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

vs.

Fresh benchmarks coming at ya. Today I've got brand new instances from DigitalOcean and ran some benchmarks. Each instance was spun up with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and were created in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Time to see who showed up today.

Overview

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:03:47 GMT Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:11:17 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 – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Disk I/O (MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (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 6 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) 2,294.61 1,996.25
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 512.00
BogoMips 4,589.21 3,992.50
Events per Second 337.24 726.05
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.07 0.64
Average Latency (ms) 2.96 1.37
Maximum Latency (ms) 7.98 12.5
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.74 2.57

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Operations per second 2,158,838.24 3,124,321.03
Mebibytes per second 2,108.24 3,051.09
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 7.22 3.2
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,098,478.11 5,198,576.87
Mebibytes per second 3,025.86 5,076.74
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.23 2.33
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Reads per Second 897.65 1,786.48
Writes per Second 598.43 1,190.99
Fsyncs per Second 1,924.36 3,820.35
Read Mebibytes per Second 14.03 27.91
Written Mebibytes per Second 9.35 18.61
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.29 0.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 30.6 15.23
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.9 0.54

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 2,798.91 1,705.40
Average Latency (ms) 2,816.88 1,717.24
Maximum Latency (ms) 2,827.29 1,725.62
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2,828.87 1,739.68

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 4,209.00 7,218.00
Queries per second 42,090.00 72,180.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.24 1.2
Average Latency (ms) 2.37 1.38
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.8 2.84
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.91 1.67

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 720.00 4,665.00
Queries per second 7,200.00 46,650.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 2.26 1.12
Average Latency (ms) 13.89 2.14
Maximum Latency (ms) 898.41 24.52
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 11.24 3.43

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 914.00 2,351.00
Queries per second 9,140.00 23,510.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 5.04 2.54
Average Latency (ms) 10.93 4.25
Maximum Latency (ms) 399.05 29.54
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 12.98 6.21

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,481.00 7,702.00
Queries per second 24,810.00 77,020.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.76 0.73
Average Latency (ms) 4.02 1.3
Maximum Latency (ms) 209.08 39.5
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 6.43 2.22

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 603,677.00 1,317,592.00
Queries per second 6,036,770.00 13,175,920.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.02 0.01
Maximum Latency (ms) 768.14 403.62
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 111,711.00 161,910.00
Queries per second 1,117,110.00 1,619,100.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.09 0.06
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.67 1.19
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.14 0.09

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,616.00 5,673.00
Queries per second 26,160.00 56,730.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.4 0.55
Average Latency (ms) 3.82 1.76
Maximum Latency (ms) 19.97 5.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 5.18 2.48

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,567.00 7,133.00
Queries per second 25,670.00 71,330.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.01 0.45
Average Latency (ms) 3.89 1.4
Maximum Latency (ms) 8.69 5.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 5.57 1.89

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,815.00 7,358.00
Queries per second 18,150.00 73,580.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.76 0.76
Average Latency (ms) 5.5 1.36
Maximum Latency (ms) 1034.92 32.59
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 6.67 2.22

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,210.00 7,941.00
Queries per second 32,100.00 79,410.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.61 0.73
Average Latency (ms) 3.11 1.26
Maximum Latency (ms) 42.13 24.84
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 5.09 2

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 18,558.00 67,880.00
Queries per second 185,580.00 678,800.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.54 0.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 146.02 18.82
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.91 0.94

Redis

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 32,310.18 68,306.01
PING_MBULK per Second 31,645.57 67,294.75
SET per Second 29,222.68 66,979.23
GET per Second 28,760.43 68,352.70
INCR per Second 34,411.56 66,225.16
LPUSH per Second 31,705.77 67,024.13
RPUSH per Second 30,883.26 68,728.52
LPOP per Second 30,892.80 67,340.07
RPOP per Second 33,602.15 67,521.95
SADD per Second 32,520.32 69,589.42
HSET per Second 34,459.00 67,430.88
SPOP per Second 35,997.12 69,252.08
ZADD per Second 29,197.08 69,252.08
ZPOPMIN per Second 29,403.12 68,212.83
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 14,295.93 36,023.05
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 6,915.15 18,308.31
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 4,855.55 12,436.26
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 4,463.09 10,716.96
MSET (10 keys) per Second 27,631.94 55,679.29

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.960.46
PING_MBULK0.970.46
SET1.060.48
GET1.080.46
INCR0.910.48
LPUSH0.980.47
RPUSH0.990.46
LPOP1.000.48
RPOP0.940.47
SADD0.950.45
HSET0.910.47
SPOP0.860.45
ZADD1.070.46
ZPOPMIN1.050.46
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)2.230.96
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)4.291.83
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)5.912.78
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)6.473.09
MSET (10 keys)1.370.73

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The DigitalOcean Premium AMD (2 GB) instance outperforms the Regular (2 GB) in most benchmarks, notably with Redis operations showing significantly higher requests per second, such as 68306.01 rps for PING_INLINE compared to 32310.18 rps, and CPU benchmark results demonstrating an events per second of 726.05 versus 337.24. For users needing high throughput for database operations and CPU-intensive tasks, the Premium AMD model provides superior performance.

From the friendly human:

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Providers & pricing

DigitalOcean overviewDigitalOcean Regular (2 GB) pricing DigitalOcean Premium AMD (2 GB) pricing

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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)