DigitalOcean vs. Vultr – which is the better VPS?

 

If you’re looking for an in depth comparison of DigitalOcean vs. Vultr you’re in the right place. In this post I’m going to outline the pros and cons of each, provide you with benchmarks and makes my own recommendations.

Let’s get started. What are the pros and cos of Each.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean has been growing rapidly in the past year. They seem to be marketing themselves to developers new to the world of visualization, 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 20GB 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. This can lead to a slow connection. This is also a problem I’ve noticed on Vultr.

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 an 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 compare to a $7 plan with similar specifications at Vultr.

System Specs

RAM	994 MB
HDD	31 GB
CPU Model	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz
CPU Cores	1
CPU Speed	2399 MHz
CPU Cache	15360 KB

UnixBench

UnixBench (w/ all processors)	1408.5
UnixBench (w/ one processor)	1372.3

FIO

Read IOPS	49028.0
Read Bandwidth	196.1 MB/second
Write IOPS	8636.0
Write Bandwidth	34.5 MB/second

Download Speed (100MB File)

Location	Rate
Cachefly	41.0 MB/s
Linode, Atlanta, GA, USA	15.0 MB/s
Linode, Dallas, TX, USA	13.0 MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP	6.22 MB/s
Linode, London, UK	87.6 MB/s
OVH, Paris, France	95.2 MB/s
SmartDC, Rotterdam, Netherlands	74.3 MB/s
Hetzner, Nuernberg, Germany	18.8 MB/s
iiNet, Perth, WA, Australia	1.89 MB/s
MammothVPS, Sydney, Australia	148 KB/s
Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL	58.5 MB/s
Leaseweb, Manassas, VA, USA	10.6 MB/s
Softlayer, Singapore	5.09 MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA, USA	12.4 MB/s
Softlayer, San Jose, CA, USA	2.90 MB/s
Softlayer, Washington, DC, USA	3.70 MB/s

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

 

Vultr

Vultr is still new to the VPS market and I haven’t personally deployed anything with them yet.  Their benchmarks are very impressive and they have functionality some people may find advantageous.

Pros

low cost of Entry

$5 VPS with 768MB of RAM vs. 512 for the $5 VPS at DigitalOcean

Multiple Data centers

At the time of writing Vultr had data centers in Chicago Illinois, New Jersey, Dallas Texas, Atlanta Georgia, Miami Florida, Silicon Valley California, Los Angeles California,  Seattle Washington, Sydney Australia, Tokyo Japan, Amsterdam Netherlands, Frankfurt Germany, London UK, and Paris France

Support for Windows Servers

They offer support of Windows VPSs at an additional cost.

Performance

The performance of the Vultr VPS are Great as you will see when you get to the benchmarks.

Cons

Network

The data connection can be slow at times. This is also a common problem with DigitalOcean as well.

Interface

The interface isn’t as refined as that of DigitalOcean

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.

System Specs

RAM	993 MB
HDD	21 GB
CPU Model	Vultr Virtual CPU 2
CPU Cores	1
CPU Speed	3392 MHz
CPU Cache	4096 KB

UnixBench

UnixBench (w/ all processors)	2250.4
UnixBench (w/ one processor)	2261.5

FIO

Read IOPS	51840.0
Read Bandwidth	207.3 MB/second
Write IOPS	61035.0
Write Bandwidth	244.1 MB/second

Download Speed (100MB File)

Location	Rate
Cachefly	31.3 MB/s
Linode, Atlanta, GA, USA	15.9 MB/s
Linode, Dallas, TX, USA	13.1 MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP	6.13 MB/s
Linode, London, UK	96.1 MB/s
OVH, Paris, France	95.2 MB/s
SmartDC, Rotterdam, Netherlands	67.0 MB/s
Hetzner, Nuernberg, Germany	43.4 MB/s
iiNet, Perth, WA, Australia	2.07 MB/s
MammothVPS, Sydney, Australia	54.2 KB/s
Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL	69.0 MB/s
Leaseweb, Manassas, VA, USA	16.0 MB/s
Softlayer, Singapore	4.48 MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA, USA	11.4 MB/s
Softlayer, San Jose, CA, USA	12.1 MB/s
Softlayer, Washington, DC, USA	19.3 MB/s

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

 

Conclusions

DigitalOceans tutorials are excellent and their platform is aimed more at novices. Vultr offers superior processing power, a larger selection of data center locations and support of Windows servers. There’s nothing stopping someone using Vultr or any other VPS hosting service from reading the excellent tutorials that DigitalOcean has created.

Recomendations

Vultr out performs DigitalOcean in nearly every respect when it comes to their core business of VPS hosting and they managed to do it while costing a little bit less. If you’re just beginning in the world of virtual servers and could use the additional support DigitalOcean’s tutorials are incredibly well written but there’s nothing stopping you form using them on another VPS host.   If I personally had to choose between the two I would go with Vultr. The only reason I’m still using DigitalOcean is because I have a couple of hundred dollars in non transferable credit with them. 

 

Sign up for Vultr

Sign up for DigitalOcean and receive $10 in credit

 

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 managed virtual private servers. CloudWays offers VPS management on top of DigitalOcean’s network. They have plans that start for as little as $5 and it removes the headache of having to manage your own VPS so that you can stick the development without having to worry about keeping your server stack updated.

Try CloudWays Managed VPS

I also keep track of the latest discounts and coupons available for each of the VPS hosting services mentioned in this post.

Here are the links to the applicable coupons

• Vultr coupons and promo codes
• Digital Ocean coupons and promo codes
• Linode coupons and promo codes
• CloudWays coupons and promo codes

 

That’s it for DigitalOcean vs. Vultr. I  hope that you’ve found the information in this post useful.  If you’ve noticed a mistake, have a comment, suggestion, think I’m an idiot or would like a custom recommendation let me know in the comments.  If you would like me to do some benchmarks of the other plans offered by these VPS providers let me know.  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.