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

All right y’all, the second quarter of 2024 is upon us. Been a bit all over the place on my end, doubly so with it being the high holiday known as WrestleMania Weekend. #CodyCryBabies

I mentioned last month that I’d be trying to include MongoDB benchmarks. I did a bit of research and came to the conclusion that it was going to be a bit more trouble than it’s worth right now.

Not ruling it out in the future, but I think there’s a higher likelihood of including PostgreSQL and/or SQLite benchmarks down the road.

Depending on how quickly everybody adds support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, this may be the last post featuring Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

As always, I’ve spun up 3 instances with each provider. All instances were in or around the New York / Newark area. Each instance is at or around the $5 price point. Data was averaged together where applicable.

Overview – DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr

Linux DistroUbuntu 22.04 LTS
Kernel Version5.15.0
MySQL Version8.0.36
Redis Version6.0.16

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
LocationNew York 1Newark, NJNew York (NJ)
Monthly Price$6/month$5/month$5/month
Hourly Price$0.009/hour$0.0075/hour$0.007/hour
RAM1 GB1 GB1 GB
CPU1 Core1 Core1 Core
Storage25 GB25 GB25 GB
Storage TypeSSDSSDSSD
Transfer1 TB1 TB1 TB
Transfer Overage$0.01/GB$0.01/GB$0.01/GB
Backups$1.2/month$2/month$1/month

CPU Info

Model Name
DigitalOcean – All InstancesDO-Regular
Linode – All InstancesAMD EPYC 7713 64-Core Processor
Vultr – All InstancesIntel Core Processor (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS)
DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
CPU MHz2,263.072,000.002,394.45
Cache Size (KB)4,096.00512.0016,384.00
BogoMipsNaN2,666.673,192.33

CPU

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
Events per Second833.743,514.80853.26
Minimum (ms)1.030.251.13
Average (ms)1.230.281.17
Maximum (ms)6.484.733.73

Memory

Read

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
Ops per Second3,437,138.245,549,685.194,131,166.76
Minimum (ms)0.000.000.00
Average (ms)0.000.000.00
Maximum (ms)4.922.300.39

Write

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
Ops per Second3,447,958.445,426,018.074,097,991.25
Minimum (ms)0.000.000.00
Average (ms)0.000.000.00
Maximum (ms)3.383.011.88

File I/O

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
Reads per Second697.443,182.462,268.14
Writes per Second464.942,121.611,512.10
Fsyncs per Second1,489.506,796.084,843.94
Minimum (ms)0.000.000.00
Average (ms)0.380.080.11
Maximum (ms)128.804.7711.62

MySQL

Read Only

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
Transactions per Second2,843.007,821.674,684.33
Queries per Second45,488.00125,146.6774,949.33
Minimum (ms)1.530.991.61
Average (ms)3.651.282.14
Maximum (ms)45.5111.5124.07

Write Only

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
Transactions per Second832.677,314.333,644.67
Queries per Second4,996.0043,886.0021,868.00
Minimum (ms)4.180.691.26
Average (ms)12.361.362.93
Maximum (ms)240.6211.1947.49

Read Write

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
Transactions per Second537.673,225.331,828.67
Queries per Second10,753.3364,506.6736,573.33
Minimum (ms)7.011.913.17
Average (ms)19.073.105.47
Maximum (ms)266.6016.6622.01

Redis

DigitalOceanLinodeVultr
PING_INLINE24,533.7550,133.4325,896.15
PING_BULK23,138.1048,298.5324,509.57
SET24,516.2151,749.5425,775.52
GET23,246.4051,519.4225,365.94
INCR23,389.1652,824.0825,656.31
LPUSH24,839.9156,273.7326,730.81
RPUSH24,227.4955,517.9126,731.01
LPOP23,044.2755,026.6327,038.36
RPOP25,501.1253,527.8126,300.85
SADD23,841.7150,172.2024,930.87
HSET23,834.1852,110.3526,757.30
SPOP22,093.1548,027.1524,778.28
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)14,291.0921,610.7319,638.87
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)6,617.7810,174.878,935.35
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)5,181.737,861.656,753.52
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)4,357.906,558.515,759.20
MSET (10 keys)26,483.1960,319.6829,542.58

Conclusion

This was one of those months where I really needed to scrutinize the results because Linode absolutely obliterated DigitalOcean and Vultr in terms of raw speed and performance.

Best as I can tell, everything was on the up and up. In fact, as I monitored my scripts, all of the Linode instances completed up before either DigitalOcean or Vultr had one instance finish.

Definitely curious to see if this continues in the coming months.


If you have found these posts informative and helpful in searching for a new hosting provider, please consider using one of the links below when signing up:

  • DigitalOcean, new accounts receive $200 in credit (good for 60 days)
  • Linode, new accounts receive $100 in credit (also good for 60 days)
  • Vultr, new accounts also receive $100 in credit (good for only 14 days)
  • UpCloud, new accounts receive €25 in credit (yes, that’s in Euros)
Josh Sherman - The Man, The Myth, The Avatar

About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.


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