
Linode vs. DigitalOcean – performance benchmarks - okor
http://jasonormand.com/2013/02/08/linode-vs-digitalocean-performance-benchmarks/
======
armored_mammal
From DigitalOcean's TOS: "You agree that you will NOT use DigitalOcean's
services to: violate any applicable state and federal law and regulation,
including, but not limited to, any copyright, trademark, patent, anti-piracy,
or other intellectual property law or regulation, or encourage or enable
others to violate any such law or regulation. Transmit, distribute, post,
store, link, or otherwise traffic in information, software, or materials that
is offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental, including,
but not limited to, those that: Are obscene, fraudulent, or discriminatory,
including any containing profanity, or obscenities. DigitalOcean permits adult
websites that abide by state and federal law and regulation. ..."

I think it's funny how they can go from barring any information "offensive,
abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental, including, but not limited
to, those that: Are obscene, fraudulent, or discriminatory, including any
containing profanity, or obscenities" to specifically permitting "adult
websites that abide by state and federal law and regulation."

In any case good, luck keeping your blog, blog, comments, or whatever else you
host with them clear of all profanity all of you who decide to try their
services, because you've just walked into a convenient TOS violation. Damn!
(Oops. TOS violation. Goodbye HN. Ha ha.)

~~~
beigeotter
Thank you for raising this issue. We try to make our terms of service as fair
as possible—we are not looking to censor any information or content on our
customers' droplets.

As you have raised this issue, to make the situation clearer, the phrase
referring to obscenity and profanity has been removed from our terms of
service.

Thanks,

Etel

~~~
aflott
I recently signed up with Digital Ocean and I'm now happier I did due to
responses like this.

------
citricsquid
For me the performance of Linode isn't the greatest factor, the greatest
factor (and the reason I spend ~$300/m with them when I could get the 10
servers for 1/5th the price elsewhere) is that support is second to none. I
have never experienced better support than I have with Linode. If I have a
problem and submit a ticket (which is rare) it's answered within a few
minutes, if there's a network or hardware issue they open a ticket with me
before I've even noticed. No other provider I've used has ever had that
quality of service.

~~~
rjsamson
I've been on Digital Ocean for around 6 months now and I have to say that
their support is pretty awesome - very responsive when needed. I couldn't be
happier with DO so far.

~~~
chadcf
Good to know. I just set up a $5 a month server with a $20 promotional coupon
code. That's 4 months free, yeesh. I love linode too, but my needs are modest
as all I really do is host a few small traffic sites for friends and staging
sites for clients. As much as I love linode, my next year of hosting will go
from $240 to $40. And with their prices if I'm happy I now have a great
affordable host to recommend to clients.

~~~
42tree
What is the $20 promotional coupon code you used? Care to share?

~~~
waps
"SSDBEAR20" without the quotes (from the serverbear.com site).

------
geuis
I just switched <http://jsonip.com> from Rackspace/Slicehost to Linode about a
month ago. I was a multi-year Slicehost customer and couldn't have been
happier. It was only a matter of time after Rackspace aquired them that I was
expecting problems. That occurred about a month + one week ago. (Sorry for the
downtime to any users that might be reading this.)

I've since migrated the service to Linode and holy shit, it's such an
improvement. The support is great, but even more their admin interface is
excellent. Gives me so much more info than I ever had before. It's even a
little cheaper than the plan I had with Slicehost.

Just to throw some numbers out there: jsonip.com is a node-based app that
supports upwards of 6-10 million requests per day. Lets just say that I
couldn't be happier with Linode.

Note to Linode: Do not ever sell out to Rackspace or else I will be forced to
go live in the woods somewhere. Thanks.

~~~
bartkozord
You don't need node.js for this little service. If you're already using nginx
you can just use the return directive. Voilà <http://git.io/ip>

~~~
geuis
Yes, I know. nginx is pretty awesome and I use it a lot in various servers.
jsonip started as a node.js side-project for me a few years ago, and its
scaled beautifully as traffic has grown. Its my preferred server environment
these days, and I prefer to see how far it can be pushed. So far, I've yet to
hit the limit on what it can do for this kind of high-traffic application.

In the future, if it started capping out, I'd look at alternatives. But I'm
not there yet, and I like to continue experimenting with node. =)

------
rmoriz
(shameless self-promo ;-)

Use the DigitalOcean API from Ruby and Chef/knife to create/shutdown/destroy
virtual servers ("droplets"):

* <https://github.com/rmoriz/digital_ocean>

* <https://github.com/rmoriz/knife-digital_ocean>

~~~
rjsamson
That's really cool! I'm definitely going to have to give it a try.

~~~
rmoriz
feel free to contact me if you encounter problems :)

------
larrys
A new broom sweeps clean. Results even with VPS depend on who else is using
the equipment and what they are doing.

Easy to spin up a machine with no usage and get great performance if there is
nobody on it. That doesn't mean this data _isn't_ correct of course but keep
in mind the OP is making a comparison between 1 machine at Linode and 1
machine at Digital Ocean at a given point in time. Same equipment or different
equipment at a later date could yield different results as the equipment gets
filled up or depending on who else is using it. We had VPS's at Media Temple
that would literally stall periodically for a few seconds. We then migrated to
a different machine at a different data center and it hasn't happened since.

------
zargon
I've been using digital ocean for a minecraft server and vpn. Network
reliability has been a problem. Some days I get frequent disconnects, and
other days it is fine.

