VPS Benchmark Review For Upcloud vs DigitalOcean vs Linode vs Vultr vs Hetzner

[eva2000]

Thought I'd share my latest 13-way KVM VPS provider benchmark comparison tests for Upcloud vs DigitalOcean vs Linode vs Vultr vs Hetzner https://community.centminmod.com/threads/17742/. Clearly not all VPS servers are created equal

Enjoy !

 

[Alpha1]

Thanks for this benchmark George! Its really interesting to see. I'm afraid that the digitalocean results come a s no surprise. I look forward to your further DO tests.

One thing I am missing in the specs comparison is that some of these VPS providers offer one click App installs (DO, Vultr, Linode) while others do not.

 

[eva2000]

One thing I am missing in the specs comparison is that some of these VPS providers offer one click App installs (DO, Vultr, Linode) while others do not.

Indeed. I don't really use 1 click apps myself so not part of my focus. But I am developing an official Centmin Mod LEMP stack image for listing on DigitalOcean's 1-Click App Marketplace eventually so will look at this more to see if other VPS providers' own 1-click apps are suited for building a Centmin Mod LEMP stack image listing

 

[Alpha1]

1 click apps make the difference between if someone who is not comfortable with CLI can use it or not. Those webmasters with CLI skills are probably only the advanced webmasters.

Are you considering a Vultr 1 click app?

 

[eva2000]

1 click apps make the difference between if someone who is not comfortable with CLI can use it or not. Those webmasters with CLI skills are probably only the advanced webmasters.

Are you considering a Vultr 1 click app?

Maybe haven't looked at Vultr 1 click app build process as yet - will use DigitalOcean's 1 click app process as test run for Centmin Mod LEMP stack first. For linode I have official Centmin Mod stackscript which is a gui form based method of deploying Centmin Mod LEMP stack on Linode VPSes https://community.centminmod.com/threads/official-centmin-mod-linode-stackscript.12513/

 

[we_are_borg]

Its to bad Centmin Mod is not compatible with Plesk, cPanel and virtaulmin. But the comparisons that you made in that post is good reading.

 

[eva2000]

Its to bad Centmin Mod is not compatible with Plesk, cPanel and virtaulmin. But the comparisons that you made in that post is good reading.

Thanks. Yeah Centmin Mod doesn't need a control panel to weigh it down so yup not compatible with Plesk/cPanel/virtualmin.

 

[Paul Buonopane]

If you're comfortable with Linux and don't need a control panel, Google has a single f1-micro instance in their GCP free tier. The catch is that you get burst capacity, rather than a fixed allocation of resources, but if you're running a small community, it should be sufficient. Includes 30 GiB (HDD most likely, not SSD), 5 GiB snapshot storage (for automated backups), unlimited inbound traffic, 1 GiB outbound traffic (except to Cloudflare, which normally has fees reduced by 75%--I'm not sure if that means you also get 3 GiB additional outbound traffic), ~600 GiB RAM. If you exceed any of the free allocations, it's pay-as-you-go, except for RAM/CPU, which would require choosing a different instance type that isn't covered by the free tier.

I've been experimenting with GCP's free tier for some small personal projects. It seems pretty reliable--more so than you average VPS, about on par with AWS. If you pair it with a free CDN, you can host small communities for about $0-2/mo, depending on bandwidth. It forces you to optimize, though; Nginx over Apache, PHP 7 over PHP 5, no poorly-designed add-ons. If you're looking for a cheap VPS, you don't mind that it's Google, and you don't care about extras like cPanel and one-click app builders, it's probably worth considering that option.

I have issues so consistently with DO and Vultr that I've mostly moved away from them. Hetzner has similar issues, but at least they're cheap, especially if your workload isn't processor-intensive. It's really hard to go back to the traditional fixed VPS model when you've been spoiled by the big cloud providers.

 

[eva2000]

I have issues so consistently with DO and Vultr that I've mostly moved away from them. Hetzner has similar issues, but at least they're cheap, especially if your workload isn't processor-intensive. It's really hard to go back to the traditional fixed VPS model when you've been spoiled by the big cloud providers.

what issues have you had ?

 

[Paul Buonopane]

what issues have you had ?

Mostly abuse-related; they're terrible at mitigating abuse on their networks. As a customer, I don't want to be lumped in with a bunch of scammers and spammers. I understand this probably isn't a major concern for most sites, but if you're sending hundreds of thousands of important transactional emails each month, IP address and ASN reputation is a huge issue.

I also generally don't want stuff like cPanel shoved in my face, so I'm not really their target demographic anyway. I'd much rather build my own images and run my services through docker-compose--it's what I'm accustomed to for work, so it's just easier that way. With services like AWS, Azure, GCP, and even Linode, I can easily make a template instance, image it, and use that as the base for my other instances.

 

[Alpha1]

what issues have you had ?

DO has frequent networking issues. I moved away from using many droplets and separate Elastic, DB, Files, mail, etc. Somehow private network craps out a few times a month. So I went back to a more condensed setup. Putting everything except backup and proxy on the same droplet.

 

[mysiteguy]

I don't want to be a downer, because it's great to have benchmarks but this isn't going to give a very concrete result the way it was done considering the nature of VPS and cloud systems.

For instance, DO doesn't bench any worse than the others in the test, other than that one that is so bad it drags the others down. With less than a handful tested from each provider there's no telling what other sites are on the server and what their load is. Plus time of day/day of week the test is done on each, and whether other sites have their peak loads at the same time. If there were 10 or so, from each providers geographic centers (ie, there would be a hundred or more tested), and if the tests woke up on a schedule, ran and stored their results so you'd know the average over time, that might give a better indicator.

I'm not saying this as a fan of any of the providers, I've used many of them, and others in the cloud space, and most have their pros and cons, its a matter of your needs.

I gotta agree about cpanel, I prefer working closer to bare metal using SSH, but it does have it's place especially if you're managing multiple sites for others.

 

[Jake]

Seems relevant to this thread, created an Upcloud cloud server to do some testing, made sure autopay was enabled (it's disabled by default, if you decide to try it out as well), but they nuked the disk and cloud server after the three day free trial with no warning. Luckily all it had was a test XenForo install with no actually useful data on it: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/anyone-use-upcloud-and-have-issues.167491/

 

[Alex.]

Up until a year ago I used a mix of Linode and Digital Ocean. DO used to be good. Emphasis on the words "used to be good." From downtime, issues, bad support, etc. drove me to drop them and use Linode more. What I like about Linode is they recently introduced GPU based servers, too. You can offload rendering to them.

That said, server market is as fragmented as ever. These days for shared hosting or blog hosting, I'm more inclined to recommend newbies use SiteGround or WP Engine, respectively.

 

[Jake]

From downtime, issues, bad support, etc. drove me to drop them and use Linode more.

Yeah, I used to use DigitalOcean quite a bit as well, then switched to Linode. More recently though I've been using Vultr, and I do like them quite a bit

 

[Alex.]

Yeah, I used to use DigitalOcean quite a bit as well, then switched to Linode. More recently though I've been using Vultr, and I do like them quite a bit

I'll have to check out Vultr more in depth later. Though their site seems nice and easy to use. The info they supply when you click on a plan is cool. How does support, uptime, etc. compare to Linode? Do you use Netdata or another panel monitoring tool?

At the end of the day, I'm more inclined to recommend a shared host from a good host like my last post over a VPS unless that person wants to learn how to do things. It's a mix of value and convenience.

 

[Haki]

Interesting table. Thank you.