It’s the end of an era, yet again. I’ve finally decided to retire the VPS Showdown posts on this blog once and for all. As I’ve been trying to focus on blog more on prose and less on straight up technical stuff, the VPS Showdown posts just don’t quite fit any longer.
That’s why I’ve finally launched VPS Showdown (singsong: “DOT COM!”)
Where it started
For those that have been following along, I’ve been putting these posts together since as far back as 2012 in some capacity. It started from my own interest in (then newcomer) DigitalOcean in comparison to my host, Linode (now Akamai Cloud). It grew from there with additional providers and more frequent updates.
While I’ve automated a lot over the years, the posts still took me some manual effort every month. Because they took me time, I always found it hard to incorporate new providers. Simply put, I wasn’t in a good position to scale.
Where it’s going
Remember last week when I mentioned stretching myself too thin recently? That all came to a conclusion today as I buttoned up a round of bug fixes and improvements before sitting down to write this post.
I’m now at a point where things are automated. So much so that the benchmarks are now being refreshed daily. With this level of automation, I’m able to focus on what I’ve wanted to do for a while now, expand to more and more providers.
Instead of continuing to tack on additional “vs.” to the end of a list, I’ve focused the content on a single comparison of two instances. There’s easy navigation between providers, and you can even compare a provider to itself.
There’s still a lot to do, which I’m excited for. The new site lacks the charts that I was generating for my blog. I also have some ideas for some fun branding and design elements that will break up the monotony of adding more providers.
Once a take a breather, expanding to support more instance sizes and more providers will be where the majority of my efforts go.
Why this matters
This isn’t exciting work. Hell, it’s not even the most unique site out there. What I think is important is that my benchmarks and comparisons are 100% independent, as I have no direct ties to the hosting providers.
I’ve definitely explored the space a bit to see what I’m up against, and it’s actually shocking to see how many hosting provider comparison sites are actually run by hosting providers themselves (suss).
They can claim they are unbiased, and not doctoring the numbers, but how do we know for sure? They control the hardware they run their own benchmarks on. Could they do so on a box that has zero [noisy] neighbors? Certainly could.
Launching with less providers
You may have noticed that I launched the site without UpCloud, which I recently re-introduced to the comparisons.
I tried y’all, I really did. What I found out when attempting to automate UpCloud is that their API is significantly more complex than the other providers. I got as far as spinning up an instance, and starting my benchmarks, but that’s as far as I was able to go.
For whatever reason, those instances would just hang and never finish their work. I’m assuming it’s because of some nuance about how you’re supposed to configure your instance that I’m not understanding.
It’s on the list to figure out, but it was eating up too much time and I decided to cut them from the new site, otherwise, I wouldn’t have jeopardized launching within the aggressive timeline I had laid out for myself.
Conclusion
As always, if you found this VPS Showdown helpful… just kidding.
Super tired, but super stoked to have launched. Really excited to see how this grows now that I’m able to focus my efforts around expansion rather than maintenance.
If you happen to represent a VPS hosting provider that has an API, feel free to reach out to let me know that you’d like to be included on VPS Showdown.
