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Featured / reviews / VPS

DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Wable : A low end cloud vps comparison

If you have been reading my rants you should know that some time back I finally made the move from shared hosting to vps’s. My first host was DigitalOcean, followed by Vultr and now I am trying out Wable, the newest kid on the block.
Now, before you start getting all ‘matter of factly’ I will state that I know this comparison is not exactly fair as Wable is openvz based while both Vultr and DigitalOcean are KVM. Still, I feel that as they are all relatively new, low end cloud based services, they’re all worth a look at.
This comparison was done by utilizing the following tools.
  • Unixbench
  • A custom bash benchmark script.
  • dd
  • Official Website of each respective site for pricing and whatnot

The metrics I will be using are

  • Price (value per dollar)
  • Upload Speed
  • I/O speed
  • CPU Performance
  • HDD Capacity
  • Extra Features

Vultr vs DigitalOcean (vs Wable).. let the fight begin..

First up DigitalOcean, they have been around for some time now and out of the three, they feature the most features, (private networking, snapshots, automated backups and a custom api for those who love scripting their own interfaces for stuff). While I will display screen shots of all benchmarks below, I will summarize and state that they had the lowest performance. I guess with all those free extra features you lost some of that hardcore baremetal performance.

Still, for enterprise customers looking for a cheap (and stable) service for their IT staff to develop on, with the plethora of features that DO (DigitalOcean) offers (especially private networking) it would be best suited to sit in the lap of the enterprise client.

Next up Vultr, this is a relatively new company (at the time of writing, it’s only been a month or two since they have been open to the public.) And I must say their service is exceptional. Like DO they offer KVM’s and their machines are ready in under a minute. Featurewise, while they don’t have the list of stuff I mentioned for DO above (except a custom api), but they recently added custom ISO’s which is a huge plus for people who want to run those os’s scraped from the dark depths of the Internet.

Performancewise Vultr blows everything out of the water with benchmark scores you would only see in VPS’s 10x it’s price. Since its inception they have been rolling out features one after the other and I would not be surprised if in a few more months they catch up to DigitalOcean in pure feature count.

For the tech enthusiast I would highly recommend Vultr and with their current promotion of doubling your first payment… The value is incredible. (I have personally loaded 100us and haven’t regretted a second of it).

Now Wable, truthfully, Wable is only here in this battle against giants because of its price. Currently for $8 you get 3 CPU’s 2GB RAM and a 50GB SSD

Also, it’s structure is unique… You don’t buy single vpses nor do you spin up kvms and pay per minute. Instead every month you pay for resources. And with those resources you can do practically anything with em. For instance the $8 plan comes with 3 cores and 2gb of ram…. With that I can either spin one machine with all the specs, make three tiny machines or anything in between. Also, IP addresses. Dear god they give you IP addresses like they grew on trees (24 of em for $8). And not ipv6 no… They give ipv4… Crazy right?

For them, when it comes to performance… It’s hard to explain… Core for core, Vultr has it beat hands down… But since for $8 you get 3 cores unlike 1 for both Vultr and DO.. you actually get better dollar for dollar benchmark performance. Unfortunately it uses openvz so it’s very limited when it comes to features.. I’d only recommend wable for someone who wants a ton of tiny machines each with a different ip addresses. While the average wable machine has the potential to be the most powerful of them all…. I am a bit skeptical, and will wait a few months before putting anything critical on their servers.

CONCLUSION: So.. who to go with? thats a simple one… if it’s a corporate or mission critical application.. use DigitalOcean for reliability and pure feature count, if not go Vultr (my personal favorite) for beast performance at a lower cost and a super active development team… as for Wable… lets give them a few more months and see whats up…

UPDATES:

  1. DigitalOcean now has a promo where you get $10 free to try em out with the coupon 2014SSD
  2. Vultr now Supports Snapshots. (Still in beta and no automatic backups yet) (May 22 2014)
  3. Vultr adds startup scripts feature to let you customize vm on first boot (June 09 2014)
  4. Vultr added Private Networking with unlimited transfer between servers  (July 08 2014)

POLL:

In the end, it’s still your decision, the following are poll-esque links which I will be using to track the popularity of each and report here a bit later on…

Vultr: I need speed!! | DigitalOcean: Stable and Rock Solid for me | Wable: Did you say 24 IP Addresses?

 

0

Featured / reviews

Bluehost vs Hostgator.. a 2014 Review

For years now I’ve been using shared hosting for a variety of websites, and while I’ve recently jumped on the vps/cloud bandwagon I wanted to compare those two hosts who served me faithfully for quite a few years now.

The plans I will be comparing here are Hostgator’s Baby and Bluehost’s standard plan. Each of these give: ‘unlimited’ storage, bandwidth, databases and domains. A shared ssl certificate and essentials such as ssh and ruby/python.
(Note. Hostgators ‘Hatchling’ plan, while cheaper does not let you have more than one add on domain so it was not chosen for this comparison)

A Brief History: my first ever shared paid host was Hostgator and I stayed with them for about a year. (Baby plan of course). The only reason I ever switched was because I was paying month to month and it was pretty much $10 each month.. and as my sites were not yet making any profit.. That was just crazy talk. When I saw that bluehost was offering 3 years for 4.95 a pop there was no way I could not jump on that deal.

Now over a year later, I am back on Hostgator mainly because I saw a great deal (that rare 50% off coupon I told you about) and jumped on it.

COST: when it comes to pure dollar for dollar value, Bluehost comes out on top. No matter when you register, the price of 4.95 (using this link of course) is pretty hard to beat.

Hostgator’s baby plan is initially 6.36 but, a few times a year (labour day, black Friday etc) it does have a 50 percent coupon.. But it’s usually only for 24 hours and you pretty much need to be on their mailing list to get it on time. Of course I will always be on the lookout and will post any codes I learn about here. Until then you may use this link for 20% off.

Winner: Bluehost

PERFORMANCE: In general, they are both pretty snappy overall with Hostgator having a slight edge in the cPanel area (a lighter experience), while Bluehost gives better website performance. How did I test? I used loadimpact as well as a custom written shell benchmark script… If you won’t want to take my word for it.. ill attach the results below.

A small thing to note is that Bluehost saw a degradation in performance after 60k files or so, I never had that manyon hostgator so I wouldn’t know how it would handle it.

SUMAMRY: I did not bother compare features as they are both pretty equal, so are their customer service. Only main difference would be Bluehost has an anytime moneyback guarantee while Hostgator has a 45 day guarantee.

If I had to choose one shared host to stick with until the end of time… I would definitely at this point choose Bluehost… with better price AND performance.. why choose otherwise? plus.. have you seen their datacenter?