Comparing SSD cloud VPS hosting providers can be difficult
A virtual cpu core at one hosting provider won’t be equivalent to a virtual cpu core at another host or even another virtual cpu core at the same host depending on the specifications of the underlying hardware and the underlying hardware’s utilization at the time of comparison. I’ve seen both Vultr and RamNode mentions along with the cloud vps start-ups Linode and DigitalOcean and I thought that I would do a quick comparison between them all. For the record I use all four of these VPS hosting companies and wouldn’t have a problem recommending any one of them. (This site is currently hosted on a $10 per month Linode VPS and if you use one the links in this article and remain a happy customer I stand to receive a hosting credit for referring you.
I’ve tried to do a basic comparison of the low cost plans at 3 price points, that I feel most independent web developers would be most interested in.
One at the lowest cost available from each one of the 4 companies compared.
- Lowest cost available
- $10 – $15 with backups if available
- $20 – $25 with backups if available
| Lowest monthly plan | $10-$15 | $20-$25 | |
| Linode | cost: $10Ram:1GBvirtual cores:1
Disk: 24GB Bandwidth: 2TB |
cost: $12.50($10 + $2.50 for 4x backup images)
Ram:1GB virtual cores:1 Disk: 24GB Bandwidth: 2TB |
cost: $25($20 + $5 for 4x backup images)
Ram:2GB virtual cores:2 Disk: 48GB Bandwidth: 3TB |
| DigitalOcean | cost: $5Ram: 512MBvirtual cores:1
Disk: 20GB Bandwidth: 1TB |
cost: $12($10 + 20% for backups)
Ram: 1GB virtual cores:1 Disk: 30GB Bandwidth: 2TB |
cost: $24($20 + 20% for backups)
Ram: 2GB virtual cores:2 Disk: 40GB Bandwidth: 3TB |
| Vultr | cost: $5Ram:768MBvirtual cores:1
Disk: 15GB Bandwidth: 1000GB |
cost: $15Ram:2GBvirtual cores:2
Disk:40GB Bandwidth: 3000GB* (*for servers in the USA & Europe) |
N/A(next price point is at $35) |
| RamNode | cost: $1.25($15 billed annually)
Ram: 128MB virtual cores:1 Disk: 12GB Bandwidth: 50GB |
cost: $14Ram: 2GBvirtual cores:2
Disk: 80GB Bandwidth: 3000GB |
cost: $21Ram: 3GBvirtual cores:2
Disk: 100GB Bandwidth: 3500GB |
At this point I think it’s important to note that RamNode isn’t offering the same type of service that Vultr, Linode and DigitalOcean are providing. RamNode can be more closely compared to traditional VPS provider as they lack, hourly billing, with only a monthly billing option available and also fail to provide an API for integration.
Let’s take a look at some benchmarks that have been provided by vpsbenchmarks.com
CPU utilization
Here we have the average CPU utilization this can give you a general idea of how each virtual CPU at each VPS provider actually performs. The reality is , It doesn’t really matter how many or how fast the virtual CPUs are assigned to your VPS. If they’ve been over allocated multiple virtual CPUs rated at a high speed may not perform as well as a single slower rated CPU that hasn’t been over allocated.
In this test DigitalOcean performs the worst, with Ramnode having the best performance. I wouldn’t categorize any of these servers as performing badly.
response time (lower is better)
This shows the average response time when making a request for a page on each VPS. Response time is a pretty important metric when it comes to web servers. Slower response times means that your users will have to wait longer and are more likely to lose interest and leave. In this test DigitalOcean didn’t perform very well when compared to the others but that’s only because the other VPS providers are performing exceptionally well. Vultr’s results are really outstanding.
If you head over to vpsbenchmarks they include a lot more benchmarks, reviews and other details regarding these four VPS providers as well as many others.
You can also check out the benchmarks over at ServerBear.com for a second set of results.
For many applications raw performance is what’s most important for other applications such as a website, network reliability and IO speed may be more important than raw cpu power. In this area both Vultr and RamNode perform exceptionally.
With DigitalOcean you can scale an individual VPS up but not back down again while with Linode you can scale and a single “node” up and then back down. Linode also has managed hosting as an option. They both have excellent support and the tutorials that DigitalOcean have been putting out are excellent.
In conclusion who you choose between these four VPS providers really depends on you and your application.
If you want the absolute lowest cost SSD VPS or getting the most performance for your dollar spent is the most important and you don’t want or need the ability to quickly resize your VPS or bring new servers online via an API RamNode is the way to go.
