15 ms·

$5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr

482 points by anaxag0ras 10y ago

devwastaken 10y ago
The article clearly is showing that Linode has better hardware and general benchmarks, but the Apache benchmark falls short of the rest. Even though it has 512MB more RAM than DO and a slightly better CPU, DO server can do 5,023 requests a second, while Linode is doing 3,285. The time per request being 304ms on linode and 199ms on DO. That seems a lot more important.
- lpgauth 10y ago
  Not really, since it's unclear how this benchmark was conducted. It might just be a tuning issue on the kernel side...
  - devwastaken 10y ago
    True, but thats the thing, the article kind of contradicts itself, because Apache should respond faster.
tapirl 10y ago
What is difference between Linode's "1000Mbps" and DigitalOcean's "1Gbps"? And why "$0.0075/hour" for Linode but "$0.007/hour" for others even if their monthly prices are all $5?
- RubyPinch 10y ago
  month is usually considered the maximum limit per period while all of their per-hour rates can go above 5bux a month, you won't be charged more than 5 for the month period
- morganvachon 10y ago
  > What is difference between Linode's "1000Mbps" and DigitalOcean's "1Gbps"? Perhaps 1000 vs 1024?
  - bcook 10y ago
    I think that would only apply to bytes (ex: kilo- vs kibi-) notation, not bits.
    - morganvachon 10y ago
      No, it applies to both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#Multiple_bits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#Multiple_bits
- joshtronic 10y ago
  There are some weird price anomalies at other price points as well for hourly. In my previous posts Lightsail ended up being a fraction of a cent more than the others. As for the 1GB vs 1000MB, I assume it's as another poster mentioned, 1024 vs 1000. For things like the overview, I pull that stuff from the hosting companies pricing pages. I assume each company has good reasons for why they price and word things they way they do.
joshbaptiste 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675969
andai 10y ago
I'm surprised the article didn't mention time4vps[0]. For about $4.25 you get 2 cores, 2 GB ram, 80GB storage, 2TB transfer. That's over twice the value of anything in this article. Potential catch for people based in US: The servers are in Europe (lithuania), and network speed isn't as great as others I've tried. But if you need something super cheap, I highly recommend it. Their storage is also excellent value (about $3 per TB). Btw, does anyone know other cheap storage providers? Thanks. [0] https://www.time4vps.eu/ https://www.time4vps.eu/
- dchest 10y ago
  Nothing surprising: they are comparing popular, well-known brands. Of course, there are many other, lesser-known VPS providers with better prices. Additionally, www.time4vps.eu can't be really compared to DO/Vultr/Amazon, since they use OpenVZ virtualization, so you're getting not a full-blown virtual machine, but a container, running on their kernel. OpenVZ VPS are usually cheaper than KVM/Xen.
  - andai 10y ago
    They offer KVM as well now! (Again $4,25 per month). 2GB RAM, 2TB transfer, 40GB storage. Only one core though. https://billing.time4vps.eu/cart/&step=3 https://billing.time4vps.eu/cart/&step=3
    - amorphid 10y ago
      Funny related story... When I first heard of a KVM switch, I thought KVM was a reference to Linux virtualization. [1] I was a non-techie working at a cloud provider, and virtualization was discussed regularly. I only realized a couple months ago that it a KVM switch was referring to keyboard-video-mouse, which made a lot more sense. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine
- barnacs 10y ago
  Another potential catch is that they will graudually throttle your cpu speed if you load it too much. I guess this is not unreasonable for the price, but they don't mention it anywhere on the site and market it as "guaranteed" or "dedicated" cpu, which is definitely misleading. If you want a budget vps and willing to do your due dilligence I recommend looking at lowendtalk[0]. If you check out the the customer reviews and the quarterly top provider poll results, you can often find offers comparable to the bigger providers for a fraction of the price. (I'm not affiliated with the forum in any way) [0] https://www.lowendtalk.com/ https://www.lowendtalk.com/
Dinius 10y ago
Bandwidth for lightsail is 1tb, not 5tb like the article says.
- forcer 10y ago
  Yeah, thats pretty significant mistake
  - joshtronic 10y ago
    yeah, since been updated... remnant from a previous post.. i'm only human :)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lauriswtf 10y ago
Scaleway (subsidiary of Online.net) offers even better value/performance deal than DO/Amazon/Linode. Their offering starts at €2.99/month for 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, 200mbit unmetered cloud server [0] [0] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/
- andriussev 10y ago
  They offer Atom processors (at least on the 2.99/mo VPS): link to tests: http://pastebin.com/raw/kfaF7Nas http://pastebin.com/raw/kfaF7Nas Pretty bad results compared to the resources offered. I'll just stop now :( Contemplating moving to Linode now...
  - jsnathan 10y ago
    As far as the CPU goes, try re-running sysbench with --num-threads=2. Since you get two cores, if your app can take advantage of that, the speed is about the same as the others.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tux3 10y ago
  The 200Mb/s unmetered pricing is really incredible. I have a server moving 20+TiB up and 20+TiB down per month for 2.99€. If I'm reading this right with EC2 pricing I'd be paying 1,750€/month just for the bandwith!
  - logicallee 10y ago
    Well, you're obviously costing them money. (I will say that I personally think it's a bit abusive of you - I mean 20 GB would be one thing, but "20+ TiB"... I mean it's like going to an all you can eat buffet and eating 70 whole lobsters. 7 is one thing - but 70?) At least you're giving them free press here. :) On that note - how are latency and CPU access? Can you run a fast, performant site on it? (If you have actual numbers it would be great, such as ms to serve first page, for example, on an actual install.) Maybe some people here can help subsidize your excesses by hosting their tiny web apps on it... ;) (And knowing that if their site ever does blow up - suddenly spike in traffic - they'll be covered without huge bills.)
