DigitalOcean vs. Linode
If you’re reading this you’re probably on the hunt For the best Virtual Private Server (VPS) that you can find and you’ve come to the correct conclusion that it comes down to DigitalOcean vs. Linode.
In this post I’m going to outline the pros and cons of each, present you the benchmarks and hopefully help you come to an informed conclusion. So let’s get started with DigitalOcean vs. Linode.
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean logo
DigitalOcean has been growing rapidly in the past year. They seem to be marketing themselves to developers new to the world of virtual servers and those with an extremely low budget.
Pros
low cost of Entry
The lowest cost server with DigitalOcean is currently $5 for a server with 1 cpu 512MB of ram and 2GGB SSD
Scale Up
The ability to scale an individual VPS up with your requirements.
Better than average performance
I’ve included some benchmarks at the bottom of this article but to summarize DigitalOcean performs better than average in benchmarks.
Multiple Data centers
At the time of writing DigitalOcean has 7 available data centers (of 9, 2 are sold out) Located in New York (2 of 3), Amsterdam (2 of 3), San Francisco, Singapore and London
Easy to use interface
They’ve clearly spend a good deal of effort making their web interface intuitive. Of the many VPS providers I’ve used, their interface is the best.
Quickly deployment of common applications
While setting up your “droplet” (DigitalOcean’s terminology for a virtual server) you are given to option to select one of many common applications. For example WordPress, Drupal, Jumla, lamp stack, lemp stack, magento this allows you to get up and running very quickly.
Cons
1GB Network
Shared 1GB network connection between all VPS on a server.
High network latency
The initial response times for a web request can be 100ms slower than with other VPS providers.
Slower SSDs
The Solid State Drives (SSDs) that DigitalOcean is using on it’s server are slower than some other providers.
Support
Their tutorials are terrific and the support department is generally helpful but isn’t always the most well informed. This could be the result of their rapid growth or it could just be poor training but the support department can be spotty.
DigitalOcean Benchmarks
For the benchmarks I used, the benchmark script provided by ServerBear.com the tests were run on December 24th 2014 on VPS’s located in London for each provider. I chose the 1GB $10 plan for DigitalOcean to compare to the similar $10 plan at Linode.
UnixBench score: 1460.8
I/O rate: 273.0 MB/second
Bandwidth rate: 48.4 MB/second
View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.
Linode
Linode.com Logo
Linode has been around for several years and have recently done multiple upgrades to their network. They have a good reputation and are marketing themselves to experienced developers and corporations looking or lower cost “cloud” providers than alternative such as Amazon EC2.
Pros
Low cost of Entry
The $10 1GB 1 cpu plan maybe be twice the price as the lowest plan on at DigitalOcean but it also offers twice the memory.
Scale Up or Down
Linode offers the ability to scale an individual “node” (Linodes name of a VPS) both up and down as needed. If you’re expecting a holiday rush in November and December you could scale you’re node up at the end of October and then back down at the beginning of January.
5GB Network
Linode offers the fastest network of any lower cost VPS provider. Each server is connected with to a 5GB network and and each data center has a 20GB network connection
Fast SSD
The SSD that Linode is using are faster than those of DigitalOcean.
Multiple Data centers
Linode offers data centers in London UK, Tokyo Japan , Newark New Jersey, Atlanta Georgia, Dallas Texas and Fremont California
Load Balancers
With Linode load balancers as an option.
Server Stats
LongView is the name of Linodes server stats package that you can use to monitor utilization. The free version displays information for the past 12 hours. It very useful in determining if you should upgrade your node or diagnosing any issues that may arise.
Support
The support department seems to be pretty well trained and easily accessible.
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting and hourly system administration are available. A managed VPS is going to cost you $100 per month more than the same package that is unmanaged.
Cons
Low speed CPU
By no means are they slow but they’re significantly slower than some of their competitors offerings.
Less friendly UI
Although offering basically the same functionality the user interface is less intuitive than DigitalOcean.
Deploying applications on new VPS slower
Linode offers scripts that you can use to install most of the same applications that DigitalOcean does but that process is not as quick as easy as selecting the app or stack at the time of deployment.
Higher minimum cost
There’s not $5 option the lowest price VPS is $10.
Linode Benchmarks
For the benchmarks I used the benchmark script provided by ServerBear.com the tests were run on December 24th 2014 on VPS’s located in London for each provider.
UnixBench score: 520.1
I/O rate: 693.0 MB/second
Bandwidth rate: 44.1 MB/second
View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.
Another option
For Raw Power there’s also another option that you may not even be aware of. This past year a new VPS provider offering SSD, multiple data centers and fast cpu’s has launched.
Vultr
Vultr logo
Vultr is still new and I haven’t deployed anything with them yet so I don’t have anything pro or con to say about them. They also have a $5 VPS with 768MB of RAM vs. 512 for the $5 VPS at DigitalOcean. Their benchmarks are also very impressive. If the only reason that you are choosing DigitalOcean over Linode is the CPU benchmarks Vultr may be an even better option for you.
