$5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr | Hacker News Reader

$5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr

joshtronic.com

482 pointsanaxag0ras151 comments

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]

[0] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/

They offer Atom processors (at least on the 2.99/mo VPS):

link to tests: http://pastebin.com/raw/kfaF7Nas

Pretty bad results compared to the resources offered. I'll just stop now :(

Contemplating moving to Linode now...

As far as the CPU goes, try re-running sysbench with --num-threads=2. Since you get two cores, if your app can take advantage of that, the speed is about the same as the others.

The 200Mb/s unmetered pricing is really incredible.

I have a server moving 20+TiB up and 20+TiB down per month for 2.99€. If I'm reading this right with EC2 pricing I'd be paying 1,750€/month just for the bandwith!

Well, you're obviously costing them money. (I will say that I personally think it's a bit abusive of you - I mean 20 GB would be one thing, but "20+ TiB"... I mean it's like going to an all you can eat buffet and eating 70 whole lobsters. 7 is one thing - but 70?) At least you're giving them free press here. :)

On that note - how are latency and CPU access? Can you run a fast, performant site on it? (If you have actual numbers it would be great, such as ms to serve first page, for example, on an actual install.) Maybe some people here can help subsidize your excesses by hosting their tiny web apps on it... ;) (And knowing that if their site ever does blow up - suddenly spike in traffic - they'll be covered without huge bills.)

I would hope it's not abusive of me, I think I'm using around 136Mb/s of the promised 200. It's a Tor relay so it happily takes all the bandwidth it can get. And I sure am happy to give them free press, it is pretty incredible :)

The CPU on the other hand isn't the beefiest (there are comparative benchmarks floating around), the advantage is probably going to be the predictable latency since it (almost) all runs on bare metal.

I don't understand your numbers. 1 month in seconds is 2,629,743 seconds [1] and at 136 MB/s that is 357 TiB [2] - almost 10 times what you quoted. Are you really averaging 136 Mb/s day-in, day-out?

Also, I'd like to understand this:

>the advantage is probably going to be the predictable latency since it (almost) all runs on bare metal.

Surely you get a VM don't you? How can it run on bare metal while giving you full access to your image? What did you mean by this bare metal remark . . . Thanks!

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=1+month+in+seconds

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=136+mb%2Fsecond+*+1+month

>I don't understand your numbers. 1 month in seconds is 2,629,743 seconds [1] and at 136 MB/s that is 357 TiB [2] - almost 10 times what you quoted

Almost exactly 8 times, as a matter of fact :)

I use Mb/s for megabits/s and not megabytes, so that comes out to a bit more than 40TiB, 20 up and 20 down.

(The 136Mb/s I estimated was a big too high, actually. Here is my bandwidth chart if you're interested: https://i.imgur.com/l1rCeHC.png)

>Surely you get a VM don't you? How can it run on bare metal while giving you full access to your image? What did you mean by this bare metal remark . . . Thanks!

I believe they have their own custom hardware that they manage directly, they spin one up and you run bare metal on one of these with some local SSDs attached. With the exception of, I think, the VPS which is KVM.

Thanks. Right, I just let Google do the conversion (per my footnotes) and didn't think about the bit/byte thing - ooops.

Do you run a web server on yours? Can you check locally what your actual latency is for curl-ing (or wgeting) a page? I mean the actual timestamp difference from your local machine, such as your laptop or desktop. I don't intend to have a lot of traffic but I really, really hate latency. thanks for all this info btw.

No problem! I checked with an apache2 instance on a VC1S in Paris, my ping to it is 25ms and curl from my laptop takes about 90ms.

Hope that helps.

Yes! This is useful. Thank you :)

> Well, you're obviously costing them money.

AWS and Google Cloud want people to think that, so that they can keep selling people McDonalds and charging Michelin prices for it.

Market-rate quality bandwidth is closer to $0.005-$0.015/GB. That's with peering to eyeball ISPs like Comcast and everything. Don't believe me, go to Voxility and crunch the numbers yourself.

