VPS Showdown VPS Showdown

DigitalOcean Premium Intel (1 GB) vs. Vultr Cloud Compute (2 GB)

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Welcome to another round of the VPS Showdown. Today I've got brand new instances from DigitalOcean and Vultr and ran my world famous suite of benchmarking scripts. All instances were running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and were created in the New York area (or close to it). Time to see who showed up today.

Overview

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Thu, 01 Oct 2026 05:06:48 GMT Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:06:02 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 7.0.0-31-generic 7.0.0-29-generic
MySQL Version 8.4.11-0ubuntu0.26.04.1 8.4.11-0ubuntu0.26.04.1
Redis Version 8.0.5 8.0.5
Location New York, NY Newark, NJ
Monthly Price $8.00 $10.00
RAM (GB) 1 2
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 35 50
Storage Type NVMe SSD
Transfer (TB) 1 2

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

CategoryWinner
CPU (events/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB)
Memory (read MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB)
Disk I/O (MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB)
MySQL (read/write tps)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB)
Redis (GET/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB)
Value (CPU events per $/mo)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) takes 6 of 6 categories.

CPU

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Vendor GenuineIntel GenuineIntel
Model Name DO-Premium-Intel Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
Clock Speed (MHz) 2,494.14 2,593.90
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 4,988.27 5,187.80
Events per Second 990.53 811.02
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.93 0.96
Average Latency (ms) 1.01 1.23
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.75 5.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.12 1.61

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Operations per second 4,986,667.23 2,932,814.92
Mebibytes per second 4,869.79 2,864.08
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 0.41 2.06
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Operations per second 4,811,794.28 3,012,810.64
Mebibytes per second 4,699.02 2,942.20
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.38 2.18
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Reads per Second 3,138.93 1,720.67
Writes per Second 2,092.55 1,147.11
Fsyncs per Second 6,701.92 3,681.86
Read Mebibytes per Second 49.05 26.89
Written Mebibytes per Second 32.70 17.92
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.08 0.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 7.98 13.92
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.24 0.55

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 1,655.46 2,497.94
Average Latency (ms) 1,661.19 2,514.76
Maximum Latency (ms) 1,666.55 2,531.03
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1,678.14 2,539.17

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 8,768.00 4,434.00
Queries per second 87,680.00 44,340.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.01 1.67
Average Latency (ms) 1.14 2.25
Maximum Latency (ms) 26.98 6.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.39 2.81

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 7,876.00 3,735.00
Queries per second 78,760.00 37,350.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.8 1.39
Average Latency (ms) 1.27 2.67
Maximum Latency (ms) 10.49 23.22
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.76 3.68

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,893.00 1,945.00
Queries per second 38,930.00 19,450.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 2.06 3.65
Average Latency (ms) 2.57 5.13
Maximum Latency (ms) 13.44 12.99
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.13 6.79

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 14,470.00 7,066.00
Queries per second 144,700.00 70,660.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.46 0.79
Average Latency (ms) 0.69 1.41
Maximum Latency (ms) 10.41 11.58
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.99 1.96

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,346,717.00 669,209.00
Queries per second 13,467,170.00 6,692,090.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.02
Maximum Latency (ms) 324.88 671.55
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 232,319.00 122,191.00
Queries per second 2,323,190.00 1,221,910.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.04 0.08
Maximum Latency (ms) 3.67 2.56
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.06 0.12

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,586.00 2,672.00
Queries per second 55,860.00 26,720.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.37 1.31
Average Latency (ms) 1.79 3.74
Maximum Latency (ms) 9.16 9.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.39 5.09

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 7,682.00 2,421.00
Queries per second 76,820.00 24,210.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.51 1.47
Average Latency (ms) 1.3 4.13
Maximum Latency (ms) 3.94 8.77
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.73 5.88

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 13,782.00 6,495.00
Queries per second 137,820.00 64,950.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.48 0.8
Average Latency (ms) 0.72 1.54
Maximum Latency (ms) 10.11 18.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.03 2.22

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 14,614.00 6,851.00
Queries per second 146,140.00 68,510.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.47 0.75
Average Latency (ms) 0.68 1.46
Maximum Latency (ms) 7.04 14.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.95 2.03

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 157,825.00 45,040.00
Queries per second 1,578,250.00 450,400.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.03 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.06 0.22
Maximum Latency (ms) 19.19 16.88
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.1 1.34

Redis

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 64,850.84 27,419.80
PING_MBULK per Second 66,711.14 29,069.77
SET per Second 70,175.44 26,476.04
GET per Second 71,684.59 22,988.51
INCR per Second 72,411.30 23,618.33
LPUSH per Second 69,832.40 24,201.36
RPUSH per Second 71,839.09 25,252.53
LPOP per Second 71,377.59 25,568.91
RPOP per Second 71,942.45 25,227.04
SADD per Second 71,428.57 27,472.53
HSET per Second 67,934.78 25,207.96
SPOP per Second 72,358.90 28,320.59
ZADD per Second 71,123.76 26,838.43
ZPOPMIN per Second 73,746.31 27,824.15
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 38,476.34 14,322.54
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 18,198.36 7,071.64
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 12,655.02 4,639.51
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 10,430.79 4,115.40
MSET (10 keys) per Second 63,816.21 23,402.76

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.491.11
PING_MBULK0.471.04
SET0.451.16
GET0.441.32
INCR0.441.28
LPUSH0.451.27
RPUSH0.441.21
LPOP0.441.21
RPOP0.441.23
SADD0.441.12
HSET0.471.22
SPOP0.431.09
ZADD0.441.16
ZPOPMIN0.421.10
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)0.872.14
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)1.784.07
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)2.696.04
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)3.076.75
MSET (10 keys)0.631.58

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

DigitalOcean's Premium Intel (1 GB) VPS outperforms Vultr's Cloud Compute (2 GB) in key benchmarks, especially in Redis commands like SET and GET which achieve higher requests per second and lower latencies. For instance, the SET command on DigitalOcean registers 65,359.48 RPS with an average latency of 0.491ms, whereas Vultr's SET command reaches 26,476.04 RPS with an average latency of 1.164ms. This performance edge makes DigitalOcean's instance preferable for CPU-intensive and memory-bound applications, despite Vultr offering more RAM.

From the friendly human:

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Providers & pricing

DigitalOcean overview Vultr overviewDigitalOcean Premium Intel (1 GB) pricing Vultr Cloud Compute (2 GB) pricing

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