VPS Showdown – August 2024 – DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr

Gonna cut to the case this month, as I’m in the middle of mixing and mastering the final track of our upcoming EP.

I’ve spun up 3 instances with DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr. Each one is in or around the New York / Newark area. They are all running some sort of AMD processor, hence the variance in price (Linode being the least expensive). Each instance is running the latest long-term service release on Ubuntu, 24.04.

Overview – DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr

Linux Distro	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Kernel Version	6.8.0
MySQL Version	8.0.39
Redis Version	7.0.15

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
Location	New York 1	Newark, NJ	New York (NJ)
Monthly Price	$7/month	$5/month	$6/month
Hourly Price	$0.01/hour	$0.0075/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	SSD	NVMe
Transfer	1 TB	1 TB	1 TB
Transfer Overage	$0.01/GB	$0.01/GB	$0.01/GB
Backups	Standard $1.40/month Daily $2.10/month	$2/month	$1.20/month

CPU Info

	Model Name
DigitalOcean – All Instances	DO-Premium-AMD
Linode – All Instances	AMD EPYC 7642 48-Core Processor
Vultr – Instance #1 and #3	AMD EPYC-Milan Processor
Vultr – Instance #2	AMD EPYC-Rome Processor

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
CPU MHz	2,097.50	2,300.00	2,832.09
Cache Size (KB)	512.00	512.00	512.00
BogoMips	2,864.00	3,066.33	4,333.33

CPU

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
Events per Second	1,980.15	1,596.65	3,771.46
Minimum (ms)	0.51	0.61	0.24
Average (ms)	0.59	0.62	0.27
Maximum (ms)	3.09	3.96	3.78

Memory

Read

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
Ops per Second	4,411,369.72	5,372,740.38	5,388,054.06
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00
Maximum (ms)	1.55	2.90	1.00

Write

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
Ops per Second	4,430,657.65	5,325,930.99	5,621,985.08
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00
Maximum (ms)	1.13	3.05	2.42

File I/O

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
Reads per Second	1,598.82	2,864.10	1,874.36
Writes per Second	1,065.87	1,909.40	1,249.56
Fsyncs per Second	3,412.60	6,119.25	4,004.79
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.16	0.10	0.16
Maximum (ms)	8.76	6.46	28.19

MySQL

Read Only

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
Transactions per Second	4,221.67	6,866.67	6,067.33
Queries per Second	67,546.67	109,866.67	97,077.33
Minimum (ms)	1.51	1.26	0.96
Average (ms)	2.46	1.45	1.83
Maximum (ms)	18.64	109.89	43.45

Write Only

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
Transactions per Second	1,781.33	5,447.67	3,527.33
Queries per Second	10,688.00	32,686.00	21,164.00
Minimum (ms)	2.13	1.02	1.02
Average (ms)	5.71	1.83	3.01
Maximum (ms)	41.47	13.96	39.40

Read Write

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
Transactions per Second	958.33	2,612.00	1,830.00
Queries per Second	19,166.67	52,240.00	36,600.00
Minimum (ms)	5.11	2.67	2.63
Average (ms)	10.54	3.83	6.19
Maximum (ms)	42.78	18.95	73.83

Redis

	DigitalOcean	Linode	Vultr
PING_INLINE	27,228.09	46,247.64	36,950.96
PING_MBULK	28,722.36	47,140.66	37,150.44
SET	27,704.14	46,361.19	34,138.62
GET	30,318.54	46,679.94	34,935.74
INCR	30,035.36	46,679.49	36,374.37
LPUSH	29,432.88	46,165.19	35,369.96
RPUSH	29,703.81	46,310.79	36,271.34
LPOP	29,990.33	45,545.58	36,134.94
RPOP	27,781.46	45,312.67	37,719.87
SADD	28,774.67	46,256.14	37,356.82
HSET	29,641.17	45,922.70	36,169.37
SPOP	30,586.62	46,746.83	33,048.63
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)	20,050.54	29,891.22	24,961.02
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)	10,797.01	16,144.96	14,509.33
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)	7,830.87	10,981.80	10,338.98
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)	6,663.42	9,757.09	9,124.14
MSET (10 keys)	28,460.40	42,392.54	33,145.94

Conclusion

More of the same this month, Linode taking nearly every category, while also remaining the most affordable of the providers.

As always, I recommend performing your own benchmarks and weighing the needs of you and your application when choosing a VPS provider.