Their marketing guys say about it what they're going to say. But under the hood, you tell me if you're getting something different:

http://bgp.he.net/AS20473#_asinfo http://bgp.he.net/AS16509#_asinfo http://bgp.he.net/AS63949#_asinfo

Oh BTW, DigitalOcean's site just resolves to a Cloudflare controlled IP. If they can't successfully run their own servers on their own network, I won't either. You can have a different opinion here, but that's mine. I like to see my ISPs eating their own dog food.

DO DNS is also powered by cloudflare

If I remember right cloudflare outsources theit DNS to someone else as well, can't remember who

No they take outsourcing

Cloudflare's entire business is running their own edge network which combines DNS + CDN + WAF + DDOS protection. They don't outsource this.

At $.005/GB, 20TB is still $100.

That said, they are a business, and it's their job to make their bandwidth policies clear and enforce them. Either they're ok with a few users using tons of bandwidth or they can't be bothered to put in place a clear policy. Either way, it's not the user's problem.

  How much bandwidth do you provide? What is the transfer limit?

  Your server comes with between 200Mbit/s and 800Mbit/s
  of internet bandwidth depending of your server. Checkout
  the pricing page to find the exact value. The internal
  bandwidth is only limited by the speed of your network card.

  There is no transfer limit, transfer is unlimited.

https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/network/

That's the bandwidth policy. I've never had them crack down on me using the bandwidth I'm paying for, never heard anyone else say they've had a problem either

> I like to see my ISPs eating their own dog food.

I have to disagree in part here - No matter what is going on with the ISPs networking etc I want to be able to see status updates. Hosting off-network is great for this.

In DigitalOcean's case they can of course use multiple of their own regions I suppose, but if Cloudflare does the job the box is ticked for me

I don't like to see my ISPs eating their own dog food, because I like my ISPs to be capable of communicating during outages.

I don't care if their status page is off-network, I care if their main web site is. Isn't that just obvious?

This comment actually got me to check them out, so right now I'm deploying 2 bare metal servers and benchmarking them against my DO boxen with interesting results. The SW boxen are outperforming the DO ones at times over 8x in disk IO, and connection to remote servers using vpsbench

They also offer bare metal x86 servers at very affordable prices as well!

If anyone needs something like this, try Kimsufi (OVH brand) [1]. Atom based servers for as low as 5 eur/mo.

[1] https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml

The scaleway bare metal server still have essentially virtualized storage, though, so it's not without its issues.

What virtualization do they use? KVM or OpenVZ?

KVM for the VCS, otherwise bare metal. See their faq.

It gets weird if you would like to pass additional kernel parameters during boot. My hope right now is that this might be possible via their API but not their website.

You can select a precompiled kernel from which you want to boot your system. If you need other kernel features, you tell them so they add these.

Machines boot via ipxi and fetch the kernel. Once kernel is loaded the system is handed off to your rootfs.

You can install Windows on a bare metal machine, if you install a proper hypervisor. I tried it using KVM with Proxmox. I did not try nested KVM.

I have read something/somewhere about Ubuntu MAAS, but I am not sure how this fits in.

Do they require you to send in your documents (drivers license, utility bill, etc)? OVH required I send mine in to pay my next invoice after a few months of paying on time with no abuse complaints (nor doing anything that would generate such). I dumped them in the end :/

(OTOH, I've used one of these type of providers listed in the post for a few years without them demanding my papers so maybe it's just an OVH thing?)

Not as far as I used them. They don't support Paypal though, so you will need to add a credit card.

Oh great! I use credit cards everywhere (including previously with OVH) so no issue on my end. How long have you been with them?

Off and on for a few months. Nothing too extensive.

The support seemed to be okay too, on the basic account (apparently, you can pay a monthly fee to have better support).

Though, considering that their servers run on Atom processors, you might want to reconsider, considering that your needs are.

If you need me to run a test, feel free to message back and I'll quickly spin up a server and provide you the results.

