Welcome to the June 2019 VPS Awards. Today we will be covering the most popular VPS Tier, the $5 bracket.

If you wish to learn more about how we compare VPS plans with these Awards, please see our explanatory post here.

This month we will be comparing what is arguably the 4 most popular VPS cloud hosts on the market.

DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode and Lightsail.

 

Server Resources

Disk Size (GB) - Winner, Lightsail

DigitalOcean - 25 - 9.6/15
Linode - 25 - 9.6/15
Vultr - 25 - 9.6/15
LightSail - 39 - 15/15

Ram Size (MB) - Winner, 4-way tie

DigitalOcean - 985 - 15/15
Linode - 985 - 15/15
Vultr - 985 - 15/15
LightSail - 983 - 15/15

Bandwidth (GB) - Winner, Lightsail

DigitalOcean - 1000 - 7.5/15
Linode - 1000 - 7.5/15
Vultr - 1000 - 7.5/15
LightSail - 2000  - 15/15

Core Count - Winner, 4-way tie

DigitalOcean - 5/5
Linode - 5/5
Vultr - 5/5
LightSail - 5/5

 

Server Resources Subtotals

DigitalOcean - 37.1/50
Linode - 37.1/50
Vultr - 37.1/50
LightSail - 50/50

 

Server Performance

CPU Performance (GB Score) - Winner, DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean - 3190 - 15/15
Linode - 2951 - 13.9/15
Vultr - 2805 - 13.2/15
LightSail - 544 - 2.6/15

Disk Performance (IOPS) - Winner, Linode

DigitalOcean
- Read: 78848 iops - 7.5/7.5
- Write: 8166 iops - 1.5/7.5

Linode
- Read: 78848 iops - 7.5/7.5
- Write: 38656 iops - 7.5/7.5

Vultr
- Read: 66560 iops - 6.3/7.5
- Write: 30976 iops - 6.0/7.5

LightSail
- Read: 3532.8 iops - 0.3/7.5
- Write: 3328 iops - 0.6/7.5

Network Performance - Winner, Vultr

DigitalOcean
2020tx - 5.7/7.5
3632rx - 7.2//7.5

Linode
3638tx - 7.5/7.5
1620rx - 3.2/7.5

Vultr
2455tx - 7/7.5
3782rx - 7.5/7.5

LightSail
924tx - 2.6/7.5
943rx - 1.9/7.5

 

Server Performance Subtotals

DigitalOcean - 36.9/45
Linode - 39.6/45
Vultr - 40/45
LightSail - 8/45

 

Other

Provider Bonuses

DigitalOcean - 15 - 5/5
Linode - 7 - 2.3/5
Vultr - 10 - 3.3/5
LightSail - 8 - 2.7/5

 

Final Scores

DigitalOcean - 79/100
Linode - 79/100
Vultr - 80.4/100
LightSail - 60.7/100

 

WINNER: VULTR

 

Notes:

An interesting find was that while AWS Lightsail absolutely dominated the "Server Resources" category when it came to "Server Performance" it completely fell on its face. Low IO, dismal network performance and a CPU that throttles to almost unusability.

In light of this, in future comparisons, I may replace Lightsail with the more competitive Hetzner.

All in all this was a pretty interesting comparison, moreover, it showed where the strengths of each provider lay

DigitalOcean for CPU intensive workloads
Linode - For IO bound jobs
Vultr - when you need a top class network speeds.

 

Raw Comparisons for we numbers nerds

Name standard 1vcpu-1gb Nanode 1GB VC2 25 GB SSD 1GB
Provider DigitalOcean Linode Vultr Lightsail
Price (USD) $5.00 $5.00 $5.00 $5.00
Ram 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB
vCPUs 1 vCPU 1 vCPU 1 vCPU 1 vCPU
Disk 25 GB 25 GB 25 GB 40 GB
SSD True True True True
Bandwidth 1000 GB 1000 GB 1000 GB 2000 GB
         
CPU Model Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6140 CPU @ 2.30GHz AMD EPYC 7501 32-Core Processor Virtual CPU 714389bda930 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz
CPU Speed 2294.61 Mhz 1999.99 Mhz 2400.00 Mhz 2400.23 Mhz
cpu_bogomips 4589.21 3999.98 4799.99 4800.09
CPU Cache L1d 32 KB 64 KB 32 KB 32 KB
CPU Cache L1i 32 KB 64 KB 32 KB 32 KB
CPU Cache L2 1024 KB 512 KB 4096 KB 256 KB
CPU Cache L3 25344 KB 16384 KB 16384 KB 30720 KB
Actual RAM 985 MB 985 MB 985 MB 983 MB
Actual Disk 25 GB 25 GB 25 GB 39 GB
TX Speed 2020.86 Mbit/s 2638.04 Mbit/s 2455.71 Mbit/s 924.53 Mbit/s
RX Speed 3632.40 Mbit/s 1620.98 Mbit/s 3782.27 Mbit/s 943.76 Mbit/s
         
IO Read (4k32qd) 78848 iops 78848 iops 66560 iops 3532.8 iops
IO Write (4k32qd) 8166.4 iops 38656 iops 30976 iops 3328 iops
io_seq_q32t1_read 2069 MB/s 2439 MB/s 489 MB/s 67.2 MB/s
io_seq_q32t1_write 865 MB/s 3046 MB/s 470 MB/s 67.2 MB/s
io_4k_q32t1_read 308 MB/s 308 MB/s 260 MB/s 13.8 MB/s
io_4k_q32t1_write 31.9 MB/s 151 MB/s 121 MB/s 13 MB/s
io_4k_read 17.8 MB/s 13.6 MB/s 23.3 MB/s 13 MB/s
io_4k_write 10.9 MB/s 34.9 MB/s 39.6 MB/s 7121 MB/s
         
Geekbench Score 3275 3106 2959 895
Geekbench Multi-Core Score 3190 2951 2805 544
Unixbench Score 971.6 1365.6 970.6 436.8
Unixbench Multi-Core Score 971.6 1365.6 970.6 436.8