I will continue using linode for my servers that matter, and digital ocean for
toys and experiments, just because it's so cheap.

~~~
ksec
During my resrach for performance / $ I recently discovered a host specialise
in Minecraft hosting that offers one of the best performance for its price.

Check Out Simplenode. ( I am not related to them in anyways )

------
dotBen
One of the many reasons I pay for Linode is the "good neighbor" aspect the
price point brings.

I'm not saying that DigitalOcean suffers this problem but the cheaper a VPS
provider is the greater chance of it being used by folks running bit torrent,
warez downloads, etc and/or folks who think they need to smash the (shared)
resources out of server to get their moneys worth.

Paying a few dollars extra for a Linode instance (and I have 100's of them, so
it adds up) is worth the peace of mind of being unattractive to these kinds.
IE 'bad neighbors" who will pee in the pool.

Support is also top notch (although I rarely need it).

~~~
jordan0day
> etc and/or folks who think they need to smash the (shared) resources out of
> server to get their moneys worth.

Wouldn't this be more likely on a higher-priced VPS (like Linode) than a
lower-priced VPS (like DigitalOcean)?

~~~
dotBen
I need to introduce you to a site called <http://lowendbox.com> \- where
scriptkiddies, 12 year old "web hosts" _(like, a web host run by a 12 year
old)_ and just weird _(sorry, but I just don't get the personality type)_
people seek out to spend as little money on VPS's - often debating the merits
of switching from one to another in order to pay $3.50/m instead of $4.

They then try to eeek out every bit of performance they can from the accounts
they "collect". It's a curious sub-culture.

~~~
epsylon
That's a presomptuous (and unnecessarily aggressive) you are making here. I
certainly don't want to pay more than 3 euros a month for the use I am making
of my VPS (it's still very useful, don't be mistaken), and LowEndBox was
incredibly useful in finding a good provider for that price range.

People certainly have different uses than you (and your expensive 100's of
hosts), that doesn't make all of them script kiddies and 12 year old hosts.

------
nathanstitt
I fail to see how anyone can create a repeatable objective benchmark between
different VPS providers.

I respect the fact that the author tried hard and didn't bias the results, but
I fail to see where he even repeated the benchmark over a number of days to
attempt to eliminate variations in what the other guests were doing while the
benchmark was running.

As I see it, the only way I would trust a benchmark of this nature was if it
was somehow ran over multiple hosts and was able to sample a large fraction of
the physical boxes over a large period of time. As you can image, that's
impossible to do on S3 and any of the other larger VPS providers

Even if somehow someone did manage to pull off a benchmark like the above, I
still wouldn't trust it because it would only be valid until the provider
added "Joe's Cheap Video Encoding Service" as a client that's sharing my box.
Or someone else who's running a benchmark just like you are?

With all of the above said: I'm sure that there is differences between the VPS
providers in how they allocate CPU and IO resources and Digital Ocean may
indeed be much better on average. I'm just not sure how you can measure it
objectively to make sure they are or that they will continue to be so even 5
minutes in the future.

Which is a shame, because an objective metric that was trustworthy that
compared all the different providers would be absolutely awesome.

------
brandon272
There are plenty of VPS providers out there who are cheaper than Linode,
including some with compelling SSD packages.

With Linode, I know that I am getting excellent support. There's the peace of
mind of knowing that when I submit a ticket, someone will read and respond in
short order.

A $5 SSD VPS sounds great, but I automatically wonder what kind of hardware I
will be on (does it compete with Linode's RAID 10 configuration?), and how
long my support requests will take to be addressed, and whether or not the low
prices are a sustainable business model.

~~~
sudonim
"With Linode, I know that I am getting excellent support."

To be honest, the poor support was one of the reasons we moved away from
Linode. We were in the Newark datacenter for about 8 months with 12 linode
boxes. Had frequent issues with their load balancer and most of the time when
we told them there was a problem, they asked us to prove it.

A few times we had extended outages due to "unscheduled maintenance"

Prior to running my business on Linode I had a single VPS with them for 2
years for personal stuff. I had zero problems... so YMMV. Overall, I'd still
use them again, but not for mission critical stuff after that experience.

~~~
brandon272
My experiences with Linode have been excellent as far as support is concerned.
That's just anecdotal and YMMV.

With that said, would you trust a $5/mo. VPS provider like DigitalOcean with
"mission critical stuff"?

~~~
taligent
>VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?

You do realise that in the past user VPSs were rooted, Bitcoins stolen and
Linode users had to find out from Reddit that their VPS was potentially
hacked.

If you trust Linode (or any VPS really) with mission critical stuff then you
are (being) an idiot. I am sorry but you are.

Edit: The idiot is a reference to behaviour not anything personal.

~~~
dustcoin
Did they ever publish a post-mortem of how their internal customer service
portal was "hacked"? A quick search turns up nothing.

~~~
taligent
No.

And frankly I can't understand how a VPS provider can act in this way and
still have people acting like they have great support. As a customer I found
out from Reddit before Linode. That's a pretty disgraceful effort.

------
jstalin
My favorite site for finding all kinds of VPS deals (some for as little as $15
a year) is <http://www.lowendbox.com>. It's great for finding a VPS nearly
anywhere in the world for your SSH tunnel, offsite storage, or just to tinker
with.

