After a little detour last month, comparing some higher priced plans, I brought it back down to the $5-ish range. Vultr nearly didn’t make the cut, as their site and login started to puke errors at the same time that I was starting to spin instances up. Fortunately it recovered after a few minutes, and hopefully didn’t cause anybody on their end too much grief over the weekend.
As always, I’ve spun up 3 instances with each VPS provider, at or around the $5 price point. Each instance has an AMD processor and is running the latest long-term service release of Ubuntu, in or around the New York / New Jersey area.
Overview – DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr
Linux Distro
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Kernel Version
6.11.0
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
Starting at $1.40/month
$2/month
$1.20/month
CPU Info
Model Name
DigitalOcean – All Instances
DO-Premium-AMD
Linode – All Instances
AMD EPYC 7601 32-Core Processor
Vultr – Instance #1
AMD EPYC-Genoa Processor
Vultr – Instance #2
AMD EPYC-Rome Processor
Vultr – Instance #3
AMD EPYC-Rome Processor
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
CPU MHz
2,300.00
2,200.00
2,414.16
Cache Size (KB)
512.00
512.00
682.67
BogoMips
3,066.33
2,933.00
3,497.33
CPU
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
Events per Second
3,398.85
1,243.29
3,601.19
Minimum (ms)
0.26
0.73
0.26
Average (ms)
0.29
0.80
0.28
Maximum (ms)
2.08
4.85
2.65
Memory
Read
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
Ops per Second
4,581,393.73
3,974,896.65
5,334,975.59
Minimum (ms)
0.00
0.00
0.00
Average (ms)
0.00
0.00
0.00
Maximum (ms)
2.12
4.09
15.64
Write
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
Ops per Second
4,999,432.08
3,928,005.55
5,373,134.41
Minimum (ms)
0.00
0.00
0.00
Average (ms)
0.00
0.00
0.00
Maximum (ms)
0.41
4.05
0.58
File I/O
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
Reads per Second
1,792.41
1,957.94
2,077.85
Writes per Second
1,194.93
1,305.29
1,385.21
Fsyncs per Second
3,831.10
4,181.10
4,437.37
Minimum (ms)
0.00
0.00
0.00
Average (ms)
0.15
0.14
0.13
Maximum (ms)
9.76
5.41
23.26
MySQL
Read Only
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
Transactions per Second
4,635.33
3,122.33
5,869.33
Queries per Second
74,165.33
49,957.33
93,909.33
Minimum (ms)
1.34
1.95
1.16
Average (ms)
2.19
3.25
1.76
Maximum (ms)
46.74
41.02
34.05
Write Only
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
Transactions per Second
1,974.33
2,644.00
3,377.33
Queries per Second
11,846.00
15,864.00
20,264.00
Minimum (ms)
1.90
1.73
1.14
Average (ms)
5.13
3.80
3.11
Maximum (ms)
44.33
20.24
57.41
Read Write
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
Transactions per Second
1,194.67
1,241.33
1,732.00
Queries per Second
23,893.33
24,826.67
34,640.00
Minimum (ms)
4.23
4.54
2.80
Average (ms)
8.37
8.08
6.07
Maximum (ms)
43.20
28.18
50.93
Redis
DigitalOcean
Linode
Vultr
PING_INLINE
31,825.47
29,869.13
38,779.03
PING_MBULK
28,143.92
29,079.87
39,268.94
SET
25,492.68
29,762.55
39,882.27
GET
30,348.80
29,878.88
39,817.14
INCR
31,312.74
30,267.86
38,427.29
LPUSH
31,488.41
30,807.52
38,247.77
RPUSH
32,613.68
31,307.12
38,496.14
LPOP
32,172.48
30,628.78
39,433.78
RPOP
28,630.53
29,697.53
38,502.05
SADD
28,504.24
28,159.70
39,733.56
HSET
28,981.27
29,245.96
37,847.43
SPOP
31,656.80
29,844.09
39,495.62
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)
20,656.24
18,642.05
27,247.40
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)
12,356.55
9,362.16
15,757.67
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)
9,094.78
6,361.94
11,012.02
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)
8,238.07
5,524.57
9,855.15
MSET (10 keys)
28,506.24
28,795.04
35,120.28
Conclusion
Kind of a bizarre twist this month. Even though Vultr was having some website issues when I had started out today, they actually pulled ahead in a lot of categories that they’ve previously fallen behind Linode on.
Not entirely sure if I ended up having a choked out instance or two from Linode, or if Vultr’s latest CPU offerings are starting to crush it compared to aging offerings or others. Regardless, this actually makes me excited to run these benchmarks again next month to see if this is going to emerge as the new normal!
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)