herbst 10y ago
I miss exoscale in that list. Would be interesting to see compared
Sami_Lehtinen 10y ago
Aruba is a pretty good deal. https://www.arubacloud.com/ https://www.arubacloud.com/ - Twice the transfer bandwidth than Linode, otherwise then same and roughly 80% cheaper. € 1 / mo - 1 Core - Intel® Xeon® E5-2650L v3 Intel Xeon 1 GB RAM - 20 GB SSD Storage - 2TB/month data transfer
- zeitg3ist 10y ago
  I don't know about their cloud offerings, but I have several "legacy" domains on Aruba and everything about it is terrible. The control panel (which you can only reach by clicking a thousand links from their homepage, all opening in new windows) looks like a website from the 90s, and it has several "hidden" limitations: for example if you change the domain's nameservers (like for Cloudflare) their email service stops working without notice. It might be OK for a cheap shared hosting website, but if you have any advanced need it quickly falls apart.
  - mastazi 10y ago
    In addition to that, the legacy offers from Aruba were so incredibly bad that they would really have to pull off some exceptional offer to convince me and use them again. I mean they used to have shared hosting plans without any DB included... EDIT: they still do! https://hosting.aruba.it/en/hosting/linux.aspx https://hosting.aruba.it/en/hosting/linux.aspx
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longnguyen 10y ago
If you're interested in VPS benchmarks, head over vpsbenchmarks.com [0]. For ~$10 instance, I think VPSDime would be the best deal in term of performance. [0]: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/performances/web https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/performances/web
- aaronheid 10y ago
  +1 for vpsdime, using them for more than 2 years on many projects including a magento shop with M2E, all running without any issues with decent performance
vbernat 10y ago
Some providers, notably Amazon, are tuning some sysctl in a way that usually help benchmarks (that's not the primary purpose of those modifications). For example, increasing default and maximum socket memory usage may help with network related benchmarks. That's the case with Amazon. Providers keeping the default values are put at a disadvantage. On the other hand, ab against a local Apache is known to be totally random.
kyledrake 10y ago
I want to give a plug for Vultr here. Compared to their competitors, IMHO they're really good and really under-rated. I've had very good performance from their servers, and their 14 datacenters allows you to spread out to regions when you need to. They also charge one of the lowest bandwidth overages, $0.02/GB. Still too high, but industry-wise it's the best you can get for VPSes right now. AWS for contrast is $0.09/GB unless you're a huge company and can get the bulk rates. Vultr also has some basic DDoS mitigation options. They're not the best at mitigation (10Gbps scrubbing, vs OVH which can handle a terabit now), but what they provide is far superior to nothing. If you get a DDoS on the other options, prepare to have your server null routed for days. (And no, the Cloudflare free plan is not real DDoS scrubbing and not an option for me, sorry. I like my SSL terminated on my OS, not someone else's.) My favorite advantage Vultr provides though is that they, unlike all of these other services, allow you to use BGP and your own IP addresses if you have them. I no longer take any hosting providers seriously (including AWS and Google Cloud) unless they can provide this https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/ https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/
- cknight 10y ago
  I was a fan of Vultr until, after Linode changed their $10 plan to have 2GB RAM, Vultr didn't match it. Beyond $5 it's no longer all that competitive. I guess the same couple be said of DO but I've never actually used them.
  - eatonphil 10y ago
    One nice thing DO and Vultr has is built-in support for FreeBSD (both) and Windows Server (Vultr). That said, I run OpenBSD, FreeBSD and SmartOS VMs on Linode through a manual install process. The only issue there is password resets through the web UI don't work and backups wouldn't work either. Here is the guide I used to get FreeBSD working [0], and the others were easy to figure out from there. [0] https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-distros/install-freebsd-on-linode https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-d...
    - kyledrake 10y ago
xchaotic 10y ago
It's really a good time to be a hobby sysadmin these days - an $5 server runs my VPN, blog, some mail, another website and serves as a basic fileserver too. It's very appealing and I know it will sell hearts of many, but I also think that price/performance at scale is what matters to most real customers. I wonder if companies can make a good enough business selling these tiny $5 boxes alone. Probably not enough to pay for engineering, marketing and such.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  Eveconomy of scale actually adds up pretty nicely I bet, especially if they're smart about resource allocation. Given 100 people who sign up, I bet only 20 are actively used and only 5 of those are heavy.
- simplehuman 10y ago
  Do you run your email server on $5 VPS? That's.. brave. What do you use?
manaskarekar 10y ago
Not specific to the service, but I have to thank whoever writes DigitalOcean's tutorials / help pages, they are very well written.
- Jgrubb 10y ago
  I don't work for DO so I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that they actually pay the community for contributed articles to their knowledge base and tutorials section. This is a brilliant idea (if true).
  - asddddd 10y ago
    Yup: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write Probably really great SEO/marketing value, and quite useful content. Example being annoying stuff like manually configuring an OpenVPN server + clients, DO seems to have 2 out of the top 3 Google results. Looks like Linode started a similar program at some point: https://www.linode.com/docs/linode-writers-guide/ https://www.linode.com/docs/linode-writers-guide/