~~~
TylerE
That's ok for some, but it kind of annoys me. Where's the equivalent index for
people want a VPS to do real work? I'd love a site that would let me compare
pricing for say, 4GB/4 core machines.

~~~
brandon272
Here's a site comparing different types of plans. <http://serverbear.com/>

------
antiterra
DigitalOcean is promising, but they should probably hire a lawyer to fix up
their Terms of Service. I notice they've attempted to appease adult content
websites by removing the restriction against nudity and adding a statement
that adult sites are expressly allowed if legal. But, they've left in a
prohibition on profanity? That seems a bit backwards.

Inappropriate content is also disallowed, what does that mean? It's not a
legal term of art that I'm familiar with. Why does a sentence begin with
"Transmit"? And please, consider using bulleted lists.

<https://www.digitalocean.com/tos>

~~~
beigeotter
Profanity clause has been removed.

------
nhebb
Since their US servers are based in New York, what are the state's policies as
far as sales taxes? I believe there was a issue with Linode's Texas hub that
any sales to Texas residents required you collect sales tax. Does NY have a
similar issue where a server constitutes a physical presence?

------
nlh
The article says Linode has "predictably greater CPU performance". Am I
missing something? It looks like Digital Ocean is the winner in every single
benchmark other than Apache Static Page Serving.

(I'm assuming lower is better for encoding time.)

~~~
karolist
Last I had to work on a video transcoder using ffmpeg, most codecs were not
easily parallelized. That's what might have happened here, even though Linode
has 4 cores, core vs core comparison it gets beaten.

~~~
jpdoctor
Your reply makes sense. I'd note also that running 4 parallel encoding jobs
would expose the CPU difference.

------
derefr
For a while, I was pretty happy with another low-price host (ChicagoVPS)--but
I had to switch away (to Linode, as it happens) due to something not mentioned
or measured in this article at all: network throughput volatility. Someone or
something was regularly burst-saturating the physical pipe going into the
machine, such that it would seem to all the rest of the world that my website
would be down for random 90-second periods every few hours. This is really bad
when you're trying to run a realtime game with persistent connections :)

I'm not sure quite what it was--whether malicious user behavior, a lack of
separation in bridge-interface setup making network traffic on the box un-QoS-
able, or maybe someone on the box I was on bearing the brunt of temporary,
persistent DoS attacks--but I didn't care to roll the dice on another box from
the same host, when I knew that this kind of thing "just doesn't happen" with
the major providers.

Still, if there was a low-end host that specifically mentioned stable network
throughput in their SLA, I'd love to try another one. $7/mo sure does buy a
lot of horizontal scaling and High Availability, once you can ensure each node
can hold onto the little bit of traffic you send it. :)

------
deutronium
I recently switched from Linode to a dedicated server from Hetzner as I found
I could get better specs for only a few quid more / month (than Linodes 1GB
package).

Linode was a great provider, but now I can manage my own VMs using Xen myself.

~~~
elbear
I just checked Hetzner out and their VPS is also cheaper than Linode. Are you
satisfied with their services?

~~~
petercooper
Not to answer for the OP but I'm both a Linode and Hetzner customer. The
Hetzner machine has been solid and their network is great. But.. I keep the
most important stuff on Linode because if a piece of hardware in the Hetzner
machine blows up, I could be off the air for $indeterminate_time whereas with
Linode, the worst case is I fire up another Linode within 5 minutes and reload
from a backup.

~~~
elbear
Thanks for answering. In my case, I'm looking more at the Hetzner VPS
offering, because it's in the same price range and has better specs than the
equivalent Linode.

------
snowwrestler
I rarely see Rackspace Cloud mentioned on Hacker News in these sorts of VPS
discussions. Anyone have insight as to why that is? Too expensive? Crappy
service?

Background - my employer hosts on dedicated servers at Rackspace and we're
considering using more of their cloud offering.

~~~
tszming
For me, it is a horrible experience.

They need to call your over the phone in order to verify you are a human being
and they need to know what you are going to do with their "cloud" - they
called it "Onboarding"

I told them I just want to experiment with their apis and maybe they think I
have no business value or I am a potential spammer, so they rejected my
"Onboarding" request without any reason given. (So you know I am not
commenting from the technical point of view since I have never access to their
system)

On the contrary, AWS give you free tier access for a whole year, no question
asked.

IMHO, don't waste time on Rackspace.

~~~
chc
I signed up with Rackspace a while back to host a new site I was putting
together. I found the "onboarding" process so creepy and off-putting that,
even though they accepted me, I went with Linode instead. Like, if that kind
of weird bureaucracy was what I had to look forward to when I needed support,
no thanks.

Also, their sorta-cloud-sorta-VPS setup for Rackspace Cloud seemed awkward to
me. It made the control panels more confusing than they needed to be.

~~~
chumpalump
I've been using rackspace for a year now and have had a great run of it. I did
get a call early on, but I did not register as creepy. The service has been
great, except for one ubuntu kernel bug caused by me using an old image to
build some servers on their new openstack systems. That was confusing.

I really like openstack. As a python hacker, it's the bee's knees.

~~~
RackerShagz
Thanks for the kind words. We were able to get everything sorted with the
kernel bug? Please let me know if I can help with this or anything else.
shaggy@rackspace.com

------
rythie
ServerBear has all the $5/month hosts in one place:
[http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=BearScore&Order=desc&...](http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=BearScore&Order=desc&Monthly+Cost=500000-500000&HDD=-&RAM=-&BearScore=-&I%2FO+Benchmark=-&Virtualization=)

------
willholloway
I made the switch from Linode/AWS micro instances to Digital Ocean recently.

Pros: Great pricem, performance is excellent,UI is great for creating servers

Cons: I have had two periods of about 20 minutes of down time in the early
mornings recently.

Digital Ocean is great hosting for developers. They are really doing it right.

