Hi. I’m Josh, and I have been doing VPS comparison posts off and on for over a decade. Every post I remind folks to do their own independent benchmarks and analysis. I don’t do this to encourage the usage of my server benchmark script. No, I tell people this because you shouldn’t just believe what you read on some random blog on the Internet.
I certainly pride myself in the quality of my posts. I’ve even mentioned in the past that I blog to improve my writing, so you probably wont ever see any AI content (aside from those crappy featured images I keep using). All the pride in the world can’t guarantee accuracy.
What sparked this rant?
Over the years, I’ve improved my workflow to create my VPS Showdown posts. A lot of it is automated at this point. I’m hoping this year to get to a point of full automation as things are quite time consuming.
As I got late into the day on January 5th, I sat down to finish my VPS Showdown for January 2025. This month is going to feature comparisons of Vultr’s different offerings at or around the same price point. Very similar to what I did last month for DigitalOcean.
The problem was, after a few hours invested, I noticed something totally borked in my results, and decided to pump the breaks on this week’s post.
The thing I noticed, could potentially be a smoking gun, considering what’s being advertised versus what I was seeing on the server instances. The issue was that the High Performance Intel instances had returned AMD processors instead.
A smoking gun you say?
Yes, if somebody says they give you X but instead they give you Y, I’d consider that a big deal. The thing is though, those companies are bigger than me, so I’m going to air on the side of it being some screw up on my end.
An early bit of debugging definitely made me think I screwed something up. What got screwed up, I’m not entirely sure of. Because I can’t be confidence in where the bug is, I couldn’t confidently move forward with the post.
No VPS Showdown this month?
Not at all. I screwed something up, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be back at it again next week. This is why I front load the month with recurring posts. If anything goes off the rails, life happens or otherwise, I have a buffer.
In conclusion, friendly reminder to always perform your own research and verification when possible. One post on the Internet may not line up with your own experience. Worse, the post you took as the gospel was wholly made up.
Regardless, it’s always on you to be skeptical.
