DigitalOcean VPS hosting

CloudWays Coupons, Promo codes and Discounts

February 1, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

This post was last updated on April 20th 2015

I’ve had many people ask me about coupons, promo codes and discounts for CloudWays managed virtual private server (VPS) hosting. So I thought that I would create a page containing that information.

What is CloudWays?

Cloud Ways managed virtual private servers

For those not in the know CloudWays adds server management on top of Digital Ocean, Amason EC2 and soon Googles “cloud”. Besides standard PHP web hosting they have implemented a software stack so that the following applications will perform optimally.

Magento
WordPress
WooCommerce
Drupal
Joomla
ProstaShop

I’ve contacted CloudWays directly and they’ve informed me that the best deal available is to actually use this big green CloudWays link.

By using this link you can sign up for a VPS managed by CloudWays on DigitalOcean’s “cloud” for as little as $5 per month. That’s the exact same price you would pay directly through Digital Ocean for the VPS without CloudWays management services. It’s a great deal.

Signup for a free 15 day trial with CloudWays

That’s it for this post. I’ll be sure to keep this page updated with the most current coupons, promo codes and discount for CloudWays services. If a coupon that is posted stops working or if you know off a better coupon please leave a comment.

DigitalOcean coupons, discount and promo codes

January 10, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

This page was last updated on May 7th 2015

Digital Ocean Coupons

I’ve been getting a bit of traffic from people looking for Digital Ocean coupon codes and promo codes. More exactly people are looking for “Digital Ocean coupon” and “Digital Ocean promo code”. I thought that I would give people what they want and make this short post. I’ll do my best to keep this page updated with the most recent and best coupon codes and promo codes for Digital Ocean.

If you use the above big green link button along with the coupon code “ALLSSD10” (without the quotes) You should get $10 in free credit after establishing a payment method.

I should also mention that if managing your own VPS isn’t something you want to do, you can actually get a $5 Digital Ocean VPS managed through cloudways for the same price. If you went directly through DigitalOcean you would pay just as much but you would have to manage it yourself.

CloudWays has a free 15 day trial so it won’t even cost you anything if you decide it’s not for you.

If this Digital Ocean coupon expires please let me know and if you know of a better coupon code to use please post it in the comments. If you know of a better coupon for Digital Ocean I would also like to hear about that so leave me a comment.

I’ve also done several comparisons of Digital Ocean with other SSD VPS providers.

Here are the links to those posts.

Digital Ocean vs. Linode

Digital Ocean vs. Vultr

A comparison between Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr and RamNode

DigitalOcean vs. Vultr – which is the better VPS?

January 1, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 6 Comments

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.

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

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.

Digital Ocean vs. Linode – Which virtual server?

December 31, 2014 by Benjamin Knigge 8 Comments

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

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

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

Singn up for RamNode

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 Managed VPS

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.

8 Mistakes when choosing a web host

December 30, 2014 by Benjamin Knigge 1 Comment

8 common mistakes made when choosing a web host

Before I list out some of the most common mistakes people make when choosing a web host I should detail what the common types of hosting are.

What are the basic types of hosting?

Let’s begin with the premise that there are are three basic types of hosting :

Shared
Virtual Private
Dedicated

Shared

With shared hosting everyone is sharing all of the resources of a single dedicated or virtual server if one of the other shared hosting customers on the same server is getting a lot of traffic or running a resource intensive process the performance of everyone else’s web site on the same server is going to suffer the consequences. The companies that sell shared web hosting will often put thousands of websites on the same server. This is by far the most popular hosting option because of the price. Shared hosting is often incredibly cheap however it’s also incredibly unreliable. This may be an acceptable hosting option for a vanity blog or uploading some photos of your kids but it’s unreliable and I wouldn’t want my business to depend on it.

Virtual private server

A Virtual Private Server is usually referred to as a “VPS”. The way that a VPS works is that there is a host Operating System or “OS” that is responsible for managing the communicate with undying hardware for each guest OS that is assigned to a customer. Typically the resources of the server are allocated in different proportions to each guest. For example lets say that the underlying hardware is an 8 core CPU with 8GB of RAM an 80 GB hard drive. There are eight VPS hosted on this server and they each have 1 cpu 1GB RAM and 10 GB of hard drive the possibility of having a bad neighbor that hogs all of the resources is minimized. However many VPS hosting providers will sell that same server as either 8 core cpu VPS with 1GB RAM and then you’re back to having the same bad neighbor problem you had with shared hosting. It can be hard to figure out what you’re actually paying for with a virtual server.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicate hosting is also often referred to as collocated hosting. With a dedicated server you’ve got the server to yourself most of the time you won’t need more than only a few percent of the resources and there’s no one else to share the bill with. If there’s a hardware failure it may take a while to get things back up.

So now that we’ve defined what we’re talking about what are the common mistakes that people make when choosing a web host?

Common mistakes made when choosing a web host.

Letting a domain name registrar host your website.

I’ve never heard of this working out well for anyone and I’ve heard numerous horror stories. I’ll admit that it’s easy and cheap but when it comes to stuffing as many shared hosting plans as possible ( and often time far beyond ) domain name registrars are among the worst offenders. I’ve already mentioned why it’s a bad idea to depend on shared hosting if you’re dependent on your website for either revenue or marketing but to reiterate it’s often slow and unreliable due to the fact that you’re at the mercy of every other website that’s being hosted on the same server.

Choosing a service based on price alone.

Not all hosting is created equal. If you’ve found a hosting package that costs $15 a year it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have any luck getting in contact with the support department if your site goes down at 3 am on a Saturday. If you’re fine with your web presence being slow and unreliable then by all means go cheap. If you would like something reliable, plan on spending between $15 and $30 a month for a moderately low traffic web site with a host with a fully staffed support department.