- acomjean 10y ago
  Totally this. Seriously good documentation on how to set up things for that know enough, but not quite enough. I've used those tutorials for no just my DO instances, but also setting up virtual box linux severs.
- purple-again 10y ago
  Man I have to second this sentiment. When I was first getting into the DevOps side adding "digital ocean" at the end of all of my Google questions always led to me a really well written and concise article complete with copy paste ready shell commands that without fail got me to where I needed to be. I would love to see an article someday just discussing the inner workings of how Digital Ocean managed/curated this community.
- timlod 10y ago
  Agreed, I have used several of their tutorials to get things working on my droplet. The tutorials rank high in search and often happen to be exactly what I am looking for (that does not happen often!). E.g. just this week I used their tutorial to secure nginx with Let's Encrypt which worked perfectly.
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morb 10y ago
I wonder why is https://prgmr.com/xen/ https://prgmr.com/xen/ never mentioned in these benchmarks. Years ago it often was, whenever there was Linode there was prgmr, but nowadays not so much.
- bhu1st 10y ago
  Once their system upgrade crashed my Mongo instance and only support they could provide was telling me I should have had backups. They were right but I had to move out.
  - vectorpush 10y ago
    Well, the tagline on their front page does read "We don't assume you're stupid.". I'm not calling you stupid, I think everyone has failed to backup something important at one point or another, just saying that the sentiment behind the business seems to be "services provided with minimum hand-holding"
  - sn 10y ago
    I still remember this problem. To my best knowledge nobody else has ever had data loss after a clean shutdown and no hardware problems. It sounded to me like it could have been the same problem as this person encountered: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10560834/to-what-extent-are-lost-data-criticisms-still-valid-of-mongodb/18269939#18269939 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10560834/to-what-extent-... . Based on their data loss after a clean shutdown of mongodb in order to perform a backup, I think the only way we could have possibly saved the data is if we hibernated the system instead of doing a clean shutdown. But I don't know how well mongodb handles sudden time jumps. In general, since time jumps can be an issue, we typically perform shutdowns if a service needs to be stopped for whatever reason. I hope you ended up with a hosted mongodb service or an MSP with an expertise specifically with mongodb, as mongo seems like it can be very tricky to administer properly if it's not the one thing you do.
- AdamGibbins 10y ago
  Sadly they're hosted on the US west coast. Resulting in not great latency for us Europeans.
jt2190 10y ago
Couldn't performance variation on a shared server be due to "noisy neighbors?" (Edit: Assuming that the article doesn't leave out details about how tests were performed, these numbers feel "single data point"-ish to me.)
erikbye 10y ago
You should go with Linode's Frankfurt location for superior network performance. Hosted by SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. (Frankfurt) [0.00 km]: 1.885 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 1880.39 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 443.29 Mbit/s Digital Ocean's most performant location is also Frankfurt. Their Amsterdam location is ok: Hosted by NFOrce Entertainment B.V. (Amsterdam) [2.18 km]: 4.612 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 874.35 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 352.77 Mbit/s
- chrisper 10y ago
  That kind of depends on where you or your clients are located at no?
- Kubuxu 10y ago
  The first test was inside the DC. Many providers will have different limits on edge routers. In OVH you get no limit (limitation is your network card) in their own network and set BW/s after edge routers.
azurelogic 10y ago
I'm mind blown that the author says AWS doesn't offer load balancers... wut?
- phamilton 10y ago
  I don't think lightsail (AWS's $5 offering, which is not the same as ec2) supports elbs, though I haven't tried.
  - joshtronic 10y ago
    yeah, I was speaking more in the context of a out of the box solution like Linode's NodeBalancer and DigitalOcean's recent offering. Nothing stopping ya from spinning up a Lightsail instance and slapping varnish on it though :)
matheweis 10y ago
Interesting price scale there on the storage and bandwidth. If you can architect in such a way as to distribute your storage and load, you can get 60% more storage and double the bandwidth by going wide on the $5/mo plan. 8x $5/mo plan = 160GB/storage 8TB/transfer $40/mo plan = 96GB/storage 4TB/transfer
chrisper 10y ago
I used to use Digital Ocean, but now I just ordered a dedicated sever at Hetzner and make my own cloud. I can create VPS on demand for no additional costs with specs I want.
20years 10y ago
Don't get me wrong, I love the cloud and I use a couple of the providers mentioned in this article. But I can't help but think the cloud business is a race to the bottom. Seems as though a lot of the smaller providers are all competing on price.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  Yes I tend to agree, however it's a race providing 55% year-over-year sales growth and 101% increase operating profits. Already it's 10% of Amazons profit[1]. That's a pretty big pie. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2016/10/28/amazoncom-inc-earnings-aws-takes-the-lead-again.aspx?client=safari https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2016...
  - 20years 10y ago
    It is not Amazon I am concerned about. I don't consider them one of the "smaller providers".
mreithub 10y ago
