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Comment by sitepodmatt | Hacker News Reader

AWS, Azure and GCP instances are completely different to Linode, DO, Vultr, etc... With the first three you get dependable performance characteristics with minimal variation (excluding t* EC2), this is the exact thing you need to do reliable horizontal scaling. Linode and Vultr and DigitalOcean etc.. are great for the price point but if I'm CPU bound and about to scale the identical service to N boxes then it's a poor choice.

As someone pointed out you have Lightsail if you want Linode/DO from AWS. 3.2.1... lets have cliche AWS/GCP/Azure is ridiculously expensive based on some undefined VPS memory/cpu details, hey virtual core!, and let's not forget the usual HE.net / Cogent / Level3 quote of 10Gig for $2000 and work out real bandwidth from there.. :rolleyes:

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didn't get your last remark re bandwidth. If 1TB alone costs $90 at both GCP/AWS, how is 3TB + 2 CPU instance for $20 is a poor choice?

You're getting 2 (or X) virtual cores - which means absolutely nothing and can vary from minute to mintue / hour to hour - Linode was even giving 8 virtual cores with the cheapest plan 2/3 years ago. Virtual cores on Linode/DO/Vultr are shared/contended, basically undefined in terms of lower bound performance - you are at the mercy of other tenants - and there's a lot more tenants in the building too (where number of tenants is exponentially more than physical cores), so I maintain if your CPU bound and horizontal scaling these are poor choices. The cost of provisioning high performance networking is very real, Linode/DO/Vultr don't expect 98% of their customers to use anything close to 1TB and this nicely fit with the idea that they are poor choice for horizontal scaling - hence why AWS Lightsail isn't a threat to main cloud offerings. If you're just getting start and no where near the limit of single node then fine, I even use Linode for a few clients myself "Bandwidth: 39GB Used, 13961GB Remaining, 14000GB Quota ".

Did you know that DigitalOcean provides "High CPU" droplets?

Interesting, I missed this announcement. This is definitely a step in the right direction to competing for CPU bound workloads. "Achieve up to 4x more CPU performance on High CPU vs Standard Droplets." I guess we can take this to mean that standard droplets virtual CPUs are contended at 4:1 - I would of thought it be higher.

You should also check out Vultr's dedicated core plans [1]. I have ~50 instances running on Vultr and CPU performance / unixbench scores are significantly better than DO and Lightsail's similar sized instances.

[1] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/

Disclosure: PM of High-CPU Droplets @ DigitalOcean

I'd highly recommend people check out the performance of the High-CPU Droplets for any compute-bound tasks like CI/CD, batch processing or active front-end web servers.

Someone from our team put together a comparison of compute series machines which includes GCE and you can see the price-to-performance ratio here is pretty solid for DigitalOcean: https://imgur.com/a/o16t2

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