Paying for services they don’t need

If your website takes up 100MB of disk space and averages around 300 daily unique visitors and is only of interest to people in Boise Idaho looking for a dentist, you don’t need to pay for a 100GB of disk space on an 8 core VPS with with 32GB of RAM and a global content distribution network. The salesman on the other end of the phone line at the hosting company is not someone that should be trusted when it comes to what you should be paying for. Paying too much for hosting is almost as common as paying too little. Spending several times more for hosting for services that you will never use will not result in any better outcomes for your website. At least 90% of you should be spending $15 – $30 a month on hosting. I’m hosting this web site on a $10 a moth VPS with a $2.50 a month backup plan and it’s capable of handling 15,000 page requests per minute. How much traffic your site can handle will depend on what your web site is doing behind the scenes and how it has been configured.

Getting in over their head.

An unmanaged VPS is going to be much less expensive than a managed VPS, but if you don’t know what you’re doing and you are either unwilling or unable to dedicate the time to learn your’re going to end up bring you site down or getting hacked. Be honest with yourself. If you’re not in the business of keeping servers secure and properly configured you’re probably much better off with managed hosting. You may be limited in how you’re allowed access to your server and what you’re allowed to do but that’s the trade off for putting someone else in charge of your websites stability and security.

Choosing a host that’s too small.

A small company may have developed your site but they’re probably not be the right choice to host it. You’re neighbor Jim’s cousin John might be a genius but if the server he’s running in his bedroom closet crashes while he’s away on a two week vacation are you fine with your site being down until he get’s back to fix it? Choose a hosting company that has a good reputation and 24 hour support. If you’re planing on switching call or email them on a weekend nigh and see if you get a response. If you don’t hear from anyone until the following Monday their probably not worth doing business with.

Choosing a host that’s growing too fast.

When a hosting company is providing a good product at a fair price the word gets out and the hosting company can rapidly grow exponentially. This is great if you’re the owner of the hosting company, but can often be bad news for the hosting customers. They’ll need to bring on new employees or overwork the employees they have. The new employees may not have the same level of experience as the employees that were working when the hosting company established it’s stellar reputation. In addition to the employee problems the underlying infrastructure may not be able to handle additional load. Their 1GB connection maybe have been adequate when they were 1/10 the size but now the traffic from 10 times as many servers have clogged their narrow pipe.

Choosing a host that is brand new.

Doing business with a company with a good reputation is much less stressful than a company with no reputation. Mistakes happen and they’re more likely to happen at the beginning, when a company and it’s employees are new.

Choosing a host based solely on performance benchmarks.

The majority of websites don’t need to be hosted on incredibly powerful servers. One marketing ploy is to mention the speed speed of the CPU which is useful when you’re doing many complicated database queries but is almost meaningless when you’re serving up static files. For most websites the hosts data connection speed will be more important to their sites performance than the CPU speed on the server. For example this site is hosted on a $10 a month Linode VPS and is capable of serving up to 15,000 requests per minute because of the way I’ve configured it and the fact that my Linode server has a 40Gbps data connection on a 160Gbps network. The raw CPU power is actually significantly lower than what I can find with other VPS providers but many of those providers servers are only using 1Gbps data connections on a 10Gbps network.

Failure to have a backup

Lastly and it’s not a hosting mistake, so I didn’t count it as one but still deserving of a mention. The failure to ensure that there is an adequate backup plan in place. If something goes wrong and you don’t have a backup you are ultimately the one that will be left to face the repercussions. Get a back up of your site and keep it safe. Make sure that your site is regularly being backed up, and make sure you know what is needed to do in order to recover your site from the backup.

Hosting Recommendations

Personal non-revenue generating

If you’re hosting a family photo album or a blog that generates no revenue and the possibility of a bit of downtime is something you can live with, shared hosting is adequate for your needs but even then I don’t recommend it. A better option would be to use a $5 per month managed VPS with CloudWays. You won’t have any of the headache associated with managing your own VPS and getting everything up and running is painless.

Small business or individual with sysadmin skills

If you are a small business or individual with the necessary server management skills a $10 Linode VPS with the $2.50 backup option is most likely powerful enough for your needs. This is the plan that I’m hosting this site on.
Sign up for Linode

Small business managed hosting

For small businesses or individuals dependent on their web sites for revenue generation or marketing I’m going to recommend a low budget Managed VPS provided by Cloudways. CloudWays adds management and support to a VPS provided by either DigitalOcean or Amazon. You can choose which underlying hosting company you use at the time of registration. With this option you loose a bit of the freedom you would have with a self managed VPS but you gain security and stability. Based on both Price and Performance my recommendation is that you choose DigitalOcean as the underlying VPS provider and the $30 a month plan should be adequate for most small business.

Larger site managed hosting

For larger businesses and sites receiving substantial traffic that need powerful servers and don’t want the headache of having to manage them, I’m going to recommend Linode managed hosting. Linode charges $100 per month in addition per VPS for management. They also offer sysadmin and development services at the rate of $100 per hour.

Raw performance or large storage.

If for some reason you need a lot of raw performance at a low cost or large amounts of magnetic disk storage Vultr offers VPS’s that have both of those bases covers.

Sign up for Vultr
I think that pretty much covers everything there is to say in this post. If you’ve noticed a mistake, have a comment, suggestion, think I’m a jerk or would like a custom recommendation let me know in the comments. 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.

Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. RamNode

December 10, 2014 by Benjamin Knigge 21 Comments

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

SSD cloud VPS comparison
	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.