~~~
clone1018
Have you ticketed your issue?

------
Ologn
I was choosing VPS providers recently. I used <http://www.serverbear.com> for
the benchmarks. Then I looked on the web for anecdotal information on how good
and reliable the VPSs were. I chose Linode. Then I needed another VPS. It was
favoring Ramnode, but they had temporarily run out of SSDs. So I went with
Rackspace, which was used by many people, even though they seemed to generate
more complaints then Linode.

------
orthecreedence
Shiny new services will always be popping up with great deals and "faster"
servers but I prefer to not move my infrastructure every time the next host du
jour comes out. Plus, they're just going to raise their prices once they get a
critical mass of customers.

Linode has been there through thick and thin for me. Sounds cheesy, but they
report on and fix issues before I even _notice_ them, I've only had to submit
a ticket once (for something that was my fault), and their infrastructure is
tight as a drum.

Linode is very, very reliable. Another thing that many people who work with
larger applications than mine will tell you is that speed is not important,
what's important is consistency. Linode's virtualization is set up to provide,
above all, consistency (even on a loaded host). So sure your site might run
1.6778 times faster on DO, but when the host server is loaded your site's
going to be crawling because the other neighbors are bursting their CPU into
your space.

We'll see if DO's prices and performance stand the test of time. My guess is
their support is extremely lacking in comparison. When everything's running
perfectly, this is great. But when the chips are down can you really rely on
them? I guess we'll see.

~~~
taligent
Wow. I found the complete opposite.

Linode would routinely not respond during major incidents (e.g. power outage
at Fremont which was common for me) and when they did they were often not
clear about what was happening. Their infrastructure is hardly tight as a drum
(Google 'Linode bitcoin').

~~~
orthecreedence
From reading through the comments, it seems a lot of the pain points for
Linode happened in the non-Dallas datacenters. Our servers are hosted there
with almost 0 problems. I did a good amount of research on which Linode
datacenters are the best before placing our servers there (this was years ago)
and found that the Fremont datacenter had a lot of flaky issues (and if your
experience was recent at all, then they apparently still have issues).

So maybe Linode's main support system is set up to favor Dallas, which if this
is true is pretty shoddy. I'd be interested to hear more experiences from
other people across different datacenters.

------
voidlogic
I've been very happy with DigitalOcean since switching to them. This blog
echo's my anecdotal experience. If DigitalOcean would open up a Chicago and
West coast DC I could switch completely over...

I wish this had been a $20 vs $20 plan comparison.

------
endijs
Doh. "Due to a high load that we are experiencing with Trial Accounts - we
have temporarily disabled them." However email after signup tells: Your trial
period will last 12 hours.

~~~
clone1018
Sorry we'll get that fixed asap D:!

~~~
isalmon
Same for me, please let us know when this is resolved

------
dhruvbird
I personally use digitalocean for hosting <http://en.wikipins.org/> and would
like to say that I am _very_ happy with their service and SSD IOPS - something
that took me 6hrs. on EC2 takes me ~45mins on digitalocean hosted machines for
a half (or less) the cost.

------
csomar
I think DO compares to Linode (or even better) in CPU performance because the
software used (for Encoding or whatever) doesn't make use of extra cores.
You'll need multi-threads aware software to take advantage of the available
cores.

I have a Linode 1Gb (and another 512Mb) and I rarely go over 110% CPU
utilization even when my server is busy (the max is 400%, 4 cores being used).

Also, price comparison, Linode charges an extra $5 (for 512Mb) and $10 (for 1
Gb) for Backups. DO seems to be giving them for free.

My yearly bill on Linode : $900

My yearly bill on DO : $180

I think I'm trying DO soon, especially I'll be in need for more servers.

Edit: I'm a little afraid from DO. They are simply too^8 cheap and it's scary.
Will they be around for too long? What's their down time like? Will they lose
my data (and backups)?...

Price wise, DO beats the hell out of anything. I can renew my smartphone
yearly for free just by moving.

~~~
cheapsteak
>I can renew my smartphone yearly for free just by moving.

You lost me there. Is that slang for something?

~~~
csomar
I'm just emphasizing the opportunity cost here. I bought a high-end Smartphone
the last year and I have been thinking if I should renew it on a yearly basis
with the latest model.

By switching to DO (expecting they offer a comparable service), my purchasing
power gets bigger and allow me to become richer (renew smartphone or buy some
other stuff).

I'm just trying to show how competition, technology and efficiency makes us
richer.

------
danellis
Hmm. They email your initial root password in cleartext, rather than either
letting me choose it or displaying it on the site, both of which would be over
SSL.

~~~
signifiers
If you use keys, no password is sent. An option to not send password by mail
(for non-key-based launches) is on the coming-soon roadmap:
[http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocea...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocean/suggestions/3566070-add-a-checkbox-to-not-email-root-password)

~~~
danellis
You should probably make it clear during server creation that if you have
added SSH keys on the web site, they will be injected into
~root/authorized_keys in the image, if that's what you do. Linode, for
example, lets you add SSH keys on their web site, but that's only to access
your VM's console.

------
account_taken
DigitalOcean is good value but I found their I/O speed not anywhere close to
SSD levels. I ran this bench mark from github. RamNode is the best.

<https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench>

------
ck2
Just hope those SSD are made by intel and are in raid10.

Otherwise 3-4 year failure is quite common.