I ended up on Scaleway after OVH led me on with this nonsense as well. For me however, it was when I first signed up. After getting the documents in order (which actually wasn't easy, as it was for my startup and we didn't have much in the way of paperwork), they just had me sitting there waiting and waiting for the server to actually be provisioned. It was very painful. I cancelled - at least the refund process went smoothly.

Ended up on Scaleway, no paperwork, no nonsense, no problems. Love it. I also have a $5 Vultr server and am very happy with it, though it's just not as good value for the price, for my needs.

OVH didn't require hardly anything from me, but they did have a (temporarily?) broken provisioning system where my server that I paid for vanished about 8 hours later, and my billing information was also erased - but my Paypal bill shows I paid.

OVH's customer service and support was beyond useless. I just gifted them the €14 and told them to fuck off since it was clear I would spend hours just for the hope of getting a refund.

Other people on the internet have told their horror stories about OVH, but I chose to ignore those. I guess sometimes the stories are true.

... PayPal chargeback?

They will reply there (probably) much quicker and give you what you bought. If they don't reply then you get your money back.

Tried that, but it was going to take 30 days and I was going to have to prove I had attempted to get the issue resolved with OVH first. Of course I considered doing that until after the first two rounds of emails with OVH support where it seemed they were either answering another user or had a random script program sending responses.

I was annoyed enough that even trying to explain the support communication failures would take more energy than €14 was worth to me.

Were you getting a VAT exclusion with OVH?

Interesting, I have been running an OVH vps for over a year without that. Until I lost my 2 factor auth backup keys and needed them to disable it. Which seems reasonable.

I made the same benchmark: https://gist.github.com/oomathias/175c737c33a1254a28bb4e81e1...

I use Scaleway too but it's different, you have more ram, space, traffic but the perf are not comparable to Linode/DO.

As jsnathan mentioned below, Scaleway's offerings are all multi-core. Sysbench defaults to using only one thread - you need to tell it to use more. (In your case, use --num-threads 4)

Well, if your app cannot use multi-core this is what you get. SSD and memory perf are below too. Since SSD are not local it makes sense.

My site (zorinaq.com) runs distributed instances on 3 of the 5 mentioned providers: Digital Ocean, Vultr, and Scaleway.

I like Scaleway for their lowest price, and it's cool to have a barbone ARM server (which I chose over the x86-64 VPS) for 3€/mo.

I like Vultr because they accept Bitcoin payments.

But overall all 3 hosters are good and reliable in my experience.

I've had a quick look at your site because I'm currently using DO and Vultr with a PeerVPN[0] setup to connect the individual hosts - which brings me to my question:

Is it just a static website or do these instances communicate with each other? If you do, I'd like to ask if you use a VPN to connect them (and which one)?

I'm relatively happy with PeerVPN (with one or two rather minor annoyances that most likely can be solved if I actually spent time on them) but am always curious about alternatives.

[0]: https://github.com/peervpn/peervpn

The site is mostly static, expect the server-side Python code to handle the submission of blog comments. I use no VPN but have automated rsync runs, over SSH, to sync data files periodically. A description of my setup is at: http://blog.zorinaq.com/release-of-hablog-and-new-design/

> I like Vultr because they accept Bitcoin payments.

This. I've been a loyal Linode user for years but recently gone with Vultr for side projects because they accept Bitcoin and had a $5 plan long before.

It seems they are in beta and very hard to find out where their datacenters are

If you refer to Scaleway, they have 2 DC's in Paris and Amsterdam.

That's great and very similar to OVH prices. I host my main site and documentation section and needed something basic without bandwidth restrictions. I never exceed more than 50gb pm anyway but it's a nice to have.

Ovh fits the bill but next time I'm looking, scaleway is definitely getting my business next.

I posted a comparison on the VC1S server on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5uz8c3/5_showd...

Do note the SSDs are mounted via NBD and not local disks.

Cool, Scaleway offers Arch Linux and Alpine Linux. Alpine is a lightweight distro that uses musl, BusyBox, and OpenRC --- not systemd.

