Scaleway (subsidiary of Online.net) offers even better value/performance deal than DO/Amazon/Linode. Their offering starts at €2.99/month for 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, 200mbit unmetered cloud server [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/</a>
I want to give a plug for Vultr here. Compared to their competitors, IMHO they're really good and really under-rated.<p>I've had very good performance from their servers, and their 14 datacenters allows you to spread out to regions when you need to. They also charge one of the lowest bandwidth overages, $0.02/GB. Still too high, but industry-wise it's the best you can get for VPSes right now. AWS for contrast is $0.09/GB unless you're a huge company and can get the bulk rates.<p>Vultr also has some basic DDoS mitigation options. They're not the best at mitigation (10Gbps scrubbing, vs OVH which can handle a terabit now), but what they provide is far superior to <i>nothing</i>. If you get a DDoS on the other options, prepare to have your server null routed for days. (And no, the Cloudflare free plan is not real DDoS scrubbing and not an option for me, sorry. I like my SSL terminated on my OS, not someone else's.)<p>My favorite advantage Vultr provides though is that they, unlike all of these other services, allow you to use BGP and your own IP addresses if you have them. I no longer take any hosting providers seriously (including AWS and Google Cloud) unless they can provide this <a href="https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/</a>
I'm surprised the article didn't mention time4vps[0].<p>For about $4.25 you get 2 cores, 2 GB ram, 80GB storage, 2TB transfer.<p>That's over twice the value of anything in this article.<p>Potential catch for people based in US: The servers are in Europe (lithuania), and network speed isn't as great as others I've tried.<p>But if you need something super cheap, I highly recommend it.<p>Their storage is also excellent value (about $3 per TB). Btw, does anyone know other cheap storage providers? Thanks.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.time4vps.eu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.time4vps.eu/</a>
My guess is that especially if you're shopping in the 5$ price range, there's gonna be a much more important factor than some benchmark results: Availability and cost of extra features.<p>For java apps you're probably go for as much RAM as possible (giving Linode the edge here)
OVH.com for example has an S3-like object store or alternatively, physical NAS hardware (amongst a bunch of other extras).
I personally am currently looking to keep the traffic cost at a minimum (DO still doesn't charge for extra traffic but plan to do so in the future [1], Scaleway and OVH have unlimited traffic).<p>Some of the ones I've looked into recently also provide DDoS protection and/or load balancing while others apparently null-route your IP(s) until you can get them on the phone[2] (DDoS protection seems to be a pretty costly feature to offer).<p>Since all of the described (and I guess most of the discussed) services provide fast provisioning, it should be relatively easy to jump ship if you later find out you picked the wrong service.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandwidth-what-will-happen" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465</a><p>A little anecdote:
About half a day after I've started using vultr, I got an abuse message from their SPAM detection system claiming that one of my IPs was sending loads of spam emails prompting me to respond within 48 hours (everything looked like my server was flagged automatically).
The problem was, the time of the incident was about 12hours before I even created the instance in question.
The issue was resolved quickly (there wasn't a lot to argue about after all) and I haven't had problems since, but nevertheless this leaves me wondering whether they (or another provider like them) might end up blocking my account one day simply because I missed an email.
But you can't really expect premium service for dirt-cheap products, can you ;)<p>edit: formatting
The article clearly is showing that Linode has better hardware and general benchmarks, but the Apache benchmark falls short of the rest. Even though it has 512MB more RAM than DO and a slightly better CPU, DO server can do 5,023 requests a second, while Linode is doing 3,285. The time per request being 304ms on linode and 199ms on DO. That seems a lot more important.
Regarding Vultr, did they admit already that they don't have any RAID protection?<p><a href="https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/273/storage-safety-raid" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/273/storage-safety-raid</a><p><a href="https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/773/are-vultr-compute-instances-vci-raid" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/773/are-vultr-compute-i...</a>
Couldn't performance variation on a shared server be due to "noisy neighbors?"<p>(Edit: Assuming that the article doesn't leave out details about how tests were performed, these numbers feel "single data point"-ish to me.)