My guess is that especially if you're shopping in the 5$ price range, there's gonna be a much more important factor than some benchmark results: Availability and cost of extra features. For java apps you're probably go for as much RAM as possible (giving Linode the edge here) OVH.com for example has an S3-like object store or alternatively, physical NAS hardware (amongst a bunch of other extras). I personally am currently looking to keep the traffic cost at a minimum (DO still doesn't charge for extra traffic but plan to do so in the future [1], Scaleway and OVH have unlimited traffic). Some of the ones I've looked into recently also provide DDoS protection and/or load balancing while others apparently null-route your IP(s) until you can get them on the phone[2] (DDoS protection seems to be a pretty costly feature to offer). Since all of the described (and I guess most of the discussed) services provide fast provisioning, it should be relatively easy to jump ship if you later find out you picked the wrong service. [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandwidth-what-will-happen https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465 A little anecdote: About half a day after I've started using vultr, I got an abuse message from their SPAM detection system claiming that one of my IPs was sending loads of spam emails prompting me to respond within 48 hours (everything looked like my server was flagged automatically). The problem was, the time of the incident was about 12hours before I even created the instance in question. The issue was resolved quickly (there wasn't a lot to argue about after all) and I haven't had problems since, but nevertheless this leaves me wondering whether they (or another provider like them) might end up blocking my account one day simply because I missed an email. But you can't really expect premium service for dirt-cheap products, can you ;) edit: formatting
junk_disposal 10y ago
What about prgmr?
netsec_burn 10y ago
Why does it say cat /etc/proc?
- joshtronic 10y ago
  was a typo ... updating shortly :)
snackai 10y ago
Just a quick reminder: DO will shut you down, if your servers a hit by 300 Mb/s regularly. Worst host ever.
- Kubuxu 10y ago
  One of the only providers that didn't close my VPS and Servers under DDoS (IDK if you talk about traffic or DDoS) was OVH. We had them report 100GiB/s on my servers and they just were enabling the VAC filtering [0]. [0]: https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/hoovering-up.xml https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/hoovering-up.xml
  - snackai 10y ago
    Doesn't matter to DO, they will shut you down if it get 300Mbit/s for a sustained minute.
jedberg 10y ago
> Vultr and Lightsail don’t current offer this, but you could also spin up an instance that serve as a self-managed load balancer. My understanding is that you can put an ELB in front of lightsail.
berns 10y ago
Regarding Vultr, did they admit already that they don't have any RAID protection? https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/273/storage-safety-raid https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/273/storage-safety-raid https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/773/are-vultr-compute-instances-vci-raid https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/773/are-vultr-compute-i...
- vbtechguy 10y ago
  probably explains why their disk i/o performance doesn't match Linode or DigitalOcean https://community.centminmod.com/threads/kvm-vps-benchmarks-5-month-digitalocean-vs-vultr-vs-linode.10437/ https://community.centminmod.com/threads/kvm-vps-benchmarks-...
mirimir 10y ago
I'm curious about the DO network measurements. Using bbcp, I've managed to push several hundred Mbps up and down for droplets with gigabit uplinks. I was using MPTCP, and some peers were multihomed, but the DO droplets had just one adapter.
mrmrcoleman 10y ago
TL;DR: Move from Digital Ocean to Hyper.sh and run the same blog in a container for $3.69 per month. -- If you'd rather run you applications as Docker containers take a look at Hyper.sh. Diogo Monica describes the process nicely here: https://diogomonica.com/2016/12/03/build-once-run-where-migrating-my-blog-to-hyper-sh/ https://diogomonica.com/2016/12/03/build-once-run-where-migr... Pricing details are here: https://hyper.sh/pricing.html https://hyper.sh/pricing.html
- petecoop 10y ago
  It depends on how many containers you want to run, if you have a lot of low memory requirement containers then it'd be significantly more expensive on Hyper.sh
  - mrmrcoleman 10y ago
    Sure, it always depends on the workload. You could also argue that if you want to run applications in containers you'd be better off using Hyper.sh than 'wasting' cycles running your own Docker daemon + scheduler on top of another provider. If you can describe your workload I'd be curious to do a comparison.
- mrmrcoleman 10y ago
  Downvote? Why?
bcarlton0 10y ago
If you need more storage, Delimeter Slot Hosting has a ship-us-your-storage (SSD or HD) for US $10/mo ($120/yr only). 1 GB RAM, 4 TB bandwidth. Disclaimer: I haven't used them, so I'm not sure how good they are. https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/ https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/
- matt2000 10y ago
  Delimiter seems like an interesting option and I haven't seen them mentioned much before. Their S3 compatible storage looks really good too, price wise at least. Anyone else have experience with them?
fidz 10y ago
Have Linode solve their security problem? I heard so much breach about how they store credit card.
plainOldText 10y ago
How about security? As far as I know, Linode has had a few security incidents in the past. I haven't heard anything about the other providers - could be my information bubble though.
- fletom 10y ago
  This is important. Linode have proven many times to be irresponsible and insecure.
eeZah7Ux 10y ago
Vikings is planning an offer that includes fully floss hardware: https://vikings.net/ https://vikings.net/
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  I mean: hardware that runs without binary blobs and runs a free BIOS.
thinkMOAR 10y ago
I honestly wonder how much resources are spend on people getting one of those boxes and then spending a night running 'benchmarks' off their VM vs what would be the 'regular' (non) usage of the vm.
nloa 10y ago
Would be nice to see Heroku in this comparison.