If you like the idea of quickly bring new instances on and offline with hourly billing either via the web gui or API with excellent performance and a low latency network or if you need to host a windows VPS, provide your own ISO or install CPanel Vultr is probably the right choice for you.
If you want the ability to easily and rapidly scale up but you only have $5 budget during development or you want a service that provides excellent documentation DigitalOcean would be the perfect fit.
If you want the ability to scale up rapidly or up and down on the same VPS and are willing to spend at least $10 a month for slightly better performance than Digitalocean go with Linode.
I’m personally using Linode currently for this site although I plan on moving everything over to RamNode once my existing credit is used up with Linode due to the dramatically better performance with RamNode. I’ve also set up clients sites at DgitalOcean and Vultr with Vultr offering both better performance and more memory for low end $5 VPS.
Staying on top of the management of a virtual server can be both time consuming and frustrating. If VPS management isn’t something within your skill set I would highly recommend using a managed VPS. A managed VPS will cost significantly more than a self managed VPS but you won’t have to worry about keeping the software updated, truncating log files or process monitoring. All of that ends up costing a bit more but you’ll feel a lot less stressed when something goes wrong at 3 am on a Saturday morning. For Managed VPS hosting I highly recommend RoseHosting. A Managed VPS that is more than adequate for a typical small business website with RoseHosting is going to cost just under $40 per month for hosting. Just give them your requirements and they’ll set everything up so that it meets their requirements. Although they state that they will make their best effort to configure your VPS to your requirements in their service agreement, the last time I spoke with their support department they told me that as of now they’ve never failed to configure a server as per a clients specifications.
Everything is subject to change and what was true at the time of writing may not be true tomorrow.
I hope you’ve found this information useful. Here are the links to each of the virtual private server hosting companies that I mentioned in this post.
I also have a pages with coupons, promo and discount codes for each of these services that I update frequently. You may be interested in taking a look if you’re planing on giving one of them a try. Rather than post the coupon codes here and potentially forget to update them in the future it makes more sense to link out to the coupon page and I’ll update them there as needed.
That’s it for this post. I hope that you’ve found this information helpful in your quest to choose a decent VPS host. If you have anything you would like to say on the topic please leave me a comment. If you would like to stay informed regarding the latest posts, please fill out the big black box on the right hand navigation and join the OdinSQL newsletter.
I’ve been benchmarking all 4 plus EC2, Google Compute engine, Vpsdime and Azure at vpsbenchmarks.com. They’ve all been reasonably stable, I only had some significant stability problems at Linode more than a year ago before they introduced their SSD plans and more recently once at Ramnode with a 30 minutes outage.
It’s easier to differentiate all of them in terms of features as you did or in terms of performances. Regarding performances, you can find real world comparative data for all of them at http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare.
It looks like you’ve put a lot of work into this. Would you mind if updated the post by adding some screen caps of your benchmarks for these 4. I’ll attribute them to your site and link back to you.
Sure. Go ahead.
Great review. Thanks for the info.
I think you all will need to expand these VPS providers and include a wide variety of offerings from OUTSIDE the continental USA.
The word on ‘Tech Street’ overseas is that NO ONE wants to bother hosting in the US any more thanks to NSA snooping that Snowden highlighted. I predict Iceland, Switzerland and other ‘safe havens’ will pick up more hosting business.
This is a BIG problem and at stake is billions of dollars in the future.
If my clients are outside of the U.S., it would be unethical for me to serve them up from a US data center. This is going to have huge ramifications in 2015 and beyond.
Just my 2 cents.
One bright spot…
A big advantage with US hosting are (generally) cheaper rates compared to Europe.
Linode, DigitalOcan and Vultr all have servers available in Europe and Asia as well as USA. Ramnode has servers in the USA and Europe. The prices are exactly the same if you choose a European based server or USA based one.
As far as protection from snooping goes, I don’t think that will it will matter much. The NSA snoops on all of the traffic on the underwater fiber cables and Most European countries will give them anything they ask for.