Aruba is a pretty good deal. <a href="https://www.arubacloud.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.arubacloud.com/</a> - Twice the transfer bandwidth than Linode, otherwise then same and roughly 80% cheaper.<p>€ 1 / mo - 1 Core - Intel® Xeon® E5-2650L v3 Intel Xeon
1 GB RAM - 20 GB SSD Storage - 2TB/month data transfer
Vikings is planning an offer that includes fully floss hardware: <a href="https://vikings.net/" rel="nofollow">https://vikings.net/</a>
I wonder why is <a href="https://prgmr.com/xen/" rel="nofollow">https://prgmr.com/xen/</a> never mentioned in these benchmarks.<p>Years ago it often was, whenever there was Linode there was prgmr, but nowadays not so much.
Some providers, notably Amazon, are tuning some sysctl in a way that usually help benchmarks (that's not the primary purpose of those modifications). For example, increasing default and maximum socket memory usage may help with network related benchmarks. That's the case with Amazon. Providers keeping the default values are put at a disadvantage.<p>On the other hand, ab against a local Apache is known to be totally random.
If you're interested in VPS benchmarks, head over vpsbenchmarks.com [0]. For ~$10 instance, I think VPSDime would be the best deal in term of performance.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/performances/web" rel="nofollow">https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/performances/web</a>
Interesting price scale there on the storage and bandwidth. If you can architect in such a way as to distribute your storage and load, you can get 60% more storage and double the bandwidth by going wide on the $5/mo plan.<p>8x $5/mo plan =
160GB/storage
8TB/transfer<p>$40/mo plan =
96GB/storage
4TB/transfer
You should go with Linode's Frankfurt location for superior network performance.<p>Hosted by SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. (Frankfurt) [0.00 km]: 1.885 ms<p>Testing download speed........................................<p>Download: 1880.39 Mbit/s<p>Testing upload speed..................................................<p>Upload: 443.29 Mbit/s<p>Digital Ocean's most performant location is also Frankfurt.
Their Amsterdam location is ok:<p>Hosted by NFOrce Entertainment B.V. (Amsterdam) [2.18 km]: 4.612 ms<p>Testing download speed........................................<p>Download: 874.35 Mbit/s<p>Testing upload speed..................................................<p>Upload: 352.77 Mbit/s
How about security? As far as I know, Linode has had a few security incidents in the past. I haven't heard anything about the other providers - could be my information bubble though.
It's really a good time to be a hobby sysadmin these days - an $5 server runs my VPN, blog, some mail, another website and serves as a basic fileserver too.
It's very appealing and I know it will sell hearts of many, but I also think that price/performance at scale is what matters to most real customers.
I wonder if companies can make a good enough business selling these tiny $5 boxes alone. Probably not enough to pay for engineering, marketing and such.
What is difference between Linode's "1000Mbps" and DigitalOcean's "1Gbps"? And why "$0.0075/hour" for Linode but
"$0.007/hour" for others even if their monthly prices are all $5?
I used to use Digital Ocean, but now I just ordered a dedicated sever at Hetzner and make my own cloud. I can create VPS on demand for no additional costs with specs I want.
If you need more storage, Delimeter Slot Hosting has a ship-us-your-storage (SSD or HD) for US $10/mo ($120/yr only). 1 GB RAM, 4 TB bandwidth. Disclaimer: I haven't used them, so I'm not sure how good they are.<p><a href="https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/</a>
Don't get me wrong, I love the cloud and I use a couple of the providers mentioned in this article. But I can't help but think the cloud business is a race to the bottom. Seems as though a lot of the smaller providers are all competing on price.
I'm curious about the DO network measurements. Using bbcp, I've managed to push several hundred Mbps up and down for droplets with gigabit uplinks. I was using MPTCP, and some peers were multihomed, but the DO droplets had just one adapter.
I honestly wonder how much resources are spend on people getting one of those boxes and then spending a night running 'benchmarks' off their VM vs what would be the 'regular' (non) usage of the vm.
> Vultr and Lightsail don’t current offer this, but you could also spin up an instance that serve as a self-managed load balancer.<p>My understanding is that you can put an ELB in front of lightsail.
TL;DR: Move from Digital Ocean to Hyper.sh and run the same blog in a container for $3.69 per month.<p>--<p>If you'd rather run you applications as Docker containers take a look at Hyper.sh.<p>Diogo Monica describes the process nicely here: <a href="https://diogomonica.com/2016/12/03/build-once-run-where-migrating-my-blog-to-hyper-sh/" rel="nofollow">https://diogomonica.com/2016/12/03/build-once-run-where-migr...</a><p>Pricing details are here: <a href="https://hyper.sh/pricing.html" rel="nofollow">https://hyper.sh/pricing.html</a>