------
karolist
I've never heard of Digital Ocean. Are they reliable? Do they have a DNS
manager comparable to Linode? (I have no aspirations of running multiple Bind
instances on my own, thanks).

I might consider moving off Linode for pricing alone.

~~~
signifiers
They've been very reliable for us. Network is spiky (12-20MB/s at times), but
otherwise, compared to roughly equivalent VMs (lscpu, /proc/cpuinfo, etc.)
they are hands-down faster than AWS. In the limited testing we've done on AWS
SSD AMIs (optimized for cluster compute), AWS wins on network and CPU, but at
literally 10X the cost.

Also, see: <http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean> for interesting
benchmarks over time (with all the standard caveats, yada yada).

------
emddudley
DigitalOcean does not currently offer IPv6.

[http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocea...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocean/suggestions/2639897-ipv6-addresses)

------
sergiotapia
Off-topic:

Who is this "Terrence Andrew Davis" fellow who comments on pretty much every
single post that reaches HN?

He sounds like a lunatic and religious fanatic constantly quoting bible verses
and sermons. Pretty darn creepy to read at 4am.

~~~
minsight
He's the author of LoseThos (64 bit OS, written from scratch), and has
schizophrenia. His story is very interesting, if you can get past the wall of
computer-generated religious content.

~~~
sergiotapia
Wow, I had no idea. Now I feel sorry for him. I wish him well.

------
whalesalad
I've been a Linode customer for many years. I couldn't be happier. They have a
buttload of locations to choose from, fast networks, and as everyone else has
already mentioned: out of this world support. I've even managed to earn a few
hundred bucks in referral cash from them.

I had a handful of dyno's, a worker, and a few add-ons running my iPhone app's
API within Heroku up until about a week ago where I transitioned everything
onto a small collection of Linodes in the UK datacenter. We're launching in
Europe so it made sense to bring everything closer. If you're comfortable and
skilled with a terminal, you can get a lot more bang for your buck with
Linode.

That being said, I am always interested in trying something new. For a $40
Linode you get 1GB of RAM, with DigitalOcean the same $40 gets you 2GB of RAM
and they run on SSD's. I'm going to deploy a copy of my primary API server
here to take it for a spin.

First impression thus far: fast deployment. From pressing the submit button to
shelling in took literally less than a minute.

Unfortunately though the latency on the box seems a bit high. There is a bit
of lag in the terminal, something I do not experience with Linode's UK
datacenter.

I'm in Sweden on a 4G modem, here's a traceroute between me and both boxes.
DigitalOcean is first, followed by Linode.

    
    
      ### DigitalOcean – Amsterdam Datacenter
      traceroute to 192.81.221.48 (192.81.221.48), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
       1  tiny (192.168.0.1)  10.573 ms  1.658 ms  1.393 ms
       2  10.9.14.115 (10.9.14.115)  33.218 ms  24.250 ms  59.223 ms
       3  10.9.14.113 (10.9.14.113)  51.009 ms  35.878 ms  30.836 ms
       4  90-229-25-24.link.se.telia.net (90.229.25.24)  33.153 ms  30.662 ms  34.999 ms
       5  s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.96)  33.962 ms
          s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.228)  74.544 ms
          s-b2-link.telia.net (213.155.133.147)  77.395 ms
       6  s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.246.148)  36.792 ms
          s-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.234)  29.966 ms
          s-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.133.142)  31.228 ms
       7  kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.134.141)  151.952 ms
          kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.248.65.29)  42.281 ms
          kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.178)  123.130 ms
       8  kbn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.249.51)  39.032 ms  45.868 ms
          kbn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.245.159)  44.708 ms
       9  te4-7.ccr01.cph01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.14.33)  67.971 ms  60.729 ms  96.055 ms
      10  te0-7-0-0.ccr22.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.62.117)  132.391 ms
          te0-7-0-6.ccr21.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.2.149)  97.568 ms
          te0-7-0-0.ccr22.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.62.117)  137.713 ms
      11  te0-0-0-3.mpd21.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.50.57)  101.141 ms  89.885 ms
          te0-0-0-3.mpd22.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.1.101)  147.596 ms
      12  te2-1.mag01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.48.62)  104.005 ms
          te1-1.mag01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.0.242)  52.704 ms  127.224 ms
      13  nxs-internet.demarc.cogentco.com (149.6.128.6)  98.294 ms  130.686 ms  142.924 ms
      14  192.81.221.48 (192.81.221.48)  148.148 ms  107.753 ms  134.880 ms
    

and now Linode...

    
    
      ### Linode – London, UK Datacenter
      traceroute to blitzen.dbld8.com (176.58.120.7), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
       1  tiny (192.168.0.1)  9.671 ms  2.313 ms  1.411 ms
       2  10.9.14.115 (10.9.14.115)  32.881 ms  21.701 ms  34.152 ms
       3  10.9.14.113 (10.9.14.113)  36.843 ms  21.986 ms  26.750 ms
       4  90-229-25-24.link.se.telia.net (90.229.25.24)  26.421 ms  24.166 ms  26.982 ms
       5  s-b2-link.telia.net (213.155.134.55)  27.415 ms
          s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.248.199)  33.347 ms  37.758 ms
       6  s-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.254.114)  34.993 ms
          s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.254.58)  92.886 ms
          s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.247.216)  38.297 ms
       7  hbg-bb1-link.telia.net (213.155.135.236)  83.932 ms
          hbg-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.251.41)  36.076 ms
          hbg-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.147)  47.708 ms
       8  ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.201)  67.937 ms
          ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.132.247)  106.801 ms
          ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.169)  63.880 ms
       9  ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.249.170)  54.534 ms
          ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.251.237)  101.259 ms
          ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.247.25)  64.316 ms
      10  telecity-ic-150799-ldn-b3.c.telia.net (80.239.167.94)  59.564 ms  70.329 ms  64.835 ms
      11  85.90.238.70 (85.90.238.70)  70.606 ms  68.463 ms  60.808 ms
      12  212.111.33.234 (212.111.33.234)  69.237 ms  60.927 ms  70.726 ms
      13  li522-7.members.linode.com (176.58.120.7)  65.147 ms  60.434 ms  62.646 ms
    
    

Quite a difference here. Geographically Sweden is closer to Amsterdam, but i'd
imagine there is a fat pipe crossing the North Sea that is faster than being
routed through Northern Europe to AMS.