482 points by anaxag0ras 10y ago

The article clearly is showing that Linode has better hardware and general benchmarks, but the Apache benchmark falls short of the rest. Even though it has 512MB more RAM than DO and a slightly better CPU, DO server can do 5,023 requests a second, while Linode is doing 3,285. The time per request being 304ms on linode and 199ms on DO. That seems a lot more important.

lpgauth 10y ago
Not really, since it's unclear how this benchmark was conducted. It might just be a tuning issue on the kernel side...
- devwastaken 10y ago
  True, but thats the thing, the article kind of contradicts itself, because Apache should respond faster.

tapirl 10y ago

What is difference between Linode's "1000Mbps" and DigitalOcean's "1Gbps"? And why "$0.0075/hour" for Linode but "$0.007/hour" for others even if their monthly prices are all $5?

RubyPinch 10y ago
month is usually considered the maximum limit per period while all of their per-hour rates can go above 5bux a month, you won't be charged more than 5 for the month period
morganvachon 10y ago
> What is difference between Linode's "1000Mbps" and DigitalOcean's "1Gbps"? Perhaps 1000 vs 1024?
- bcook 10y ago
  I think that would only apply to bytes (ex: kilo- vs kibi-) notation, not bits.
  - morganvachon 10y ago
    No, it applies to both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#Multiple_bits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#Multiple_bits
joshtronic 10y ago
There are some weird price anomalies at other price points as well for hourly. In my previous posts Lightsail ended up being a fraction of a cent more than the others. As for the 1GB vs 1000MB, I assume it's as another poster mentioned, 1024 vs 1000. For things like the overview, I pull that stuff from the hosting companies pricing pages. I assume each company has good reasons for why they price and word things they way they do.

joshbaptiste 10y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675969

andai 10y ago

I'm surprised the article didn't mention time4vps[0]. For about $4.25 you get 2 cores, 2 GB ram, 80GB storage, 2TB transfer. That's over twice the value of anything in this article. Potential catch for people based in US: The servers are in Europe (lithuania), and network speed isn't as great as others I've tried. But if you need something super cheap, I highly recommend it. Their storage is also excellent value (about $3 per TB). Btw, does anyone know other cheap storage providers? Thanks. [0] https://www.time4vps.eu/ https://www.time4vps.eu/

dchest 10y ago
Nothing surprising: they are comparing popular, well-known brands. Of course, there are many other, lesser-known VPS providers with better prices. Additionally, www.time4vps.eu can't be really compared to DO/Vultr/Amazon, since they use OpenVZ virtualization, so you're getting not a full-blown virtual machine, but a container, running on their kernel. OpenVZ VPS are usually cheaper than KVM/Xen.
- andai 10y ago
  They offer KVM as well now! (Again $4,25 per month). 2GB RAM, 2TB transfer, 40GB storage. Only one core though. https://billing.time4vps.eu/cart/&step=3 https://billing.time4vps.eu/cart/&step=3
  - amorphid 10y ago
    Funny related story... When I first heard of a KVM switch, I thought KVM was a reference to Linux virtualization. [1] I was a non-techie working at a cloud provider, and virtualization was discussed regularly. I only realized a couple months ago that it a KVM switch was referring to keyboard-video-mouse, which made a lot more sense. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine
barnacs 10y ago
Another potential catch is that they will graudually throttle your cpu speed if you load it too much. I guess this is not unreasonable for the price, but they don't mention it anywhere on the site and market it as "guaranteed" or "dedicated" cpu, which is definitely misleading. If you want a budget vps and willing to do your due dilligence I recommend looking at lowendtalk[0]. If you check out the the customer reviews and the quarterly top provider poll results, you can often find offers comparable to the bigger providers for a fraction of the price. (I'm not affiliated with the forum in any way) [0] https://www.lowendtalk.com/ https://www.lowendtalk.com/

Dinius 10y ago

Bandwidth for lightsail is 1tb, not 5tb like the article says.

forcer 10y ago
Yeah, thats pretty significant mistake
- joshtronic 10y ago
  yeah, since been updated... remnant from a previous post.. i'm only human :)
deleted 10y ago
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lauriswtf 10y ago

Scaleway (subsidiary of Online.net) offers even better value/performance deal than DO/Amazon/Linode. Their offering starts at €2.99/month for 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, 200mbit unmetered cloud server [0] [0] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/

andriussev 10y ago
They offer Atom processors (at least on the 2.99/mo VPS): link to tests: http://pastebin.com/raw/kfaF7Nas http://pastebin.com/raw/kfaF7Nas Pretty bad results compared to the resources offered. I'll just stop now :( Contemplating moving to Linode now...
- jsnathan 10y ago
  As far as the CPU goes, try re-running sysbench with --num-threads=2. Since you get two cores, if your app can take advantage of that, the speed is about the same as the others.
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tux3 10y ago
The 200Mb/s unmetered pricing is really incredible. I have a server moving 20+TiB up and 20+TiB down per month for 2.99€. If I'm reading this right with EC2 pricing I'd be paying 1,750€/month just for the bandwith!
- logicallee 10y ago
  Well, you're obviously costing them money. (I will say that I personally think it's a bit abusive of you - I mean 20 GB would be one thing, but "20+ TiB"... I mean it's like going to an all you can eat buffet and eating 70 whole lobsters. 7 is one thing - but 70?) At least you're giving them free press here. :) On that note - how are latency and CPU access? Can you run a fast, performant site on it? (If you have actual numbers it would be great, such as ms to serve first page, for example, on an actual install.) Maybe some people here can help subsidize your excesses by hosting their tiny web apps on it... ;) (And knowing that if their site ever does blow up - suddenly spike in traffic - they'll be covered without huge bills.)