All ARM servers though

Nope, they do have x86_64 too, I have one of those.

yeah, just spotted that as well :) some Intel ARK kind of thing. What is the performance like?

Nope: https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/

Which of these would be best suited for a ghost blog. Under 50k visitors a month.

That's really not that much traffic, so I don't think any of them will not be able to serve up so few hits. One of our servers is running on a $40 Linode and served up 186,698 unique visitors, 6,837,460 requests, and 552G of data last week alone and we had no issues with performance (in terms of bandwidth, CPU, memory usage, or disk usage). That Linode is a tad bit beefier than the $5 one, but I doubt you'll run into any issues with 50k visitors on a Ghost blog (which is, from what I saw last year while playing with it, fairly performant and optimized).

If you are going the VPS route, just make sure the provider allows for resizing your instance in case you do end up needing a larger instance.

Linode wins hands down. Check out detailed benchmarks at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/kvm-vps-benchmarks-...

Whichever is cheapest. For something like that these servers are all over-powered for what you need.

I'm sure that's great for Europeans, but having US datacenters and USD pricing is a major feature of DO/Linode. They don't seem to be competitors so much as serving different regions. Latency to Europe is quite significant.

I've found some previous posts about bad customer service at Scaleway:

https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/55kiqc/be_aware...

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/50thne/scaleway_ste...

Can anyone tell how reliable they are?

I had one planned maintenance disruption using their API for a few minutes as well as about 30minutes disruption yesterday solely with their API. I told them about the latter via Twitter. I am not sure if they found this error themselves or if my Twitter post helped them. The status/incident-ticket page was updated after my Twitter post. I don't know how much of these 30 minutes was fixing the issue or just discovering my Tweet. Once they contacted me on Twitter it was fixed in < 5 minutes.

These incidents happened in 6 weeks

Not specific to the service, but I have to thank whoever writes DigitalOcean's tutorials / help pages, they are very well written.

I don't work for DO so I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that they actually pay the community for contributed articles to their knowledge base and tutorials section. This is a brilliant idea (if true).

Yup: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write

Probably really great SEO/marketing value, and quite useful content. Example being annoying stuff like manually configuring an OpenVPN server + clients, DO seems to have 2 out of the top 3 Google results.

Looks like Linode started a similar program at some point: https://www.linode.com/docs/linode-writers-guide/

Totally this. Seriously good documentation on how to set up things for that know enough, but not quite enough. I've used those tutorials for no just my DO instances, but also setting up virtual box linux severs.

Man I have to second this sentiment. When I was first getting into the DevOps side adding "digital ocean" at the end of all of my Google questions always led to me a really well written and concise article complete with copy paste ready shell commands that without fail got me to where I needed to be.

I would love to see an article someday just discussing the inner workings of how Digital Ocean managed/curated this community.

Agreed, I have used several of their tutorials to get things working on my droplet. The tutorials rank high in search and often happen to be exactly what I am looking for (that does not happen often!).

E.g. just this week I used their tutorial to secure nginx with Let's Encrypt which worked perfectly.

Thank you so much for your kind words. We've linked to this thread in our internal slack channel and I know this kind of feedback means a lot to the team. We're really excited about creating useful, approachable content, and hearing about how it has helped others is great encouragement.

If you, or someone you know, wants to join us in this effort, we are both hiring for these roles in the Community Department (https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/) and seeking freelance contributions (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write)

I want to second the praise of DOs tutorial pages. I used to use stack overflow for all my tutorial needs, but I'll always pick DO when I can. Just in case you doubt their value - It's a big part of why I use DO for my hosting needs and recommend you guys to others.

Really well written and easy to use content. Thanks very much for the write up.

I applied for a community role at Digital Ocean and got a generic "background doesn't match" response. Would be great to chat to a real person about if I might fit another role better or what I should focus on if I want to apply again in the future :)

I want to give a plug for Vultr here. Compared to their competitors, IMHO they're really good and really under-rated.

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.

