DigitalOcean flexible droplets compared

Switching it up this month. DigitalOcean recently released flexible plans at 15$
per droplet and I thought it would be fun to dig a bit deeper into them instead
of just doing a side by side comparison of the different providers.

These droplets come in three varieties: 1 GB of RAM with 3 cores, 2 GB of RAM
with 2 cores and 3 GB of RAM with just 1 core. All three come with 60 GB of
storage and 3 TB of transfer.

As per usual, I spun up 3 of each size and gave them a whirl. All droplets were
in the New York 1 data center and were all running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x64.

Normally I just show the averaged results but I had noticed some pretty
interesting divergences I thought it would be nice to show the metrics for each
instance on each plan.

1 GB of RAM, 3 vCPU cores

  Droplet 1 Droplet 2 Droplet 3
Location New York 1 New York 1 New York 1
RAM 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB
CPU 3 Cores 3 Cores 3 Cores
SSD 60 GB 60 GB 60 GB
Transfer 3 TB 3TB 3 TB
CPU Model Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz
CPU MHz 1799.997 1799.998 1797.917
CPU BogoMips 3599.99 3599.99 3595.83
CPU (time taken) (seconds) 14.9508 14.9055 42.5499
Memory (Read) (MB/sec) 1853.11 1871.11 540.89
Memory (Write) (MB/sec) 1850.04 1943.42 582.12
File I/O (MB/sec) 99.257 88.977 21.797
MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) 5380.70 5181.59 1168.29
ab (req/sec) (mean) 1278.98 1272.78 738.03
ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) 14445.89 14173.45 7403.84

All three droplets had the same CPU Model, there was a slight variance in the
reported clock rates. I assume a lot of that has to do with the servers being
virtualized and all that. What is interested though is that the instance that
reported the slowest CPU performed exceptionally worse than the other two.

2 GB of RAM, 2 vCPU cores

  Droplet 1 Droplet 2 Droplet 3    
Location New York 1 New York 1 New York 1    
RAM 2 GB 2 GB 2 GB    
CPU 2 Cores 2 Cores 2 Cores    
SSD 60 GB 60 GB 60 GB    
Transfer 3 TB 3TB 3 TB    
CPU Model Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz    
CPU MHz 1799.998 2199.998 2200.032    
CPU BogoMips 3599.99 4399.99 4400.06    
CPU (time taken) (seconds) 16.8264 11.9887 12.0212    
Memory (Read) (MB/sec) 1556.33 2090.59 2190.45    
Memory (Write) (MB/sec) 1617.56 2130.72 2213.51    
File I/O (MB/sec) 43.591   87.279   78.372
MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) 1663.57 7626.88 7100.76    
ab (req/sec) (mean) 1294.67 3416.73 1286.48    
ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) 14503.99 38808.73 14467.76    

Of the three instances I spun up, one had the same CPU as the 1 GB variety and
the other two received faster CPUs. Not surprising, the droplet with the slower
CPU performed the worst.

3 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU core

  Droplet 1 Droplet 2 Droplet 3
Location New York 1 New York 1 New York 1
RAM 3 GB 3 GB 3 GB
CPU 1 Core 1 Core 1 Core
SSD 60 GB 60 GB 60 GB
Transfer 3 TB 3TB 3 TB
CPU Model Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz
CPU MHz 2199.998 2199.998 2199.998
CPU BogoMips 4399.99 4399.99 4399.99
CPU (time taken) (seconds) 15.4133 13.3255 20.8646
Memory (Read) (MB/sec) 1522.34 1963.28 1166.86
Memory (Write) (MB/sec) 1535.42 1999.21 1192.88
File I/O (MB/sec) 97.955 97.832 73.861
MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) 3788.11 4321.55 2140.37
ab (req/sec) (mean) 1149.32 1299.26 1937.64
ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) 12912.26 14633.08 19147.69

Got lucky on this one, all three droplets received the same CPU model and clock
rate. Even with the exact same CPUs, one instance performed wildly slower than
the others.

DigitalOcean vs. DigitalOcean vs. DigitalOcean

Now for a side by side comparison of each of the flexible plans:

  1 GB + 3 vCPU 2 GB + 2 vCPU 3 GB + 1 vCPU
Location New York 1 New York 1 New York 1
RAM 1 GB 2 GB 3 GB
CPU 3 Cores 2 Cores 1 Core
SSD 60 GB 60 GB 60 GB
Transfer 3 TB 3TB 3 TB
CPU MHz 1799.304 2066.676 2199.998
CPU BogoMips 3598.60 4133.35 4399.99
CPU (time taken) (seconds) 24.1354 13.6121 16.53447
Memory (Read) (MB/sec) 1421.70 1945.79 1550.83
Memory (Write) (MB/sec) 1458.53 1987.26 1575.84
File I/O (MB/sec) 70.010 69.747 89.883
MySQL (Read/write) (req/sec) 3910.19 5463.74 3416.68
ab (req/sec) (mean) 1096.60 1999.29 1462.07
ab (transfer rate) (Kbytes/sec) 12007.73 22593.49 15564.34

Not too shocked here, the more well rounded plan ended up performing better in
nearly every category. Obviously YMMV and you should pick a plan based on your
needs.

Based on mixed lot of CPUs and the fact that I ran into instances that appeared
to be duds compared to the others, I would highly recommend spinning up more
than one server and running your own benchmarks to make sure you’re getting the
best possible server. This goes for all VPS providers, not just DigitalOcean!

As always, if you found this post helpful and are thinking about pulling the
trigger with DigitalOcean, pretty pretty please use my referral code.

Also, please comment if you liked the deeper comparison of a single VPS provider
or if you think I should stick to just comparing across providers!


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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