herbst 10y ago

I miss exoscale in that list. Would be interesting to see compared

Sami_Lehtinen 10y ago

Aruba is a pretty good deal. https://www.arubacloud.com/ https://www.arubacloud.com/ - Twice the transfer bandwidth than Linode, otherwise then same and roughly 80% cheaper. € 1 / mo - 1 Core - Intel® Xeon® E5-2650L v3 Intel Xeon 1 GB RAM - 20 GB SSD Storage - 2TB/month data transfer

zeitg3ist 10y ago
I don't know about their cloud offerings, but I have several "legacy" domains on Aruba and everything about it is terrible. The control panel (which you can only reach by clicking a thousand links from their homepage, all opening in new windows) looks like a website from the 90s, and it has several "hidden" limitations: for example if you change the domain's nameservers (like for Cloudflare) their email service stops working without notice. It might be OK for a cheap shared hosting website, but if you have any advanced need it quickly falls apart.
- mastazi 10y ago
  In addition to that, the legacy offers from Aruba were so incredibly bad that they would really have to pull off some exceptional offer to convince me and use them again. I mean they used to have shared hosting plans without any DB included... EDIT: they still do! https://hosting.aruba.it/en/hosting/linux.aspx https://hosting.aruba.it/en/hosting/linux.aspx

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longnguyen 10y ago

If you're interested in VPS benchmarks, head over vpsbenchmarks.com [0]. For ~$10 instance, I think VPSDime would be the best deal in term of performance. [0]: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/performances/web https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/performances/web

aaronheid 10y ago
+1 for vpsdime, using them for more than 2 years on many projects including a magento shop with M2E, all running without any issues with decent performance

vbernat 10y ago

Some providers, notably Amazon, are tuning some sysctl in a way that usually help benchmarks (that's not the primary purpose of those modifications). For example, increasing default and maximum socket memory usage may help with network related benchmarks. That's the case with Amazon. Providers keeping the default values are put at a disadvantage. On the other hand, ab against a local Apache is known to be totally random.

kyledrake 10y ago

I want to give a plug for Vultr here. Compared to their competitors, IMHO they're really good and really under-rated. I've had very good performance from their servers, and their 14 datacenters allows you to spread out to regions when you need to. They also charge one of the lowest bandwidth overages, $0.02/GB. Still too high, but industry-wise it's the best you can get for VPSes right now. AWS for contrast is $0.09/GB unless you're a huge company and can get the bulk rates. Vultr also has some basic DDoS mitigation options. They're not the best at mitigation (10Gbps scrubbing, vs OVH which can handle a terabit now), but what they provide is far superior to nothing. If you get a DDoS on the other options, prepare to have your server null routed for days. (And no, the Cloudflare free plan is not real DDoS scrubbing and not an option for me, sorry. I like my SSL terminated on my OS, not someone else's.) My favorite advantage Vultr provides though is that they, unlike all of these other services, allow you to use BGP and your own IP addresses if you have them. I no longer take any hosting providers seriously (including AWS and Google Cloud) unless they can provide this https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/ https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/

cknight 10y ago
I was a fan of Vultr until, after Linode changed their $10 plan to have 2GB RAM, Vultr didn't match it. Beyond $5 it's no longer all that competitive. I guess the same couple be said of DO but I've never actually used them.
- eatonphil 10y ago
  One nice thing DO and Vultr has is built-in support for FreeBSD (both) and Windows Server (Vultr). That said, I run OpenBSD, FreeBSD and SmartOS VMs on Linode through a manual install process. The only issue there is password resets through the web UI don't work and backups wouldn't work either. Here is the guide I used to get FreeBSD working [0], and the others were easy to figure out from there. [0] https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-distros/install-freebsd-on-linode https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-d...
  - kyledrake 10y ago

xchaotic 10y ago

It's really a good time to be a hobby sysadmin these days - an $5 server runs my VPN, blog, some mail, another website and serves as a basic fileserver too. It's very appealing and I know it will sell hearts of many, but I also think that price/performance at scale is what matters to most real customers. I wonder if companies can make a good enough business selling these tiny $5 boxes alone. Probably not enough to pay for engineering, marketing and such.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago
Eveconomy of scale actually adds up pretty nicely I bet, especially if they're smart about resource allocation. Given 100 people who sign up, I bet only 20 are actively used and only 5 of those are heavy.
simplehuman 10y ago
Do you run your email server on $5 VPS? That's.. brave. What do you use?

manaskarekar 10y ago

Not specific to the service, but I have to thank whoever writes DigitalOcean's tutorials / help pages, they are very well written.