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 nothing. 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.)

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 https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/

I was a fan of Vultr until, after Linode changed their $10 plan to have 2GB RAM, Vultr didn't match it. Beyond $5 it's no longer all that competitive. I guess the same couple be said of DO but I've never actually used them.

One nice thing DO and Vultr has is built-in support for FreeBSD (both) and Windows Server (Vultr). That said, I run OpenBSD, FreeBSD and SmartOS VMs on Linode through a manual install process. The only issue there is password resets through the web UI don't work and backups wouldn't work either.

Here is the guide I used to get FreeBSD working [0], and the others were easy to figure out from there.

[0] https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-d...

Vultr supports autoconfig OpenBSD now (and probably FreeBSD?), you should give that a shot.

But the Vultr $20 plan with 2GB RAM also has more bandwidth and disk space, and 2 CPU cores instead of 1. So I guess it depends on what you're looking for. I still think it's a great deal for what you get.

For standard plans, both Vultr and Linode have 1 CPU core at $10, both have 2 CPU cores at $20, and so on. Up to $80 a month, both companies have the same CPU count, but Linode has double the RAM. Vultr's bandwidth starts out a bit better but is surpassed by Linode as the price tiers increase. Linode's disk space is also a bit more generous.

Were it not for Vultr's current promotion matching the first $100 of funds that new customers put in their accounts, I would think that they seem uninterested in competing.

> I like my SSL terminated on my OS, not someone else's.

This is a good idea for some people. The vast majority of us would benefit from the security of having termination on a host outside of our control and especially away from a public-facing webserver.

Besides, I believe at this point "accidental leak from an engineer" is about 100x more likely than sophisticated hackers.

> The vast majority of us would benefit from the security of having termination on a host outside of our control

To some of us, SSL is more than just something you use to put a fancy lock logo on people's web browsers.

I agree with this so much. I don't know how people can be ok with terminating their SSL in CloudFlare and then sometimes running the plain, old HTTP from the CF to their servers.

Even if you run from CF to your server via HTTPS, I wouldn't trust CF. There is no such thing as free service in this world. They have profit in your data or in your users'.

Free users provide the DDoSes and other malicious traffic CF uses to protect paying customers.

I'm surprised the article didn't mention time4vps[0].

For about $4.25 you get 2 cores, 2 GB ram, 80GB storage, 2TB transfer.

That's over twice the value of anything in this article.

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.

But if you need something super cheap, I highly recommend it.

Their storage is also excellent value (about $3 per TB). Btw, does anyone know other cheap storage providers? Thanks.

[0] https://www.time4vps.eu/

Nothing surprising: they are comparing popular, well-known brands. Of course, there are many other, lesser-known VPS providers with better prices.

Additionally, www.time4vps.eu can't be really compared to DO/Vultr/Amazon, since they use OpenVZ virtualization, so you're getting not a full-blown virtual machine, but a container, running on their kernel. OpenVZ VPS are usually cheaper than KVM/Xen.

They offer KVM as well now!

(Again $4,25 per month).

2GB RAM, 2TB transfer, 40GB storage.

Only one core though.

https://billing.time4vps.eu/cart/&step=3

Funny related story... When I first heard of a KVM switch, I thought KVM was a reference to Linux virtualization. [1] I was a non-techie working at a cloud provider, and virtualization was discussed regularly. I only realized a couple months ago that it a KVM switch was referring to keyboard-video-mouse, which made a lot more sense.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine

Another potential catch is that they will graudually throttle your cpu speed if you load it too much. I guess this is not unreasonable for the price, but they don't mention it anywhere on the site and market it as "guaranteed" or "dedicated" cpu, which is definitely misleading.

If you want a budget vps and willing to do your due dilligence I recommend looking at lowendtalk[0]. If you check out the the customer reviews and the quarterly top provider poll results, you can often find offers comparable to the bigger providers for a fraction of the price. (I'm not affiliated with the forum in any way)

[0] https://www.lowendtalk.com/

That is seriously one awful domain name.

shorthand (redirects) http://t4vps.eu

I think it's more the 4 in the domain as well as "time for VPS". It just feels a little cheap and tacky.

