | 41,048.27 | 68,728.61 | 36,234.68 |
| SADD | 39,039.79 | 45,176.80 | 45,358.86 | 65,350.07 | 35,403.70 |
| HSET | 40,946.85 | 45,410.51 | 38,251.66 | 69,801.03 | 37,225.46 |
| SPOP | 39,846.72 | 45,455.11 | 43,371.54 | 64,492.96 | 35,146.80 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 22,969.88 | 29,350.65 | 17,719.85 | 31,437.83 | 25,199.44 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 9,792.23 | 12,896.25 | 6,857.64 | 11,578.97 | 10,227.54 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 7,148.05 | 9,314.58 | 5,236.80 | 9,103.11 | 7,237.59 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 5,783.65 | 7,662.92 | 4,269.72 | 7,553.44 | 5,690.99 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 31,176.00 | 37,305.93 | 22,313.51 | 62,830.05 | 25,982.71 |
$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 | 8.0.28 | 8.0.28 | 8.0.28 |
| 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 | MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis | MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis | 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 |
| Container Hosting | 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 | 2,494.13 | 2,000.00 | 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 | 917.55 | 1,248.44 | 1,282.75 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.95 | 0.71 | 0.76 |
| Average (ms) | 1.09 | 0.80 | 0.79 |
| Maximum (ms) | 3.65 | 2.21 | 3.57 |
Memory
Read
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3,979,735.29 | 3,758,442.89 | 6,035,823.31 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 7.79 | 1.60 | 1.91 |
Write
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 4,119,352.53 | 3,680,563.67 | 5,958,689.57 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 8.23 | 0.39 | 2.62 |
File I/O
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 1,543.73 | 1,411.73 | 4,284.03 |
| Writes per Second | 1,029.16 | 941.15 | 2,856.01 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 3,298.36 | 3,018.59 | 9,145.51 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.18 | 0.19 | 0.06 |
| Maximum (ms) | 44.25 | 9.25 | 4.28 |
MySQL
Read Only
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 5,348.00 | 4,214.33 | 7,732.00 |
| Queries per Second | 85,568.00 | 67,429.33 | 123,712.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.25 | 1.61 | 1.00 |
| Average (ms) | 1.88 | 2.38 | 1.31 |
| Maximum (ms) | 15.21 | 15.02 | 13.92 |
Write Only
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 2,337.33 | 2,335.33 | 8,485.67 |
| Queries per Second | 14,024.00 | 14,012.00 | 50,914.00 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.35 | 1.36 | 0.65 |
| Average (ms) | 4.99 | 4.33 | 1.19 |
| Maximum (ms) | 67.42 | 31.50 | 9.14 |
Read Write
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 1,569.00 | 1,356.33 | 3,419.67 |
| Queries per Second | 31,380.00 | 27,126.67 | 68,393.33 |
| Minimum (ms) | 3.40 | 3.58 | 1.93 |
| Average (ms) | 6.50 | 7.37 | 2.96 |
| Maximum (ms) | 42.49 | 46.04 | 14.31 |
Redis
| DigitalOcean - Premium Intel | DigitalOcean - Premium AMD | Vultr - High Frequency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PING_INLINE | 50,266.15 | 56,599.66 | 57,109.99 |
| PING_BULK | 58,428.95 | 58,457.23 | 55,453.14 |
| SET | 65,451.25 | 53,479.60 | 57,497.53 |
| GET | 68,538.76 | 50,075.38 | 57,157.16 |
| INCR | 73,527.31 | 53,560.93 | 55,939.91 |
| LPUSH | 69,139.43 | 48,015.23 | 58,951.83 |
| RPUSH | 71,894.19 | 50,203.37 | 57,703.71 |
| LPOP | 71,098.72 | 50,752.64 | 56,650.94 |
| RPOP | 69,684.18 | 52,063.91 | 55,335.97 |
| SADD | 68,376.48 | 56,393.02 | 54,516.48 |
| HSET | 64,383.89 | 47,876.91 | 57,782.21 |
| SPOP | 61,403.54 | 59,065.90 | 55,848.86 |
| LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) | 28,538.76 | 26,498.22 | 39,926.35 |
| LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) | 11,361.02 | 10,166.03 | 16,726.98 |
| LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) | 7,871.50 | 7,100.11 | 11,425.41 |
| LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) | 6,688.44 | 5,263.32 | 9,277.14 |
| MSET (10 keys) | 37,688.12 | 28,234.83 | 47,581.62 |
Conclusion
As mentioned, Linode’s performance wasn’t where it usually is, with noticeable lag that seems to have impacted every category of benchmarks.
I mention it pretty regularly, it’s always a great idea to spin up multiple instances with a provider to ensure you’re on the latest and greatest hardware. This is especially true for the providers that aren’t transparent with the underlying processor. It’s also good to run your own independent benchmarks and factor in the needs of your own application when choosing a provider.
If these benchmarks helped you make a decision on a new hosting company, 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!
