VPS Benchmarking – Cloudfanatic, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr
blog.aawadia.dev
blog.aawadia.dev
The machine on one provider might be experiencing more load than a similar machine at a different provider, biasing the results.
That being said, Vultr has been good for our purposes.
Uhh, a statement like this somewhat hurts the ability to trust the other claims of the benchmark. Sure, Linode has the lowest clock speed, but you're comparing Epyc Milan which is almost a decade newer than the Sandy-Bridge EP of Cloudfanatic for example. Unsurprisingly, this is even reflected in the one cpu benchmark run, geekbench, which Linode comes first in.
Why?
> Sure, Linode has the lowest clock speed, but you're comparing Epyc Milan which is almost a decade newer than the Sandy-Bridge EP of Cloudfanatic for example.
Sure, but also take into consideration that the Linode instance costs $48/month while the Cloudfanatic one costs $18/month. Both of them have the same amount of CPU cores too.
Seems like this is a Linode problem of offering old hardware, instead of a problem with the benchmark itself.
Linode has the newest hardware, and the highest single- and multi-core speeds despite the lowest clocks. Mentioning the higher clock speeds instead of the benchmarks is pointless and very misleading.
I’m not the GP, but I agree with the sentiment.
Clock speed alone is a spectacularly bad metric to use for a summary result regarding relative performance of different CPUs.
If one wants to assess performance on a workload of integer addition/subtraction with a linear chain of data dependencies on a working set that fits in the L1, then sure, clock speed will correlate strongly with performance (in practically every metric other than maybe power).
On the other hand the performance of a lot of real-world workloads will be influenced by things like the number of execution units per core, the types of operations they perform, the throughput of various instructions, the specifics of the front end (e.g. assuming x86/CISC, the types of uops; the size of the BTB; the branch-prediction algorithm), the size of the various caches (TLBs in addition to I$ and D$), the specifics of the coherency protocol, the memory bandwidth, etc.
All that to say that CPUs should be compared by benchmark results, not blind comparisons of clock speed, and so to quote clock speed in a summary might lead one to question the rest of the results.
To add on to what denotational wrote, an assertive and wrong statement on the cpu performance also implies they didn't research too in depth before running the benchmark, so it casts doubt on if they controlled for other factors in their test too. Like for the disk test, did they take care to ensure all the VPSes are running the same filesystem? Do any of the providers make you choose between directly attached storage and network block storage? etc.
Hertzner is pretty great
Hetzner is pretty terrible.
They blackholed my server right when things were starting to hockey stick and took until the following day to unlock it. I lost a ton of users to a full outage while I had an unplanned migration to AWS.
When they finally unlocked my server their tech responded to my ticket begging them to unlock my server with an extremely condescending “It’s unlocked but I’m certain you’re not in control of this server”
Anyway, never again. I’ll pay a premium for stability and intelligent support staff and systems that don’t automatically blackhole your server.
[1] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/blob/94304819263b0553...
Not a good company if you’re relying on it for anything important
Really rough when you get rug pulled by your provider.
I've read about lots of other users who have as well. Can't exactly poll their users.
Other providers have been fine for me.
Would appreciate some more voices on noisy neighbors at hetzner though as that's always the bigger problem of VPS than the promises they make
Most VPS providers rent rack space at large colocation facilities in multiple cities. In some cases they locate right next to major peering points for very good peering and very cheap bandwidth.
Vultr in particular is massively underrated and is certainly good enough to use in production.
One caveat though: most of these providers don’t handle sanitization of storage or encryption at rest as thoroughly as the big clouds do. I’d recommend handling your own encryption at rest with these if you have sensitive data. See: Vault, LUKS, etc.
See other child comment above. Faster to use AWS S3 instead of trying to fix it (IIRC can't set the endpoint url or something, which is required for Spaces). :shrug:
Some examples of things that I used the S3 compat for that worked just fine:
- terraform backend
- velero backups
- log store for prometheus/promtail
- docker pull through cache
There are additional interop things like Apache Spark <--> Spaces that don't work like Spark <--> AWS S3 (endpoint URL config issue which I lost the will to sort out as it was quicker to just use AWS S3 :shrug:).
That’s why you’re paying so much for AWS.
Never heard of them running on other providers though.
Surely that would a problem for all of the compliance e.g. HIPAA, FIPS ?
Its crazy to me how many smart people don't realize they are only looking at the most expensive options out there.
It's like thinking the Ferraris and Porsches are your only two options for getting from point a to b