
$5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr - anaxag0ras
https://joshtronic.com/2017/02/14/five-dollar-showdown-linode-vs-digitalocean-vs-lightsaild-vs-vultr/
======
lauriswtf
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/)

~~~
ehPReth
Do they require you to send in your documents (drivers license, utility bill,
etc)? OVH required I send mine in to pay my next invoice after a few months of
paying on time with no abuse complaints (nor doing anything that would
generate such). I dumped them in the end :/

(OTOH, I've used one of these type of providers listed in the post for a few
years without them demanding my papers so maybe it's just an OVH thing?)

~~~
blunte
OVH didn't require hardly anything from me, but they did have a (temporarily?)
broken provisioning system where my server that I paid for vanished about 8
hours later, and my billing information was also erased - but my Paypal bill
shows I paid.

OVH's customer service and support was beyond useless. I just gifted them the
€14 and told them to fuck off since it was clear I would spend hours just for
the hope of getting a refund.

Other people on the internet have told their horror stories about OVH, but I
chose to ignore those. I guess sometimes the stories are true.

~~~
ReverseCold
... PayPal chargeback?

They will reply there (probably) much quicker and give you what you bought. If
they don't reply then you get your money back.

~~~
blunte
Tried that, but it was going to take 30 days and I was going to have to prove
I had attempted to get the issue resolved with OVH first. Of course I
considered doing that until after the first two rounds of emails with OVH
support where it seemed they were either answering another user or had a
random script program sending responses.

I was annoyed enough that even trying to explain the support communication
failures would take more energy than €14 was worth to me.

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

~~~
beigeotter
Thank you so much for your kind words. We've linked to this thread in our
internal slack channel and I know this kind of feedback means a lot to the
team. We're really excited about creating useful, approachable content, and
hearing about how it has helped others is great encouragement.

If you, or someone you know, wants to join us in this effort, we are both
hiring for these roles in the Community Department
([https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/))
and seeking freelance contributions
([https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-
write](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write))

~~~
aeturnum
I want to second the praise of DOs tutorial pages. I used to use stack
overflow for all my tutorial needs, but I'll always pick DO when I can. Just
in case you doubt their value - It's a big part of why I use DO for my hosting
needs and recommend you guys to others.

------
kyledrake
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
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
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-d...](https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-
distros/install-freebsd-on-linode)

~~~
kyledrake
Vultr supports autoconfig OpenBSD now (and probably FreeBSD?), you should give
that a shot.

------
andai
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
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
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
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)

------
mreithub
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-
bandw...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandwidth-
what-will-happen) [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

------
devwastaken
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
Not really, since it's unclear how this benchmark was conducted. It might just
be a tuning issue on the kernel side...

~~~
devwastaken
True, but thats the thing, the article kind of contradicts itself, because
Apache should respond faster.

------
berns
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-i...](https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/773/are-vultr-compute-
instances-vci-raid)

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

------
jt2190
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.)

------
Sami_Lehtinen
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
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
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)

------
eeZah7Ux
Vikings is planning an offer that includes fully floss hardware:
[https://vikings.net/](https://vikings.net/)

~~~
eeZah7Ux
I mean: hardware that runs without binary blobs and runs a free BIOS.

------
morb
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
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.

~~~
sn
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-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10560834/to-what-extent-are-
lost-data-criticisms-still-valid-of-mongodb/18269939#18269939) . 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.

------
vbernat
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.

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

~~~
forcer
Yeah, thats pretty significant mistake

~~~
joshtronic
yeah, since been updated... remnant from a previous post.. i'm only human :)

------
longnguyen
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)

------
matheweis
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

------
joshbaptiste
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675969)

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

~~~
Kubuxu
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
Doesn't matter to DO, they will shut you down if it get 300Mbit/s for a
sustained minute.

------
erikbye
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

~~~
Kubuxu
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.

------
plainOldText
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
This is important. Linode have proven many times to be irresponsible and
insecure.

------
xchaotic
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
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.

------
tapirl
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?

~~~
morganvachon
> _What is difference between Linode 's "1000Mbps" and DigitalOcean's
> "1Gbps"?_

Perhaps 1000 vs 1024?

~~~
bcook
I think that would only apply to bytes (ex: kilo- vs kibi-) notation, not
bits.

~~~
morganvachon
No, it applies to both.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#Multiple_bits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#Multiple_bits)

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

------
chrisper
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.

------
bcarlton0
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
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
Have Linode solve their security problem? I heard so much breach about how
they store credit card.

------
20years
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
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...](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)

~~~
20years
It is not Amazon I am concerned about. I don't consider them one of the
"smaller providers".

------
mirimir
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.

------
thinkMOAR
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.

------
jedberg
> 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.

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

~~~
phamilton
I don't think lightsail (AWS's $5 offering, which is not the same as ec2)
supports elbs, though I haven't tried.

~~~
joshtronic
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 :)

------
nloa
Would be nice to see Heroku in this comparison.

------
netsec_burn
Why does it say cat /etc/proc?

~~~
joshtronic
was a typo ... updating shortly :)

------
mrmrcoleman
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-
migr...](https://diogomonica.com/2016/12/03/build-once-run-where-migrating-my-
blog-to-hyper-sh/)

Pricing details are here:
[https://hyper.sh/pricing.html](https://hyper.sh/pricing.html)

~~~
petecoop
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
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.