~~~
hhw
Linode appears to have a BGP mix of Level3, NTT, Time Warner, KDDI, and Telia
vs DigitalOcean's BGP mix of Level3 and Cogent. Linode hands down has the
better network connectivity.

~~~
ihopngo
Better is relative. A company like MegaUpload would say Cogent is the best,
but a company like Gameservers.com would say Internap.

~~~
ksec
Yes. But you are not comparing a hosting company to hosting company. In the
above example, Linode Win hands down.

DO just need to improve on their Networking. ( But i guess you get what you
paid for )

~~~
ihopngo
Linode is my favorite provider on the web right now. For us, Linode is the
best. It could be overkill for someone else, or a variety of other reasons
unrelated to the speed of their hardware. For example, my neighbor only buys
stuff from women-owned businesses, no exceptions.

I don't think anyone can be a "hands down winner", because it varies based on
the needs of the user. Businesses frequently use Cogent for bandwidth at the
lowest price point. Their business model could even depend on it. Other
businesses require low latency, service level agreements, etc.

------
dspillett
One of the key featuers of Linode (at least it was when I used them) is the
control panel which allows you to manage various vdisks (and even various
whole OS installs on those vdisks if you so desire, though not with several
running on a single account) within the space limits of your account. That and
the general support. At the time I used Linode very few other hosts at that
price-for-stuff value point offered such control. Neither of these things are
mentioned in the comparison so I don't know if DO offers similar - obviously
it isn't important to this reviewer but that sort of thing is for some.

I currently use one of the cheap servers from <http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/>
(9UKP/mo for 2Gb RAM, 500Gb space and 5Tb bandwidth (after 5Tb you are not cut
off but bandwdth is throttled, though I've never come close to that to see how
much effect it has)). Excellent if you don't need any hand holding (it is a
completely self managed service) or much support (I've not needed to contact
support so can't comment, but again "completely self manged"), or a very
specific OS/kernel (they have their own builds, getting stock versions
intalled is possible but a bit of a faf), you want a pile of space, and your
tasks are not CPU intensive (the cheaper machines only have Atom or Celeron
processors). Having your own dedicated drive makes I/O contention a moot point
unlike with a VPS (though depending on how loaded DigitalOcean's host servers
are they may still outperform this for some I/O patterns due to the use of
SSDs).

------
Steveism
Where are Digital Ocean's data centers? I can't seem to find that information
anywhere on their site.

~~~
DASD
Equinix(New York) and Telecity(Amsterdam).

------
madmaze
In this article, DigitalOcean's virtualization technology is misstated.

Its KVM not VMware

~~~
madmaze
this has now been corrected.

------
JimmaDaRustla
For over VPS benchmarks, I love serverbear.com

I host with Ramnode.com, and I love their prices and SSDs. Not one issue yet
except the odd DDoS attack. Used the server bear coupon code to get 31% off my
services for life.

I wonder how it stacks up to DigitalOcean. I also have a linode server, but
I'm thinking of cancelling because it is too expensive, but it is solid as a
rock.

------
jsnrkd
Not a bad deal for Digital Ocean especially when there are $20 off promo codes
available. Assuming you can use it for 4 months, it's essentially a 4 month
trial. I found a few codes with a Google search. ;)

------
epaulson
It's still just 512 megs of RAM. I'd love to find a VPS provider that gives me
like 2 gigs of RAM, and charged me by how much of that was hot during the
month. It's frustrating to have to pay in advance for the maximum amount of
RAM I might need.

I'd like to be able to leave processes running that might have a lot of data
mapped into their address spaces, but for much of the time that data can
safely be paged out to disk and not used. When I come and use the machine, I'd
like to have a large amount of RAM, but when I'm not using it, I don't want to
pay for it.

~~~
tedunangst
What happens when they sell your ram to another customer, and then you decide
you want it back?

~~~
epaulson
It's just capacity planning - they can migrate me around as needed, though
obviously they'd like to minimize the number of times that happens. Maybe
there are periods where I spin up but don't get the full memory - that's OK,
I'm only paying for what I use.

We have all of this virtualization technology but I still have to make hard
decisions about size ahead of time. There are lots of providers that will let
me burst CPU, I'd like to burst RAM. For people building small apps that get
occasional usage, having more flexibility on memory would be a huge boon.

~~~
crynix
I know IntoVPS lets you burst RAM. I believe the cheapest plan can burst to
1GB.

------
dharma1
I've been with Linode for a few years, nothing to complain about. Like others
have mentioned, super fast support, good wiki pages for setting things up, and
good IRC channel.

