VPS Showdown VPS Showdown

The story

A decade of asking which VPS is faster

Asked in 2013. Still asking. Now automated.

  1. 2013 The first post Linode vs DigitalOcean, on joshtronic
  2. 2025 Mechanized the benchmark scripts become an automated platform
  3. 2026 → The platform the site you're on — and just getting started

~1,000 benchmarks spun up and run by hand over that decade — and now the platform runs them itself.

Hi, I'm one of many Joshes but the one and only joshtronic.

It's been over a decade since I stumbled upon DigitalOcean and wanted to see how they compared to Linode. It was a simpler time: pre-COVID and pre-AI. Linode was its own company and not part of Akamai Cloud.

A lot has changed, but a lot is still the same.

There are more providers out there, but Linode is still my ride or die.* The plans are way more nuanced, where 1–2 bucks can change everything. Benchmarks are more important than ever.

I always had a bigger vision for my VPS Showdown posts, which led to me further mechanizing my benchmark scripts into this platform.

Yes, I used the hell out of LLMs to get to this point. Otherwise, I'd probably still be doing things manually, or I would have lost interest and stopped all together (again).

As always, if you found VPS Showdown helpful… just joshing you. ;)

* Yes, I know this website runs on AWS. I have my reasons, don't judge me.