VPS Showdown VPS Showdown

DigitalOcean Regular (2 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Premium AMD (2 GB)

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New day, new benchmarks. Today I've got brand new instances from DigitalOcean and ran my world famous suite of benchmarking scripts. Each instance was running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and all resided in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Let's get into the numbers.

Overview

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:31:21 GMT Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:38:52 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 7.0.0-27-generic 7.0.0-27-generic
MySQL Version 8.4.10-0ubuntu0.26.04.1 8.4.10-0ubuntu0.26.04.1
Redis Version 8.0.5 8.0.5
Location New York, NY New York, NY
Monthly Price $12.00 $14.00
RAM (GB) 2 2
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 50 50
Storage Type SSD NVMe
Transfer (TB) 2 2

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

CategoryWinner
CPU (events/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Memory (read MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Disk I/O (MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
MySQL (read/write tps)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Redis (GET/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Value (CPU events per $/mo)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB) takes 4 of 6 categories.

CPU

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Vendor GenuineIntel AuthenticAMD
Model Name DO-Regular DO-Premium-AMD
Clock Speed (MHz) 2,494.14 1,996.25
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 512.00
BogoMips 4,988.28 3,992.49
Events per Second 411.59 730.16
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.99 0.64
Average Latency (ms) 2.42 1.37
Maximum Latency (ms) 19.9 18.59
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.96 2.52

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Operations per second 4,123,717.02 3,123,620.54
Mebibytes per second 4,027.07 3,050.41
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 0.54 3.07
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Operations per second 4,007,053.05 5,224,478.37
Mebibytes per second 3,913.14 5,102.03
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.82 3.4
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Reads per Second 2,758.95 2,012.74
Writes per Second 1,839.23 1,341.83
Fsyncs per Second 5,895.77 4,295.05
Read Mebibytes per Second 43.11 31.45
Written Mebibytes per Second 28.74 20.97
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.09 0.13
Maximum Latency (ms) 11.81 16.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.3 0.5

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 2,498.24 1,660.48
Average Latency (ms) 2,546.75 1,679.64
Maximum Latency (ms) 2,562.19 1,687.90
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2,585.31 1,678.14

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,626.00 7,656.00
Queries per second 56,260.00 76,560.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.18 1.17
Average Latency (ms) 1.77 1.3
Maximum Latency (ms) 3.44 2.99
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.39 1.58

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 4,813.00 4,129.00
Queries per second 48,130.00 41,290.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.92 1.14
Average Latency (ms) 2.07 2.42
Maximum Latency (ms) 29.26 19.52
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.19 3.75

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,931.00 2,409.00
Queries per second 19,310.00 24,090.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 2.94 2.42
Average Latency (ms) 5.17 4.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 17.66 75.42
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 7.17 6.55

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,585.00 6,034.00
Queries per second 65,850.00 60,340.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.56 0.73
Average Latency (ms) 1.51 1.66
Maximum Latency (ms) 11.88 18.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.71 3.02

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 833,039.00 1,346,717.00
Queries per second 8,330,390.00 13,467,170.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.01
Maximum Latency (ms) 568.39 407.38
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 148,439.00 164,009.00
Queries per second 1,484,390.00 1,640,090.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.07 0.06
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.95 1.58
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.1 0.09

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,505.00 5,968.00
Queries per second 35,050.00 59,680.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.98 0.61
Average Latency (ms) 2.85 1.67
Maximum Latency (ms) 6.79 3.83
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.25 2.22

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,769.00 7,381.00
Queries per second 57,690.00 73,810.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.53 0.52
Average Latency (ms) 1.73 1.35
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.73 2.7
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.66 1.79

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,299.00 6,407.00
Queries per second 62,990.00 64,070.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.57 0.77
Average Latency (ms) 1.58 1.56
Maximum Latency (ms) 28.52 18.26
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.07 2.66

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 7,198.00 6,751.00
Queries per second 71,980.00 67,510.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.51 0.74
Average Latency (ms) 1.39 1.48
Maximum Latency (ms) 167.69 15.32
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.35 2.48

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 33,426.00 62,091.00
Queries per second 334,260.00 620,910.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.3 0.16
Maximum Latency (ms) 22.19 26.3
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.61 1.08

Redis

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 34,188.04 71,225.07
PING_MBULK per Second 44,483.99 71,225.07
SET per Second 40,112.31 68,119.89
GET per Second 40,883.07 66,401.06
INCR per Second 39,729.84 70,077.09
LPUSH per Second 40,404.04 70,422.54
RPUSH per Second 37,397.16 68,965.52
LPOP per Second 37,257.82 68,259.38
RPOP per Second 36,114.12 66,445.18
SADD per Second 37,425.15 69,492.70
HSET per Second 38,759.69 66,445.18
SPOP per Second 45,641.26 69,930.07
ZADD per Second 42,283.30 71,428.57
ZPOPMIN per Second 47,438.33 71,174.38
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 23,089.36 38,819.88
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 12,169.89 18,768.77
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 8,394.19 12,822.16
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 6,932.89 10,741.14
MSET (10 keys) per Second 31,796.50 61,387.36

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.940.45
PING_MBULK0.690.44
SET0.770.47
GET0.750.48
INCR0.780.45
LPUSH0.780.46
RPUSH0.840.46
LPOP0.850.47
RPOP0.870.49
SADD0.830.46
HSET0.810.49
SPOP0.680.45
ZADD0.740.45
ZPOPMIN0.650.44
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)1.400.91
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)2.631.81
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)3.622.72
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)4.243.13
MSET (10 keys)1.060.65

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The Premium AMD (2 GB) instance from DigitalOcean outperforms the Regular (2 GB) instance in nearly all benchmarks, particularly in Redis operations with significantly higher requests per second and lower latencies, e.g., 71225.07 RPS for PING_INLINE vs. 34188.04 RPS, and in MySQL bulk inserts with 134434.64 TPS compared to 82488.07 TPS. These results indicate the Premium AMD instance is better suited for CPU-intensive and memory-heavy tasks, making it ideal for users needing high performance at a slightly higher cost.

From the friendly human:

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vs. DigitalOcean Regular (1 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Regular (1 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Premium Intel (1 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Premium Intel (2 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Premium Intel (1 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Premium AMD (1 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Premium Intel (2 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Premium AMD (1 GB)