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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.

7 steps to make WordPress fast

December 11, 2014 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

WordPress logo

By default WordPress is slow. Not a little slow or kind of slow but really slow. WordPress’s slow page load times are costing you money. Whether you are a small business using WordPress as your content management system a blogger making a bit of money from advertising revenue, you should follow these 7 steps that will greatly decrease page load times and increase your revenue.

I’m not going to lie to you and claim that each of these steps is easy but for someone who is fairly computer literate and willing to learn something new you should be able to make it through them with only a moderate headache and well-earned sense of accomplishment. If you would like to forgo the headache you could always hire someone to do the dirty work for you.

#1 Hosting

If you’re using a cheap shared hosting plan you need to stop it now. If you’re making more than $10 a month of your website or if you plan on making more than $10 a month off of your website sign up for a cloud based virtual private server(VPS) with a solid state drive. To be on the safe side you need to plan on spending the greater of $10 or $10 per 30,000 page views per day at peak utilization. (For example. if your site is doing great and you’re getting 60,000 page views per day on averaged but every Friday you update your blog and you’re getting 140,000 page views on Friday you would do the math like this 140/30 * 10 = $46.60) For the vast majority of you that means you should plan on spending $10 a month. If however you were following this very simplified formula and you came up with a number greater than $100 you should hire me or someone else that is qualified to evaluate your hosting needs more accurately. You should also consider setting up managed hosting. Do not take this as an opportunity to try to save a couple of dollars.

Select a plan from either Linode or DigitalOcean. I’ve personally used them both and have had excellent experience with both. As of the time of writing these are the only two companies that I’m willing to recommend. (Full disclosure this site is being hosting on a Linode VPS and if you use one the Linode or Digitalocean links in this article and stay with the service for 3 months, I stand receive a $20 hosting credit.) In addition DigitalOcean will add a $10 credit to your account.

#2 Setting up your VPS OS and software

Once you’ve selected your hosting plan you’ve got your virtual server but you’re going to need to install and Configure the OS and software. I would recommend the latest long-term release of Ubuntu Server. Currently that would be 14.04. it’s relatively simple to install all of the necessary software using apt-get. Installation of the OS should be as simple as selecting the Ubuntu 14.04 from either Linode or DigitalOcean immediately after choosing your hosting package by following the onscreen instructions. Now we’re needing to install the web server. Thankfully DigitalOcean has created an excellent tutorial on how to set up and configure Nginx. Nginx web server is able to serve up pages faster while using less memory than the older and more commonly used Apache web server. After you’ve completed the Nginx tutorial ,You should have a working static website . Now you’re ready to install MySQL, PHP and WordPress we’re going to head back over to DigitalOcean you should be able to skip to step two in this tutorial on how to get WordPress up and running on Nginx.

Edit: for an even easier way to install and configure everything read my post “The quick and EasyEngine WordPress on Ubuntu 14.04”

If you’ve done everything correctly you’re probably exhausted but you should be staring at an empty word press site.

IMPORTANT! You’re now the one responsible for keeping your server secure and updated. I would recommend logging into your server at least once a month and doing “sudo apt-get update” followed by “sudo apt-get upgrade”. You can automate this by following this Ubuntu tutorial. You should also configure a firewall and Fail2Ban.

#3 Move your site to the new server

Install the duplicator WordPress plugin on both your old and new server. Follow the directions provided by the plugin to backup everything from your old site then copy the backed up files over to your new site and restore them. You should now have a copy of your site on your new server. One last thing for this step disable any plugins that you have installed that you are not using.

#4 Install Smoosh.it

Install the Smoosh.it wordpress plugin. Smoosh.it will optimize your images making them smaller files that download more quickly. You can even use it to batch process the existing images on your site.

#5 Install and configure WP Super Cache

Install the WP Super Cache plugin and select the “Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files” and the “Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors” options under the advanced tab. This is the step that will result in the greatest increase in server performance. Instead of each page request needing to be generated by PHP on each page request a static version of the page will be generated on the first page request. For a period of time (3600 seconds by default) a static and compressed version. will be served by Nginx. Nginx is very good at serving static files quickly and you’ve now turned WordPress into a static file generator.

#6 Install WP DB-Manager

Install WP DB-Manager and use it to optimize and repair your DB. You should use this plugin to schedule the database to be Optimized and Repaired at least once per Month. If your site is frequently being updated and many comments are being posted you should schedule this to occur once per week.

If you’ve made it this far you’re doing great. Your WordPress site is on your own new VPS and should be amazingly fast but there’s still one more step before your site is live on the new server.

#7 Set up a Free CloudFlare account

Sign up for a free CloudFlare account. Cloudflare is a content delivery network CDN. The way cloudflare works is that you use them to manage your DNS records. You’ll need to log in to your domain name registrar to update your name servers. Then when someone makes a request to your site they send that request to the closest server on their network which has a cached version of your site which it then serves to the requester. This results in a much quicker response time for the end-user and significantly less load on your VPS. Their free service is fast but they offer an even faster paid service with additional functionality.

You’ve done it! You’re WordPress site is now incredibly fast. If you’re still in the need for greater speed many WordPress templates make way too many requests to external js and css files and should also be optimized.

If you need a great virtual server host for your WordPress site I highly recommend that you
Sign up for a Linode SSD VPS

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

I’ve been a bit brief in some of my descriptions on how to make WordPress Fast. If you have followed all the steps in this tutorial and you’re having an issue or need further details, please ask a question in the comments and I’ll update the article to address your concerns.

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.

Pros

low cost of Entry

Better than average performance

Multiple Data centers

Easy to use interface

Quickly deployment of common applications

Cons

1GB Network

High network latency

Slower SSDs

Support

DigitalOcean Benchmarks

System Specs

UnixBench

FIO

Download Speed (100MB File)

Pros

low cost of Entry

Multiple Data centers

Support for Windows Servers

Performance

Cons

Network

Interface

Vultr Benchmarks

System Specs

UnixBench

FIO

Download Speed (100MB File)

Conclusions

Recomendations

Pros

low cost of Entry

Better than average performance

Multiple Data centers

Easy to use interface

Quickly deployment of common applications

Cons

1GB Network

High network latency

Slower SSDs

Support

DigitalOcean Benchmarks

Pros

Scale Up or Down

5GB Network

Fast SSD

Multiple Data centers

Load Balancers

Server Stats

Support

Cons

Less friendly UI

Deploying applications on new VPS slower

Higher minimum cost

Linode Benchmarks

Another option

Pros

low cost of Entry

Cons

Vultr Benchmarks

Conclusions

Recomendations

#1 Hosting

#2 Setting up your VPS OS and software

#3 Move your site to the new server

#5 Install and configure WP Super Cache

#6 Install WP DB-Manager

#7 Set up a Free CloudFlare account

Comparing SSD cloud VPS hosting providers can be difficult

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