With RAM prices being what they are, Linode should price their RAM more
competitively and offer SSD for those who want it, at a reasonable price.

On the other hand they also have a data centre in Tokyo, which means
noticeably better pings to Asia than DigitalOcean.

In any case, will give DigitalOcean a try for a couple of projects.

Might also want to try OVH and Hetzner for dedicated servers for about
£50/month.

------
curcumin
Very confused, but I understand brand loyalty. Linode scorched Slicehost at
one point. I like the idea of DigitalOcean and I'm moving all my non
critical/beta/alpaha sites to DigitalOcean.

------
gleb
There is routine 10x variation in disk performance between different VPS's on
Linode. It's luck of the draw and performance will change (i.e. get worse)
over time.

You'd need to provision and benchmark a bunch of Linodes to get meaningful
numbers.

That's one of a dozen ways in which a VPS is not like a real server.

5 second benchmark which corresponds well to real-life disk performance:

    
    
      sysbench --test=fileio --file-fsync-freq=1 --file-num=1 \
       --file-total-size=16384 --file-test-mode=rndwr run --max-time=10 \
       | grep "Requests/sec"

------
tcohen
We just switched over to Digital Ocean and I'm very happy with it!

------
graham_king_3
There might be better performing hosting providers, and there are definitely
lower cost providers than Linode, but I don't love them like I love Linode.

It's not entirely rational, but if you ask around, I'd wager most people who
use Linode love it.

Maybe it's because it used to be just caker doing everything, or the free disk
/ memory upgrades he kept handing out. I remember him asking about LASIK
surgery in the (very helpful) forums; there's a family feeling to it. It's the
anti-Rackspace. It's home.

~~~
corford
>It's not entirely rational

So true. I moved a mail server I manage over to digital ocean recently because
it needed more RAM and the price difference between a 4GB DO instance and a
4GB Linode one was just too much to swallow.

Very happy with DO so far but... I still have 7 1GB and 512MB vms with Linode
and no plans to move any of them because I just can't bring myself to sever
all ties with Linode :D

------
callmeed
I just launched this project on a Digital Ocean $5 VPS ... it seems pretty
fast. (nginx + passenger + Rails)

<http://romancepass.com>

I've been a happy Linode customer as well. But being able to deploy silly side
projects like this for just $5/mo is really cool. This is my 3rd DO VPS and
they've all been great. I had a PostgreSQL problem on another one and my
support requests were replied to really fast.

------
SanjayUttam
Anyone know of any similar hosts (VPS, SSD) for Windows Server? Seems like
installing a virtual Win instance may not work [
[http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocea...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocean/suggestions/2536799-can-i-deploy-windows-) ]

Alternatively, if anyone has successfully installed Windows on a VPS instance,
please let me know :)

------
earless1
DigitalOcean seems like they are worth a look

------
t0mislav
I have both Linode 512 and DigitalOcean 512 VPS. Both VPS are running the same
version of Debian, same version of Apache (Apache/2.2.16 (Debian), same
apache2.conf files, list of loaded modules are same. For benchmark is used
same web site on localhost. (simple joomla site). Results are quite different
and I can't figure why. Linode has much more "Requests per second".

    
    
       #linode London
      Server Software:        Apache/2.2.16
      Server Hostname:        localhost
      Server Port:            80
    
      Document Path:          /
      Document Length:        7483 bytes
    
      Concurrency Level:      20
      Time taken for tests:   33.140 seconds
      Complete requests:      1000
      Failed requests:        0
      Write errors:           0
      Total transferred:      8037000 bytes
      HTML transferred:       7483000 bytes
      Requests per second:    30.18 [#/sec] (mean)
      Time per request:       662.791 [ms] (mean)
      Time per request:       33.140 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
      Transfer rate:          236.84 [Kbytes/sec] received
    
      Connection Times (ms)
                    min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
      Connect:        0    0   2.1      0      16
      Processing:   118  658 1143.2    487   19006
      Waiting:      113  655 1138.1    485   19006
      Total:        118  659 1143.2    488   19006
    
      Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
        50%    488
        66%    563
        75%    616
        80%    658
        90%    779
        95%    932
        98%   3635
        99%   6406
       100%  19006 (longest request)
    
        #DigitalOcean Amsterdam
      Server Software:        Apache/2.2.16
      Server Hostname:        localhost
      Server Port:            80
    
      Document Path:          /
      Document Length:        7483 bytes
    
      Concurrency Level:      20
      Time taken for tests:   118.087 seconds
      Complete requests:      1000
      Failed requests:        0
      Write errors:           0
      Total transferred:      8032000 bytes
      HTML transferred:       7483000 bytes
      Requests per second:    8.47 [#/sec] (mean)
      Time per request:       2361.734 [ms] (mean)
      Time per request:       118.087 [ms] (mean, across all   concurrent requests)
      Transfer rate:          66.42 [Kbytes/sec] received
    
      Connection Times (ms)
                    min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
      Connect:        0    1   4.0      0      33
      Processing:  1256 2355 234.1   2284    3604
      Waiting:     1256 2328 232.5   2264    3604
      Total:       1256 2356 234.1   2284    3604
    
      Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
        50%   2284
        66%   2328
        75%   2412
        80%   2500
        90%   2666
        95%   2768
        98%   2877
        99%   3204
       100%   3604 (longest request)

------
ktzar
Maybe this is the reason, (from DigitalOcean): Backup User is solely
responsible for the preservation of User's Data. Even with respect to Data as
to which User contracts for backup services, DigitalOcean shall have no
responsibility to preserve Data, the service is provided as is, without
warranty.

