New year, new set of benchmarks. Decided to start the year off with a comparison
at the 5 dollar tier.
Best as I can tell, this price point tends to be a favorite so I’m probably
going to stick with it this year. Either that or every month moving up to a new
tier, but I’m not sure that each provider has 12 tiers so that may not work.
Overview
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Location | New York 1 | Virginia, Zone A | Newark, NJ | New York (NJ) |
| RAM | 1 GB | 1 GB | 1 GB | 1 GB |
| CPU | 1 Core | 1 Core | 1 Core | 1 Core |
| SSD | 25 GB | 40 GB | 25 GB | 25 GB |
| Transfer | 1 TB | 2 TB | 1 TB | 1 TB |
The tale of the pricing pages is pretty evenly matched with the exception of
Lightsail offering 15 GB of additional storage and double the bandwidth.
CPU Info
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU MHz | 2263.07 | 2398.25 | 2499.99 | 2400.00 |
| Cache Size (KB) | 27136.00 | 30720.00 | 16384.00 | 16384.00 |
| BogoMips | 3059.67 | 3196.33 | 3333.00 | 3199.67 |
Bit of a swing here between providers. Worth noting is that these numbers are
the average of 3 separate servers on each provider. Based on the peculiar
looking numbers for DigitalOcean and Lightsail, it seems like each instance came
in with a different clock speed.
When you’re picking a provider, any provider, you should always spin up a few
boxes and pick the one with the most favorable specs. Often times they may all
be exactly the same while other times you may end up with server sitting on
legacy hardware and crappier specs.
CPU
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events per Second | 965.74 | 859.84 | 680.53 | 781.90 |
| Minimum (ms) | 1.00 | 1.06 | 1.24 | 1.20 |
| Average (ms) | 1.05 | 1.16 | 1.47 | 1.28 |
| Maximum (ms) | 1.70 | 2.55 | 14.78 | 8.49 |
Even with having the slowest average clock speed, DigitalOcean’s actual
processing power was speedier.
Both Linode and Vultr brought up the rear, those maximum times most likely to
blame. Even with decent average speeds, when there is a high maximum you can
experience lag. Often times this is due to noisy neighbors that are choking out
the CPU.
Memory (Read)
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3872902.31 | 812003.21 | 652546.66 | 3388041.42 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 0.29 | 11.85 | 1.13 | 4.57 |
DigitalOcean and Vultr both broke 3 million operations per second while
Lightsail and Linode were below 1 million.
Even putting up some decent numbers, Vultr’s maximum time to process came in
third.
Memory (Write)
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ops per Second | 3861697.14 | 824843.47 | 629582.55 | 3359018.29 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Maximum (ms) | 0.17 | 0.41 | 4.25 | 2.28 |
Generally speaking, the memory write metrics tend to marry up pretty close with
the memory read one. This particular benchmark is no exception.
Lightsail’s maximum did come in well below what it did during memory reads while
Linode’s maximum came in well above.
File I/O
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads per Second | 1246.86 | 1112.42 | 1094.47 | 2159.02 |
| Writes per Second | 831.22 | 741.61 | 729.61 | 1439.33 |
| Fsyncs per Second | 2652.49 | 2366.50 | 2326.54 | 4601.03 |
| Minimum (ms) | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Average (ms) | 0.23 | 0.24 | 0.25 | 0.12 |
| Maximum (ms) | 155.05 | 93.08 | 46.75 | 10.89 |
Vultr really shined for file I/O with the rest of the bunch fairly evenly
matched.
MySQL
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transactions per Second | 670.00 | 2146.67 | 1556.00 | 3055.67 |
| Queries per Second | 13400.00 | 42933.33 | 31120.00 | 61113.33 |
| Minimum (ms) | 2.39 | 2.37 | 2.90 | 2.18 |
| Average (ms) | 43.96 | 4.68 | 7.18 | 3.29 |
| Maximum (ms) | 6513.68 | 72.36 | 46.34 | 53.09 |
Vultr continued the trend into the MySQL benchmark coming in nearly 1,000
transactions ahead of the second place Lightsail.
What’s somewhat surprising is that DigitalOcean’s transactions per second came
in so low with a maximum time at 6 and a half seconds.
Speed Test
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Distance (km) | 2434.95 | 2090.30 | 2397.50 | 2391.13 |
| Latency (ms) | 42.737 | 46.035 | 44.246 | 46.736 |
| Download (Mbit/s) | 1280.89 | 169.92 | 219.86 | 294.70 |
| Upload (Mbit/s) | 566.46 | 296.87 | 331.52 | 556.25 |
Poor MySQL benchmarks aside, DigitalOcean crushed everybody on download speed
and inched out ahead of Vultr for uploads.
Considering Vultr still touts themselves as having the fastest network, their
numbers weren’t all that impressive.
Apache Benchmark (against nginx on the servers)
| DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Requests per Second | 258.93 | 269.21 | 253.82 | 263.67 |
| Time per Request (ms) (mean) | 1931.14 | 1857.98 | 1980.04 | 1899.95 |
| Transfer Rate (Kbytes/sec) | 217.21 | 225.83 | 212.93 | 221.19 |
This is always the “take it with a grain of salt” metric. It’s just me running
ab locally to an out of the box nginx server serving up a static page. Too
many factors in play to get a clean reading.
Nonetheless, everybody came in pretty evenly matched, which usually isn’t the
case.
Conclusion
As always, please take these metrics and jump to your own conclusions based on
your needs.
For me, I think DigitalOcean put out some of the better results this go around,
with the exception of how MySQL performed.
Obviously, for most specs for the buck, Lightsail is going to provide you the
most storage and bandwidth.
There’s still a lot to love about Linode and Vultr and other offerings like
block storage and ease of use of the user experience don’t factor into these raw
metrics but should be considered when making your decision.
If you found this comparison helpful and are planning to sign up for one of the
providers mentioned, it would be greatly appreciated if you used one of my sign
up links below.
