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

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.

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.

Choose Linode

Choose DigitalOcean

Choose Vultr

Choose RamNode

Choose RoseHosting

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.