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 |