VPS Showdown Articles

Winding down the VPS Showdown

It’s been a long time since I wrote my original Linode vs. DigitalOcean post. The year was 2013 and it was a simpler time. Over the last [nearly] ten years, the humble post grew from being the output of my own gross curiosity about the performance of a couple of […]

VPS Showdown - May 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

The big news for this month would be DigitalOcean’s announcement of their “serverless functions” product being beta released. Said functionality is the equivalent of AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions and Azure Function. While not the most exciting news, as I don’t include any additional benchmarks, it did lead to me […]

VPS Showdown - April 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

The landscape of Virtual Private Servers is ever changing and evolving. Gone are the days of providers offering just servers. Many providers offer a wide range of managed services in addition to traditional VPS offerings. Maybe I’m too much of an old dog, but I’m finding the more recent trend […]

VPS Showdown - March 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

The biggest news this month is that Linode was recently acquired by Akamai Technologies for a whopping $900M. What that will do to the VPS landscape is yet to be seen. The most immediate impact I’ve noticed is that Linode is going to start charging sales tax in May. I […]

VPS Showdown - February 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Around this time last year, we were dealing with one of the worst winter storms in Texas history. While it’s still pretty cold, we’ve been extremely fortunate this year. Hopefully everybody reading this is staying warm (or cool, if you’re south of the equator), safe and healthy! Similar to previous […]

VPS Showdown - January 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

So 2021 was interesting. Not going to bore you with the details of my life, but I am ready to bore you with the details of the world of virtual private servers! I forgot to do my “Christmas wish list” last month as I have in the past, but it’s […]

VPS Showdown - December 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Here we are, with the final VPS Showdown of 2021. We’ve seen a few changes over the course of the year in terms of product offerings. One of the most notable was the adoption of AMD EPYC processors either a standard or premium offering depending on the provider. Next year […]

VPS Showdown - November 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Even though the year is drawing to a close, these showdowns continue. Nothing very exciting this month other than it seems Linode took their firewall offering out of beta and Vultr did the same with their Kubernetes offering. DigitalOcean continues to lead the pack in terms of their “managed” offerings, […]

VPS Showdown - October 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Q4 is upon us! I’ve been busy moving recently, so I’ve admittedly not been as on top of the VPS news (or my Twitter account) in the last few weeks. That being said, it looks like Lightsail is not offering container hosting, which I’m assuming is a bit more inline […]

VPS Showdown - September 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

September, the last month of summer (in the northern hemisphere at least) but not the end of comparing a few VPS providers. Didn’t see a lot happening this month side from Vultr starting a beta period for their Kubernetes offering in a few of their data centers. As always, I’ve […]

VPS Showdown - August 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

It’s that time again! Been extremely busy on my end, so it’s more of the same at the moment in terms of what’s covered. Something notable that I had missed last month is that UpCloud is now offering managed database hosting along with their VPS and other products (block and […]

VPS Showdown - July 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

I got a few bits of feedback recently that I took into consideration before doing this month’s benchmarks. The first bit was to include some additional price points and plan types instead of just the $5 plan. The other (opposing) bit of feedback was to start including some content that […]

VPS Showdown - June 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Have had some requests for some comparisons of different plans (like the dedicated CPU offerings) and different price points, but considering it’s the last month of the quarter, I figured I would just stay the course and stick to the same comparisons as I’ve done the past few months. Next […]

VPS Showdown - May 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Switching things up a small bit this month. Last month, I had introduced a “$6 VPS Showdown” as a separate post alongside my existing $5 post. This was all well and good, but best as I can figure, there’s no reason to have them split out, as most folks probably […]

$6 VPS Showdown - April 2021 - DigitalOcean - Premium Intel vs. DigitalOcean - Premium AMD vs. Vultr - High Frequency

By popular demand, I am now doing a $6 VPS Showdown to compare the “premium” offerings from both DigitalOcean (which are fairly new) and Vultr (which have been around for a while). In the past, I did include Vultr’s High Frequency plan in my $5 VPS Showdowns, but it always […]

$5 VPS Showdown - April 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

This month is some what of a special one. First, DigitalOcean recently had their IPO, which helps further legitimizes them as a company. Also, this marks the first month where I’m doing both a $5 and $6 VPS Showdown. I know some of you probably want to see a comparison […]

VPS Showdown - March 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Hot on the heels of Linode offering up AMD EPYC processors, DigitalOcean has started to offer “premium” CPUs as part of their Shared CPU Basic plans. Unfortunately, this new offering comes with a slightly elevated price, clocking in at $6 per month instead of $5. This new product offering lines […]

VPS Showdown - February 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

It was just last month that I had added a bit more information about the CPUs that each provider was reporting. Wouldn’t you know it, this month the Linode instances tested were reporting AMD EPYC 7542 32 Core Processors, same as UpCloud has been offering. As one would expect, this […]

VPS Showdown - January 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

New year, new VPS Showdown! While I don’t usually make big changes to these posts month to month, I do try to refresh them every year or so. This year’s improvements include commas (on the larger numbers) and charts! I’ve also made the decision to drop the High Frequency plan […]

VPS Showdown - December 2020 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

With this month’s post being the final one of the year, I thought it was best to get back to a comparison that included all of the providers that I cover. The last few months have not included Lightsail or UpCloud since they didn’t offer the types of plans I […]

VPS Showdown - November 2020 - DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr

It’s that time of the year again, new version of Ubuntu has been released! Sadly (and expectedly) both UpCloud and Amazon are slow to add the latest and greatest (albeit, not LTS) version of Ubuntu to their Linux distro offering. With that, this month I’ll be omitting both providers as […]

VPS Showdown - October 2020 - DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr

Switching things up a bit for Spooktober (doot doot) by running some benchmarks on the CPU-centric plans. Unfortunately, Lightsail and UpCloud are lacking this sort of offering, so they are omitted this month. It’s also worth noting that even though all of the plans are touting a dedicate CPU, it’s […]

VPS Showdown - September 2020 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Bringing things back around to the price point that I had started with many moons ago, the $20 plan. While the lower priced systems are sufficient enough for a lot of use cases, moving up to a meatier server instance can provide instant performance gains, give you better priority on […]

VPS Showdown - Germany - August 2020 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

Starting to feel like I’m taking a virtual vacation as I test out different data centers each month. This month we step into Europe to explore Frankfurt. Next month may end up taking us to Australia, but head’s up, not every provider has a data center there. Usual setup this […]

VPS Showdown - Singapore - July 2020 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

By request, we’re revisiting the Singapore data centers for this month’s VPS Showdown. Incidentally, while not part of the benchmarks currently, Linode did expand their S3-compatible Object Storage to the Singapore data center. They also turned 17 in mid-June with their usual slew of announcements, and upgrades for existing customers. […]