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?

 

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18 Responses

  1. Jason says:

    I’ve been with Vultr a few months now and I have no regrets. The customer support is great. They really aim to please. Also, they’ve added a snapshot feature now.

    • Petronald Green says:

      Agreed.. most of my sites (including this one) are hosted on vultr… So far, no complaints and their service is exceptional

  2. gms says:

    I use them both and I was thinking to migrate all my servers at Vultr. But when one of my vultr servers hacked from an elasticsearch vulnerability, vultr just locked my server out without telling me anything about the problem or give me a chance to get my data back.
    At the same time one of my DigitalOcean’s servers got hacked with the same problem. They also locked my server, but DigitalOcean support team told me about the elasticsearch vulnerability, they told me how to fix the problem and they offer me a recovery ISO of my locked server. They made an Arch Linux virtual server so I could mount the recovery ISO and take all the data I need.

    After that, I changed my mind about DO and Vultr. Vultr is faster for sure. But they lack support. I lost all my data at Vultr. On the other hand, I didn’t lost anything at DO. They told me about the problem, they told me how to fix it and they gave me a backup of my server to save my data. They also gave me a link with step by step instructions about the rescue procedure.

    So, Vultr is faster but lacks of support. If you want a server to play with go at Vultr. If you want a production server than DigitalOcean is slower but a much much safer bet….

    • Façade says:

      Yup, same point I was trying to bring accross…. DIgitalOcean is perfect for Enterprise use but if you are the casual user (as casual as people who setup vps’s go)…. Nothing beats Vultr’s raw speed and performance

  3. Ankur says:

    Thanks for the review.
    I am currently hosting a wordpress site on DO. Vultr looks better in specs now. After reading I dont know how wable is offering so much.

    Could you elaborate differnce between wable and Vultr in terms of OpenVZ and KVM. Do you think it would have an impact for a medium traffic WordPress site.
    Thanks

    • Façade says:

      A very short explanation would be, with openvz, you can have ONLY linux machines, and those machines need to be provided by the host…

      With KVM, you can do whatever you want… linux, windows… its more of a ‘full’ virtualization environment

  4. praveen says:

    Far Wable on bundle 1 and 2 they block SMTP, for bundle 3 they allow only 300 mails per day if you go above that level, they suspend the server.

    • Façade says:

      I believe smtp is only blocked on bundle 1. The others allow 300 on ip 1 and none on the others.

      Also, I only use wable for really quick projects or if I just need to test something on a server… I don’t think wable was intended to host stuff in ‘production’ mode

  5. Niccolo says:

    Good article, but it’s full of spelling mistakes. “its” versus “it’s” (all wrong). “for beast performance”..?

    Just saying. 🙂

    • facade says:

      lol.. yea you’re right.. I have no excuse for the ‘its’ but the “for beast performance” thats me getting my colloquial on xD. I blog how I speak 🙂

  6. Wable offers terrible service. Avoid them at all costs. They advertise un-metered bandwidth, but if you happen to use more than they like, they will ban your account and say it’s because of a “DDOS”. They are the most unprofessional company I have ever worked with. I think its a one person company, where the owner acts like a bratty teenager. If you do use them make sure to make regular backups, otherwise you will loose all your data like I did.

  7. Arda Kilicdagi says:

    I’ve been using Wable for ~9 months, and never had issues so far. %100 uptime.

    Also they regularly make a power boost campaign. If you are at bundle3 or higher, when you click the power boost link (which is shared throuh their social accounts like fb etc) you get 2 additional CPUs/VPS, 4GB additional RAM, and 30GB additional SSD storage for free, and it’s unlimited (it’s not reduced after a month)!

    Yeah they have smtp limits on machines, but I’ve already been using a 3rd party smtp service (there are a lot of quality free smtp services around), so not a big handicap at least for me.

    So for $8/mo, you get 6GBs of ram, 5 cores of CPU (each @3GHZ), 80 GB SSD drive. Hard to beat that for that price I guess, right ?

    • facade says:

      agreed, i recently got that promo its pretty awesome.

      I plan to do an updated version of this article seeing as Vultr have since raised their prices and give lower performance E5 2.5Ghz CPU’s.

      I have personally moved to Wable for most of my hosting needs

    • Brandon Hann says:

      Nice! Thanks for this info…I just Google searched it and found their Facebook link. Apparently the promotion is still on.

  8. I’ve canceled my Wable account, because they changed their plan from bundle to hourly fees.

    The “base vps” (1 core, 1 gb ram, 30 GB SSD) is $4, which is a good price.

    But upgrades make the difference: Power boosted $8 resource bundle will have to pay something like $135.

    https://www.facebook.com/1407513069510726/photos/a.1412950622300304.1073741829.1407513069510726/1688267714768592/?type=3

    https://www.facebook.com/1407513069510726/photos/a.1412950622300304.1073741829.1407513069510726/1688577991404231/?type=3&comment_id=1688583924736971&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D

    Another alternative is scaleway, they offer 2GB ram, 2 CPU, 50GB SSD drive for €2,99 for the time being, which is a great price. Also they have ARM servers for playground, too.

  9. Abhijit Mahida says:

    I have accounts at Digital Ocean, Hostgator, (and Linode in the past).
    Comparing (based solely on my experiences so far) this would be my review:

    I believe Vultr has the best performance and price.

    Sometimes some unexpected things still happen, and I’m like – “ok, this is new.”

    But this company is relatively new if compared to the others, so adjustments and improvements will surely come.

    I have websites and game servers running smooth here, so yeah I recommend.

  10. Between the 3 of them, I would pick DigitalOcean as the clear winner. The features that DO offers are superior and the price it charges is very economical, thus the value of money for DO is superior. The only blip that DigitalOcean has is that it is not for beginners. You have to be a developer or at least have a technical background to deploy and manage a server on DO. The wisest thing to do is hire the services of Managed Cloud Hosting Providers like Cloudways and WPEngine. These services will not only take care of the technical aspects of deployment and management of your server, but also allow you to focus on the business aspect of your website. It is very convenient to set up a DO server using services like Cloudways and only requires a few minutes and a few clicks.

    Source: https://www.cloudways.com/blog/host-wordpress-on-digitalocean/

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