Jgrubb 10y ago
I don't work for DO so I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that they actually pay the community for contributed articles to their knowledge base and tutorials section. This is a brilliant idea (if true).
- asddddd 10y ago
  Yup: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write Probably really great SEO/marketing value, and quite useful content. Example being annoying stuff like manually configuring an OpenVPN server + clients, DO seems to have 2 out of the top 3 Google results. Looks like Linode started a similar program at some point: https://www.linode.com/docs/linode-writers-guide/ https://www.linode.com/docs/linode-writers-guide/
acomjean 10y ago
Totally this. Seriously good documentation on how to set up things for that know enough, but not quite enough. I've used those tutorials for no just my DO instances, but also setting up virtual box linux severs.
purple-again 10y ago
Man I have to second this sentiment. When I was first getting into the DevOps side adding "digital ocean" at the end of all of my Google questions always led to me a really well written and concise article complete with copy paste ready shell commands that without fail got me to where I needed to be. I would love to see an article someday just discussing the inner workings of how Digital Ocean managed/curated this community.
timlod 10y ago
Agreed, I have used several of their tutorials to get things working on my droplet. The tutorials rank high in search and often happen to be exactly what I am looking for (that does not happen often!). E.g. just this week I used their tutorial to secure nginx with Let's Encrypt which worked perfectly.

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morb 10y ago

I wonder why is https://prgmr.com/xen/ https://prgmr.com/xen/ never mentioned in these benchmarks. Years ago it often was, whenever there was Linode there was prgmr, but nowadays not so much.

bhu1st 10y ago
Once their system upgrade crashed my Mongo instance and only support they could provide was telling me I should have had backups. They were right but I had to move out.
- vectorpush 10y ago
  Well, the tagline on their front page does read "We don't assume you're stupid.". I'm not calling you stupid, I think everyone has failed to backup something important at one point or another, just saying that the sentiment behind the business seems to be "services provided with minimum hand-holding"
- sn 10y ago
  I still remember this problem. To my best knowledge nobody else has ever had data loss after a clean shutdown and no hardware problems. It sounded to me like it could have been the same problem as this person encountered: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10560834/to-what-extent-are-lost-data-criticisms-still-valid-of-mongodb/18269939#18269939 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10560834/to-what-extent-... . Based on their data loss after a clean shutdown of mongodb in order to perform a backup, I think the only way we could have possibly saved the data is if we hibernated the system instead of doing a clean shutdown. But I don't know how well mongodb handles sudden time jumps. In general, since time jumps can be an issue, we typically perform shutdowns if a service needs to be stopped for whatever reason. I hope you ended up with a hosted mongodb service or an MSP with an expertise specifically with mongodb, as mongo seems like it can be very tricky to administer properly if it's not the one thing you do.
AdamGibbins 10y ago
Sadly they're hosted on the US west coast. Resulting in not great latency for us Europeans.

jt2190 10y ago

Couldn't performance variation on a shared server be due to "noisy neighbors?" (Edit: Assuming that the article doesn't leave out details about how tests were performed, these numbers feel "single data point"-ish to me.)

erikbye 10y ago

You should go with Linode's Frankfurt location for superior network performance. Hosted by SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. (Frankfurt) [0.00 km]: 1.885 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 1880.39 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 443.29 Mbit/s Digital Ocean's most performant location is also Frankfurt. Their Amsterdam location is ok: Hosted by NFOrce Entertainment B.V. (Amsterdam) [2.18 km]: 4.612 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 874.35 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 352.77 Mbit/s

chrisper 10y ago
That kind of depends on where you or your clients are located at no?
Kubuxu 10y ago
The first test was inside the DC. Many providers will have different limits on edge routers. In OVH you get no limit (limitation is your network card) in their own network and set BW/s after edge routers.

azurelogic 10y ago

I'm mind blown that the author says AWS doesn't offer load balancers... wut?

phamilton 10y ago
I don't think lightsail (AWS's $5 offering, which is not the same as ec2) supports elbs, though I haven't tried.
- joshtronic 10y ago
  yeah, I was speaking more in the context of a out of the box solution like Linode's NodeBalancer and DigitalOcean's recent offering. Nothing stopping ya from spinning up a Lightsail instance and slapping varnish on it though :)

matheweis 10y ago

Interesting price scale there on the storage and bandwidth. If you can architect in such a way as to distribute your storage and load, you can get 60% more storage and double the bandwidth by going wide on the $5/mo plan. 8x $5/mo plan = 160GB/storage 8TB/transfer $40/mo plan = 96GB/storage 4TB/transfer

chrisper 10y ago

I used to use Digital Ocean, but now I just ordered a dedicated sever at Hetzner and make my own cloud. I can create VPS on demand for no additional costs with specs I want.

20years 10y ago

Don't get me wrong, I love the cloud and I use a couple of the providers mentioned in this article. But I can't help but think the cloud business is a race to the bottom. Seems as though a lot of the smaller providers are all competing on price.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago
Yes I tend to agree, however it's a race providing 55% year-over-year sales growth and 101% increase operating profits. Already it's 10% of Amazons profit[1]. That's a pretty big pie. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2016/10/28/amazoncom-inc-earnings-aws-takes-the-lead-again.aspx?client=safari https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2016...
- 20years 10y ago
  It is not Amazon I am concerned about. I don't consider them one of the "smaller providers".