Pros
low cost of Entry
The lowest cost server with Vultr is currently $5 for a server with 1 cpu 728MB of RAM
The servers are significantly faster than either DigitalOcean or Linode.
Cons
Nothing major some of the functionality such as IPV6 support is still in beta and can be a bit buggy.
Vultr Benchmarks
For the benchmarks I used the benchmark script provided by ServerBear.com the tests were run on December 24th 2014 on VPS’s located in London for each provider. I chose the 1GB $7 plan for Vultr to compare to the similar $10 plan with DigitalOcean and Linode.
UnixBench score: 2250.4
I/O rate: 447.0 MB/second
Bandwidth rate: 31.3 MB/second
View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.
Conclusions
DigitalOcean has almost three times the cpu power of a Linode VPS with similar specification however Linode is twice as fast and operations involving disk I/O. Simplified that means that DigitalOcean would be better at anything involving heavy calculations such as complicated database joins or on processing complicated PHP scripts while Linode would be better at serving up static content like images or html documents quickly.
Recomendations
I personally use both Linode and DigitalOcean and have overwhelmingly positive things to say about each of them. Other VPS’s that I use include those with Vultr and RamNode. This site is currently hosted on a $10 Linode VPS but I pan on moving it over to RamNode once my existing credit with Linode is used up. It’s important that you evaluate the requirements of your own applications. I primarily use DigitalOcean and Vultr for development and staging and RamNode or Linode for production. Linode offers better I/O on a superior network their support staff are excellent and if need be are available at an additional cost to help resolve any emergencies that may arise. You should evaluate the resource requirements of your own applications and if you need the extra cpu power Vultr maybe be the best choice for you but only if you are willing to tolerate slower I/O and a slower network. DigitalOcean may be a good middle ground and because of the simplified deployment of applications is an excellent choice to someone new to managing a VPS. I hope that this post has at least helped made a well informed decisions.
use the coupon code “LINODE10” (without the quotes) for $10 credit
Sign up for DigitalOcean and receive $10 in credit
use coupon code “SSDVPS” (without the quotes) for $20 in free credit but it must be used within 30 days
After reading through all of this you’ve decided that you would rather leave the management of you server in the hands of professionals have a look at
CloudWays offers VPS management on top of DigitalOcean’s network
That’s it for my post on DigitalOcean vs. Linode. If you’ve noticed a mistake, have a comment, suggestion, think I’m an ass hat or would like a custom recommendation let me know in the comments. If you would like me to benchmark some of the other plans offered by these VPS providers let me know. If you would like to keep updated periodically regarding new content please join my mailing list by filling out the form in the right side navigation. Thank you for reading.
Great article, Benjamin! However, I’m afraid you are wrong. If you double-check both DigitalOcean and Linode’s websites, you can see that while DigitalOcean offers 1GB/s network, Linode offers 40Gbits. Now there’s a difference between GB/s and Gbit. You can easily find relevant information on Google. As I stated in my article, 40Gbit equals to 5GB/s, and that means that Linode’s network is five times faster than DigitalOcean’s, not forty times.
You can check out my article about Linode and DigitalOcean for further reading: http://www.hostingcomparisons.org/linode-vs-digitalocean-vps-comparison-december-2014/
Happy blogging!
Thank you for pointing that out. I’ve updated my post to reflect the correct 5GB/s.
Great post! When they started marketing DigitalOcean by offering a free month, I was a bit worried of reliability.
Thank you very much for the positivity. I’ve actually found that they are getting more reliable. They’re performance isn’t as good as Vultr though, so I’m using them more for new development projects.
RamNode has a requirement in their AUP that restricts the CPU usage. For example, your server might get shutdown by the provider if you use over 1.0 load over an hour even with a 4-cores package.
It’s a very strange rule and my server got shutdown because of this, so I gave up RamNode and don’t look back again.
It’s not that strange of a rule at all and is how companies offering VPS hosting make money. You have access to 4 cores but they are not 4 dedicated cores they are shared among all of the hosting clients on the same physical server. It sounds like what you actually want is a dedicated server or at least dedicated CPU cores Vultr offers a virtual dedicated cloud with 4 CPU for $120 per month, which is significantly more than the $14 with RamNode for a fractional share of 4 cores. I’m not sure what you were running but for the majority of web servers the CPU usage is close to 0% most of the time with a few spikes during high traffic.
Yikes that’s a bit scary. Have they ever enforced it?
They all enforce it at some point. RamNode now offers something they call “virtual dedicated” which will allow you to used 100% of the cpu’s assigned to your VPS. On the low end Digital Ocean is great but they actually perform much more poorly and cost significantly more on anything that costs $20 or more.