~~~
dspillett
That is pretty much the case with every VPS provider in my experience. Many
will make best efforts but hardly any will offer any garantees so officially
distater recovery is your responsibility not their's.

------
kawsper
Doesn't something like Rails appservers (Unicorns for an example) run better
on Linode because of more access to cores?

Or does that depend on implementation? I remember reading something about MRI
only being able to utilize one core.

------
benbro
How is it possible that amazon charge $0.050 per GB (for more than 350 TB /
month ) while DigitalOcean charge $0.02 per GB for each extra GB and 0.005$ /
GB for the 5$ plan? How can they make any profit?

~~~
ios84dev
Given you can get 1Gbps from Cogent for ~1K/mo (at least that's the price I
heard last time they were having a sale) that works out to $0.003/GB, so both
are making a massive amount of profit.

~~~
benbro
How can I get $0.003/GB? Can I do it with a single dedicated server or do I
need my own data center?

~~~
ios84dev
Contact your local cogent rep. If your dedicated server is in a building with
a cogent feed you can probably get a line to it. I'm not sure their current
non sales pricing and that might require a 10Gbps commit.

------
hhw
Has nobody else noticed that the benchmarks use ext3 for Linode and ext4 for
DigitalOcean? Not that the SSD's won't outperform hard drives anyway, but
that's one extra variable that will skew results.

------
propercoil
Linode customer for years. I'll buy 4 servers and give digital ocean a shot
just because it seems the community approves the service and they accept
paypal (Linode doesn't and it bothers me)

------
DigitalJack
How does KVM compare with Xen? Can you over-subscribe ram with KVM?

~~~
aliguori
Yes, you can over-subscribe RAM either through ballooning or just by over-
subscribing the host.

Both KVM and Xen use QEMU for their device models so the machine they emulate
is very similar (at least in HVM mode). Xen and KVM use different paravirtual
I/O drivers but everything I've ever seen indicates that I/O performance is
better in KVM.

Xen PV guests are a mixed bag. On the one hand, they work on boxes without
virtualization hardware (which are rare anymore) but on pre-Nehalem/Barcelona
processors, they are much slower than using HVM (especially 64-bit).

I've never seen a good Xen HVM benchmark either comparatively speaking... Of
course, I'm more than a little biased :-)

------
niggler
How are the "requests per second" measured? (I assume that something like `ab`
is used, but I'm wondering if it run on the same machine or from an external
machine ...)

~~~
jacques_chester
Don't fuss about it.

HN loves benchmark porn. Throw some dramatic charts up, show approximately
zilch methodological control, voila: front page.

(Complete with sarky comments like this one.)

My personal question is: are DigitalOcean making a profit?

~~~
niggler
"are DigitalOcean making a profit?" -- pandodaily is mentioned on the home
page, so I'm guessing no.

Let's suppose for a moment that I actually wanted to do a performance
comparison for my own purposes (which means I actually care about the actual
results). How would I do it right?

------
mrinterweb
When Digital Ocean has a west coast datacenter, I will give them another look.
Latency has a larger perceived impact to users than any of those benchmarks
given.

------
datagramm
The tests on disk performance are kind of redundant as ext3 is being compared
to ext4. This will skew the results in favour of DigitalOcean somewhat.

------
DeepDuh
As someone living in a land far beyond the mountains and the sea (aka
Switzerland) I'm thinking this: 5$ for a nice Hulu / Netflix proxy? Sweet!

------
EugeneOZ
But what about features set comparison? ipv6 support, backups, node balancer,
dashboard, API, community, documentation...?

------
gourneau
I signed up for DigitalOcean, thanks.

------
machbio
Performance Benchmarks for what.. Are these Benchmarks for a Remote Server for
Work.. Or is it as a Webserver..

Benchmark does not prove thing for Webserver other than Disk I/O is greater
with Digital ocean. If Disk I/O was so critical then no one would go with AWS
since they have got the worst of all.

Benchmarks need to prove a thing in its application, unless it does its waste
of time.

------
jwmoz
Well looks like I'm just spunking away ~£12 every month!

------
fowlduck
These graphs are meaningless without methodology.

~~~
michael37
The methodology is a well-documented "Phoronix Benchmark Suite".

However, why in the world is this methodology relevant for the hosting
service? Would any of you really do any x264 encoding on an outsourced server,
or would you use your desktop?

I would much rather get apache running, and run the ab (Apache HTTP server
benchmarking tool).

~~~
noamsml
I might, actually. A huge part of the reason I own a VPS is precisely because
I don't own a desktop, and having a persistent networked machine comes in
handy often.

------
taligent
It amazes me that people on here are so quick to forget about the Linode
Bitcoin incident.

Because it is during security incidents that you really find out what type of
company you are dealing with. With Cloudflare they informed users quickly,
were transparent about what happened and took their licks. With Linode they
didn't inform users and we still don't know what happened.

As a former customer I would never, ever use Linode again.

~~~
Legion
Ahh, the Linode troll's right on time.

We've heard you <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840352> again
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121734> and again
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4911934> and again
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4652662> and again
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427802> and again
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4545458>

In every Linode thread that pops up, no matter what the thread is actually
about.

We get it. Move on.

~~~
jacques_chester
His other pet subject is that MySQL has a better replication story than
PostgreSQL.

------
sunyc
i think its bullshit, just buy 10 vps and write garbage to disk, in a month
you can wipe their entire stock of ssd disks.