mreithub 10y ago

My guess is that especially if you're shopping in the 5$ price range, there's gonna be a much more important factor than some benchmark results: Availability and cost of extra features. For java apps you're probably go for as much RAM as possible (giving Linode the edge here) OVH.com for example has an S3-like object store or alternatively, physical NAS hardware (amongst a bunch of other extras). I personally am currently looking to keep the traffic cost at a minimum (DO still doesn't charge for extra traffic but plan to do so in the future [1], Scaleway and OVH have unlimited traffic). Some of the ones I've looked into recently also provide DDoS protection and/or load balancing while others apparently null-route your IP(s) until you can get them on the phone[2] (DDoS protection seems to be a pretty costly feature to offer). Since all of the described (and I guess most of the discussed) services provide fast provisioning, it should be relatively easy to jump ship if you later find out you picked the wrong service. [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandwidth-what-will-happen https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465 A little anecdote: About half a day after I've started using vultr, I got an abuse message from their SPAM detection system claiming that one of my IPs was sending loads of spam emails prompting me to respond within 48 hours (everything looked like my server was flagged automatically). The problem was, the time of the incident was about 12hours before I even created the instance in question. The issue was resolved quickly (there wasn't a lot to argue about after all) and I haven't had problems since, but nevertheless this leaves me wondering whether they (or another provider like them) might end up blocking my account one day simply because I missed an email. But you can't really expect premium service for dirt-cheap products, can you ;) edit: formatting

junk_disposal 10y ago

What about prgmr?

netsec_burn 10y ago

Why does it say cat /etc/proc?

joshtronic 10y ago
was a typo ... updating shortly :)

snackai 10y ago

Just a quick reminder: DO will shut you down, if your servers a hit by 300 Mb/s regularly. Worst host ever.

Kubuxu 10y ago
One of the only providers that didn't close my VPS and Servers under DDoS (IDK if you talk about traffic or DDoS) was OVH. We had them report 100GiB/s on my servers and they just were enabling the VAC filtering [0]. [0]: https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/hoovering-up.xml https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/hoovering-up.xml
- snackai 10y ago
  Doesn't matter to DO, they will shut you down if it get 300Mbit/s for a sustained minute.

jedberg 10y ago

> Vultr and Lightsail don’t current offer this, but you could also spin up an instance that serve as a self-managed load balancer. My understanding is that you can put an ELB in front of lightsail.

berns 10y ago

Regarding Vultr, did they admit already that they don't have any RAID protection? https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/273/storage-safety-raid https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/273/storage-safety-raid https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/773/are-vultr-compute-instances-vci-raid https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/773/are-vultr-compute-i...

vbtechguy 10y ago
probably explains why their disk i/o performance doesn't match Linode or DigitalOcean https://community.centminmod.com/threads/kvm-vps-benchmarks-5-month-digitalocean-vs-vultr-vs-linode.10437/ https://community.centminmod.com/threads/kvm-vps-benchmarks-...

mirimir 10y ago

I'm curious about the DO network measurements. Using bbcp, I've managed to push several hundred Mbps up and down for droplets with gigabit uplinks. I was using MPTCP, and some peers were multihomed, but the DO droplets had just one adapter.

mrmrcoleman 10y ago

TL;DR: Move from Digital Ocean to Hyper.sh and run the same blog in a container for $3.69 per month. -- If you'd rather run you applications as Docker containers take a look at Hyper.sh. Diogo Monica describes the process nicely here: https://diogomonica.com/2016/12/03/build-once-run-where-migrating-my-blog-to-hyper-sh/ https://diogomonica.com/2016/12/03/build-once-run-where-migr... Pricing details are here: https://hyper.sh/pricing.html https://hyper.sh/pricing.html

petecoop 10y ago
It depends on how many containers you want to run, if you have a lot of low memory requirement containers then it'd be significantly more expensive on Hyper.sh
- mrmrcoleman 10y ago
  Sure, it always depends on the workload. You could also argue that if you want to run applications in containers you'd be better off using Hyper.sh than 'wasting' cycles running your own Docker daemon + scheduler on top of another provider. If you can describe your workload I'd be curious to do a comparison.
mrmrcoleman 10y ago
Downvote? Why?

bcarlton0 10y ago

If you need more storage, Delimeter Slot Hosting has a ship-us-your-storage (SSD or HD) for US $10/mo ($120/yr only). 1 GB RAM, 4 TB bandwidth. Disclaimer: I haven't used them, so I'm not sure how good they are. https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/ https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/

matt2000 10y ago
Delimiter seems like an interesting option and I haven't seen them mentioned much before. Their S3 compatible storage looks really good too, price wise at least. Anyone else have experience with them?

fidz 10y ago

Have Linode solve their security problem? I heard so much breach about how they store credit card.

plainOldText 10y ago

How about security? As far as I know, Linode has had a few security incidents in the past. I haven't heard anything about the other providers - could be my information bubble though.

fletom 10y ago
This is important. Linode have proven many times to be irresponsible and insecure.

eeZah7Ux 10y ago

Vikings is planning an offer that includes fully floss hardware: https://vikings.net/ https://vikings.net/

eeZah7Ux 10y ago
I mean: hardware that runs without binary blobs and runs a free BIOS.

thinkMOAR 10y ago

I honestly wonder how much resources are spend on people getting one of those boxes and then spending a night running 'benchmarks' off their VM vs what would be the 'regular' (non) usage of the vm.

nloa 10y ago

Would be nice to see Heroku in this comparison.