Side note that link doesn't redirect, it just links the main site.

Yeah, it's like those corny Java libraries that end in "4j".

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.

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).

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).

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.

[1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465

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 ;)

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.

Not really, since it's unclear how this benchmark was conducted. It might just be a tuning issue on the kernel side...

True, but thats the thing, the article kind of contradicts itself, because Apache should respond faster.

Regarding Vultr, did they admit already that they don't have any RAID protection?

https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/273/storage-safety-raid

https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/773/are-vultr-compute-i...

probably explains why their disk i/o performance doesn't match Linode or DigitalOcean https://community.centminmod.com/threads/kvm-vps-benchmarks-...

Couldn't performance variation on a shared server be due to "noisy neighbors?"

(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. https://www.arubacloud.com/ - Twice the transfer bandwidth than Linode, otherwise then same and roughly 80% cheaper.

€ 1 / mo - 1 Core - Intel® Xeon® E5-2650L v3 Intel Xeon 1 GB RAM - 20 GB SSD Storage - 2TB/month data transfer

I don't know about their cloud offerings, but I have several "legacy" domains on Aruba and everything about it is terrible. The control panel (which you can only reach by clicking a thousand links from their homepage, all opening in new windows) looks like a website from the 90s, and it has several "hidden" limitations: for example if you change the domain's nameservers (like for Cloudflare) their email service stops working without notice. It might be OK for a cheap shared hosting website, but if you have any advanced need it quickly falls apart.

In addition to that, the legacy offers from Aruba were so incredibly bad that they would really have to pull off some exceptional offer to convince me and use them again.

I mean they used to have shared hosting plans without any DB included...

EDIT: they still do! https://hosting.aruba.it/en/hosting/linux.aspx

Vikings is planning an offer that includes fully floss hardware: https://vikings.net/

I mean: hardware that runs without binary blobs and runs a free BIOS.

I wonder why is https://prgmr.com/xen/ never mentioned in these benchmarks.

Years ago it often was, whenever there was Linode there was prgmr, but nowadays not so much.

Once their system upgrade crashed my Mongo instance and only support they could provide was telling me I should have had backups. They were right but I had to move out.

Well, the tagline on their front page does read "We don't assume you're stupid.".

I'm not calling you stupid, I think everyone has failed to backup something important at one point or another, just saying that the sentiment behind the business seems to be "services provided with minimum hand-holding"

I still remember this problem. To my best knowledge nobody else has ever had data loss after a clean shutdown and no hardware problems.

It sounded to me like it could have been the same problem as this person encountered: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10560834/to-what-extent-... . Based on their data loss after a clean shutdown of mongodb in order to perform a backup, I think the only way we could have possibly saved the data is if we hibernated the system instead of doing a clean shutdown. But I don't know how well mongodb handles sudden time jumps. In general, since time jumps can be an issue, we typically perform shutdowns if a service needs to be stopped for whatever reason.

I hope you ended up with a hosted mongodb service or an MSP with an expertise specifically with mongodb, as mongo seems like it can be very tricky to administer properly if it's not the one thing you do.

Sadly they're hosted on the US west coast. Resulting in not great latency for us Europeans.

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.

On the other hand, ab against a local Apache is known to be totally random.

Bandwidth for lightsail is 1tb, not 5tb like the article says.

Yeah, thats pretty significant mistake

yeah, since been updated... remnant from a previous post.. i'm only human :)

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.

[0]: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/performances/web

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.

8x $5/mo plan = 160GB/storage 8TB/transfer

$40/mo plan = 96GB/storage 4TB/transfer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675969

Just a quick reminder: DO will shut you down, if your servers a hit by 300 Mb/s regularly. Worst host ever.

One of the only providers that didn't close my VPS and Servers under DDoS (IDK if you talk about traffic or DDoS) was OVH. We had them report 100GiB/s on my servers and they just were enabling the VAC filtering [0].

