VPS Showdown – January 2025 – Vultr Cloud Compute vs. High Frequency vs. High Performance AMD and Intel

After last week’s snafu with the data, I went into this week’s post a bit more cautious. Instead of spinning up all of the instances at one time, I went ahead and spun up servers for each class individually. I would collect the benchmarks for the class, then destroy the servers before spinning up the next class.

Fortunately, the crap I was seeing last week didn’t show up today. Each server class had the expected CPU manufacturer. I assuming last week I had mislabeled one or two of the server classes, which got things twisted.

So, this month’s post is similar to my post last month. Instead of focusing on the nuanced instance classes for DigitalOcean, I’m doing the same for Vultr. Vultr offers multiple types of shared hosting options. Regular compute, High Frequency and High Performance. High Performance then comes in AMD and Intel flavors.

Not only is the naming confusing, but Vultr’s new wizard is a bit confusing too. Last week the New York (NJ) instance location was labeled as Piscataway, NJ but this week they were renamed back. Also last week I wasn’t able to figure out how the heck to disable backups with the wizard. This week, either it was easier to spot, or they changed something, and I was able to find it.

Similar to all of my other comparisons, I’ve spun up three instances of each type. All of them are running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and all of them are in the New York / New Jersey geographic area.

Overview – Vultr Cloud Compute vs. High Frequency vs. High Performance AMD and High Performance Intel

Linux Distro	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Kernel Version	6.8.0
MySQL Version	8.0.40
Redis Version	7.0.15

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
Location	New York (NJ)	New York (NJ)	New York (NJ)	New York (NJ)
Monthly Price	$5/month	$6/month	$6/month	$6/month
Hourly Price	$0.007/hour	$0.008/hour	$0.008/hour	$0.008/hour
RAM	1 GB	1 GB	1 GB	1 GB
CPU	1 Core	1 Core	1 Core	1 Core
Storage	25 GB	32 GB	25 GB	25 GB
Storage Type	NVMe	NVMe	NVMe	NVMe
Transfer	1 TB	1 TB	2 TB	2 TB
Transfer Overage	$0.01/GB	$0.01/GB	$0.01/GB	$0.01/GB
Backups	$1.00/month	$1.20/month	$1.20/month	$1.20/month

CPU Info

	Model Name
Cloud Compute – Instance #1	Intel Core Processor (Haswell, no TSX, IBRS)
Cloud Compute – Instance #2	Intel Core Processor (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS)
Cloud Compute – Instance #3	Intel Core Processor (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS)
High Frequency – All Instances	Intel Core Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
High Performance AMD – All Instances	AMD EPYC-Rome Processor
High Performance Intel – All Instances	Intel Xeon Processor (Cascadelake)

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
CPU MHz	2,396.30	3,696.03	1,996.25	2,959.71
Cache Size (KB)	16,384.00	16,384.00	512.00	16,384.00
BogoMips	3,196.00	4,928.33	2,661.67	3,924.00

CPU

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
Events per Second	844.61	1,339.47	2,620.69	1,013.26
Minimum (ms)	1.08	0.73	0.28	0.87
Average (ms)	1.18	0.76	0.41	1.00
Maximum (ms)	3.66	3.14	9.15	9.56

Memory

Read

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
Ops per Second	4,140,464.52	6,633,393.60	3,828,706.67	4,759,528.51
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Maximum (ms)	0.73	0.54	2.00	2.64

Write

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
Ops per Second	4,122,254.69	6,599,626.81	3,900,478.96	4,789,128.87
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Maximum (ms)	0.99	1.71	6.20	0.81

File I/O

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
Reads per Second	2,061.69	4,264.29	1,547.08	2,759.07
Writes per Second	1,374.41	2,842.88	1,031.39	1,839.36
Fsyncs per Second	4,403.10	9,103.03	3,309.01	5,896.82
Minimum (ms)	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Average (ms)	0.13	0.06	0.18	0.10
Maximum (ms)	15.20	2.31	45.40	13.82

MySQL

Read Only

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
Transactions per Second	4,044.67	7,197.00	4,351.67	4,562.00
Queries per Second	64,714.67	115,152.00	69,626.67	72,992.00
Minimum (ms)	1.78	1.08	1.48	1.18
Average (ms)	2.48	1.41	2.35	2.26
Maximum (ms)	20.03	9.96	37.35	21.03

Write Only

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
Transactions per Second	2,987.33	6,346.67	1,848.00	3,517.33
Queries per Second	17,924.00	38,080.00	11,088.00	21,104.00
Minimum (ms)	1.73	0.80	1.68	1.11
Average (ms)	3.41	1.60	6.29	3.36
Maximum (ms)	23.28	10.92	112.57	21.96

Read Write

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
Transactions per Second	1,266.00	2,859.67	1,138.00	1,540.33
Queries per Second	25,320.00	57,193.33	22,760.00	30,806.67
Minimum (ms)	4.21	2.20	3.84	3.34
Average (ms)	7.90	3.57	9.11	6.84
Maximum (ms)	40.02	12.72	65.38	28.84

Redis

	Cloud Compute	High Frequency	High Performance AMD	High Performance Intel
PING_INLINE	36,636.19	55,203.23	32,311.81	42,848.67
PING_MBULK	37,858.72	56,249.39	29,517.24	41,260.50
SET	37,242.89	55,449.03	30,208.70	40,806.46
GET	37,686.02	55,560.97	30,586.48	42,217.77
INCR	37,923.82	55,204.24	29,708.78	40,850.17
LPUSH	36,905.69	55,300.66	29,848.87	40,727.31
RPUSH	36,868.25	54,835.17	30,210.01	41,096.98
LPOP	36,806.22	54,123.12	30,421.97	40,030.81
RPOP	36,592.64	53,527.74	31,887.87	40,837.44
SADD	37,784.97	55,290.02	30,717.04	40,525.56
HSET	36,981.95	54,557.64	31,154.15	42,900.89
SPOP	38,007.79	55,527.75	31,957.90	44,700.93
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)	24,722.29	34,594.45	20,418.58	26,114.89
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)	13,110.50	17,595.94	11,678.61	12,949.49
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)	9,050.78	12,136.68	8,509.20	8,693.71
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)	7,821.14	10,537.06	7,688.88	7,132.14
MSET (10 keys)	34,634.48	50,324.06	29,131.20	37,211.34

Conclusion

Admittedly, I wasn’t really sure what to expect this month, aside from the slightly more expensive plans performing better. Other than the raw clock speed of the processors, the High Frequency plan shined in every category.

Gotta love the marketing jargon for the plan names, as I really would have expected “high performance” to shine over whatever “high frequency” means.

Of course, you need to weigh out your needs, as the high performance plans do actually offer more bandwidth. High frequency seemingly more powerful in the raw metrics, but also offering a bit more storage.

While this may change in the future, I’ll be sticking to the High Frequency Vultr instances when doing future comparisons with Linode and DigitalOcean.