Edit: your question inspired me to write another post just on the topic of VPS hosting in Europe. Here’s the link
chunkhost review please? 🙂
Anyway for super cheap I’d still go with DO over ramnode, only because you can get a KVM box cheaper, and add your own virtual swap RAM [I don’t think you can do this with an openvz container]. Though the ramnode boxes are faster…
I took a look at ChunkHost and didn’t see any information regarding where their datacenter(s) is located or anything about their network. There are hundreds of companies offering VSP hosting and I don’t plan on reviewing most of them. If there’s a bigger company with multiple data centers I’ll try to take a look when I have time. As for RamNode they offer both Openvz and KVM virtualization. RamNode’s KVM standard VPS have the same specs and price as DigitalOcean’s but RamNode significantly out performs DigitalOcean. If I only had one VPS and didn’t need hourly billing I would definetly be using RameNode.
Benjamin:
Can you elaborate on RamNode outperforming DO? In what aspect? How did you measure this?
It’s in the charts on this page. DigitalOcean has less CPU power, slower IO and higher network latency. Their performance isn’t bad but it’s the worst of the four VPS hosts mentioned in this post. I’ve used the benchmarking script at serverbear.com.
Here’s a post I made containing some of the benchmarks I did on DigitalOcean and Vultr. https://odinsql.com/2015/01/digitalocean-vs-vultr-vultr-vs-dgitalocean/
I haven’t tested RamNode as extensively due to the lack of hourly billing and not wanting to spin up multiple instances billed by the month. I would recommend taking a look at severbear’s benchmark archive for more thorough RamNode benchmarks.
I’ve moved any new development over to Vultr since they offer more ram and faster CPU performance for $5. I still have this site hosted with Linode but I plan on moving it over to RamNode once my existing credit with Linode is used up.
Vultr does seem to have pretty good specs relative to DO. However, ramnode KVM, at the $5 price point you can only get 10 GB storage [compared to DO 20GB] or $7 for 60 GB storage SSD-cached [dual cpu]. So assuming you need the storage, and the RAM, there is no equivalent $5 ramnode offering. If you are willing to go to $7 or don’t need as much storage or RAM, then Ramnode is probably better [I’m aware their network and disks are faster, it’s all about that extra $2 for me LOL]. Also DO offers auto-backups [ramnode doesn’t] which is convenient, though costs an extra 20% [$1/month]. Hope that helps explain my initial comment better. Or maybe there is a coupon that can make it equivalent? Haven’t checked. Vultr does look nice too. Cheers!
Vulr is beating the pants off of DigitalOcean at every price point in benchmarks. I think I’m going to be moving this site over to RamNode once my existing existing credit with Linode is used up. RamNode offers the best performance but lack many of the “cloud” features that the other three offer such as hourly billing and the ability to take snapshots and clone a VM. Linode has a fast network but they haven’t been accurately tracking referrals that I’ve made to them and despite my numerous requests this doesn’t seem like it’s an issue they are willing to resolve. If they’re not willing to honor their referral agreement I’ll stop sending traffic their way.
I have used both of them and I can’t say anything bad about the 2. I use it for a NGINX webserver (7 websites with 100.000 pageviews/month together), a teamspeak server, and some hoby scripts (python,…).
Digitalocean has a great GUI to manage your Droplet (this is how they call your VPS), linode has a depreciated GUI, but they have an android/iOS app.
If you are a student you can get 100 dollar for free via the github student bundle. If you are not a student you can use this link where you get 10 dollar for free:
https://r.odinsql.com/digitalocean
When I go here: http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare
It shows that RamNode outperforms Vultr in response time. How did you come up with that chart?
They outline their methodology on the homepage under “how” http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/. Basically they host their website on VPS from different providers and then log different performance metrics. Both RamNode and Vultr perform consistently well.
hi
what is exact mean by hourly billing. Suppose I want to send newsletter weekly once. Can I upgrade plan for 2-3 hours and send mails and then come back to low plan. And the bill will be calculate 2-3 hours for upgraded plan
You can lease a VPS for a single hour if needed usually only for a few pennies per hour. I would highly recommend that you NOT try to send emails out via a VPS. Use a service such as MailChimp and you will have much better delivery rates.
I’m using ramnode to host one of my websites, until now works perfect. Raport price/quality is one of the best.
Does any of them (Linode or DO) offer cPanel for their VPS servers?
If you must use cPanel you can install it on any of their VPS, although if you need to use cPanel you probably shouldn’t be hosting and managing your own VPS.
You should add a way to dismiss the popup icons on the left hand side of the page (the popups that have the links to Google+, Twitter, etc). Because I couldn’t dismiss the popup, I found it awkward to read your article and ended up skipping most of it as a result.
Were they overlaying the content? What browser, OS combination are you using? I’ll look into it if they’re causing an issue.