[0]: https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/hoovering-up.xml

Doesn't matter to DO, they will shut you down if it get 300Mbit/s for a sustained minute.

You should go with Linode's Frankfurt location for superior network performance.

Hosted by SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. (Frankfurt) [0.00 km]: 1.885 ms

Testing download speed........................................

Download: 1880.39 Mbit/s

Testing upload speed..................................................

Upload: 443.29 Mbit/s

Digital Ocean's most performant location is also Frankfurt. Their Amsterdam location is ok:

Hosted by NFOrce Entertainment B.V. (Amsterdam) [2.18 km]: 4.612 ms

Testing download speed........................................

Download: 874.35 Mbit/s

Testing upload speed..................................................

Upload: 352.77 Mbit/s

That kind of depends on where you or your clients are located at no?

The first test was inside the DC. Many providers will have different limits on edge routers.

In OVH you get no limit (limitation is your network card) in their own network and set BW/s after edge routers.

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.

This is important. Linode have proven many times to be irresponsible and insecure.

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.

Eveconomy of scale actually adds up pretty nicely I bet, especially if they're smart about resource allocation.

Given 100 people who sign up, I bet only 20 are actively used and only 5 of those are heavy.

Do you run your email server on $5 VPS? That's.. brave. What do you use?

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?

month is usually considered the maximum limit per period

while all of their per-hour rates can go above 5bux a month, you won't be charged more than 5 for the month period

> What is difference between Linode's "1000Mbps" and DigitalOcean's "1Gbps"?

Perhaps 1000 vs 1024?

I think that would only apply to bytes (ex: kilo- vs kibi-) notation, not bits.

No, it applies to both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#Multiple_bits

There are some weird price anomalies at other price points as well for hourly. In my previous posts Lightsail ended up being a fraction of a cent more than the others.

As for the 1GB vs 1000MB, I assume it's as another poster mentioned, 1024 vs 1000.

For things like the overview, I pull that stuff from the hosting companies pricing pages. I assume each company has good reasons for why they price and word things they way they do.

I miss exoscale in that list. Would be interesting to see compared

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.

https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/

Delimiter seems like an interesting option and I haven't seen them mentioned much before. Their S3 compatible storage looks really good too, price wise at least. Anyone else have experience with them?

Have Linode solve their security problem? I heard so much breach about how they store credit card.

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.

Yes I tend to agree, however it's a race providing 55% year-over-year sales growth and 101% increase operating profits. Already it's 10% of Amazons profit[1]. That's a pretty big pie.

1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2016...

It is not Amazon I am concerned about. I don't consider them one of the "smaller providers".

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.

My understanding is that you can put an ELB in front of lightsail.

I'm mind blown that the author says AWS doesn't offer load balancers... wut?

I don't think lightsail (AWS's $5 offering, which is not the same as ec2) supports elbs, though I haven't tried.

yeah, I was speaking more in the context of a out of the box solution like Linode's NodeBalancer and DigitalOcean's recent offering. Nothing stopping ya from spinning up a Lightsail instance and slapping varnish on it though :)

Would be nice to see Heroku in this comparison.

Why does it say cat /etc/proc?

was a typo ... updating shortly :)

TL;DR: Move from Digital Ocean to Hyper.sh and run the same blog in a container for $3.69 per month.

If you'd rather run you applications as Docker containers take a look at Hyper.sh.

Diogo Monica describes the process nicely here: https://diogomonica.com/2016/12/03/build-once-run-where-migr...

Pricing details are here: https://hyper.sh/pricing.html

It depends on how many containers you want to run, if you have a lot of low memory requirement containers then it'd be significantly more expensive on Hyper.sh

Sure, it always depends on the workload. You could also argue that if you want to run applications in containers you'd be better off using Hyper.sh than 'wasting' cycles running your own Docker daemon + scheduler on top of another provider.

If you can describe your workload I'd be curious to do a comparison.

Downvote? Why?

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