VPS Showdown VPS Showdown

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

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My friend, I'm so glad you're here! Today I spun up fresh instances from DigitalOcean and did some benchmarking. Each instance was spun up with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and all resided in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Without further ado, here's the results.

Overview

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:00:48 GMT Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:08:17 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 $6.00 $16.00
RAM (GB) 1 2
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 25 70
Storage Type SSD NVMe
Transfer (TB) 1 2

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

CategoryWinner
CPU (events/sec)DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Memory (read MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Disk I/O (MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
MySQL (read/write tps)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Redis (GET/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Value (CPU events per $/mo)DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)

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

CPU

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Vendor GenuineIntel GenuineIntel
Model Name DO-Regular DO-Premium-Intel
Clock Speed (MHz) 2,494.14 2,494.14
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 4,096.00
BogoMips 4,988.28 4,988.28
Events per Second 815.71 599.47
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.98 0.98
Average Latency (ms) 1.22 1.67
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.86 12.39
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.5 2.91

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,956,759.89 4,940,116.70
Mebibytes per second 3,864.02 4,824.33
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.03 0.44
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,883,080.49 4,629,786.72
Mebibytes per second 3,792.07 4,521.28
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 6.51 3.05
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Reads per Second 2,180.62 3,843.72
Writes per Second 1,453.75 2,562.48
Fsyncs per Second 4,652.64 8,204.64
Read Mebibytes per Second 34.07 60.06
Written Mebibytes per Second 22.71 40.04
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.12 0.07
Maximum Latency (ms) 8.63 5.02
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.34 0.21

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 2,077.12 1,668.13
Average Latency (ms) 2,109.98 1,673.77
Maximum Latency (ms) 2,125.57 1,680.60
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2,120.76 1,678.14

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,111.00 8,428.00
Queries per second 61,110.00 84,280.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.13 1.02
Average Latency (ms) 1.63 1.18
Maximum Latency (ms) 16.53 6.54
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.3 1.7

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,456.00 9,581.00
Queries per second 34,560.00 95,810.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.3 0.74
Average Latency (ms) 2.89 1.04
Maximum Latency (ms) 17.71 8.19
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.57 1.37

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,206.00 3,903.00
Queries per second 22,060.00 39,030.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 2.57 1.98
Average Latency (ms) 4.53 2.56
Maximum Latency (ms) 12.36 11.22
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 6.55 3.25

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,940.00 15,461.00
Queries per second 69,400.00 154,610.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.52 0.45
Average Latency (ms) 1.43 0.64
Maximum Latency (ms) 22.94 10.02
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.57 0.92

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,084,592.00 1,317,592.00
Queries per second 10,845,920.00 13,175,920.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.01
Maximum Latency (ms) 506.06 355.01
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 160,315.00 239,595.00
Queries per second 1,603,150.00 2,395,950.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.03
Average Latency (ms) 0.06 0.04
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.76 1.38
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.1 0.05

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,209.00 5,471.00
Queries per second 32,090.00 54,710.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.96 0.62
Average Latency (ms) 3.11 1.83
Maximum Latency (ms) 10.53 5.61
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.57 2.43

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,822.00 7,700.00
Queries per second 58,220.00 77,000.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.52 0.43
Average Latency (ms) 1.71 1.3
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.33 4.19
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.86 1.73

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 9,262.00 15,377.00
Queries per second 92,620.00 153,770.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.52 0.45
Average Latency (ms) 1.08 0.65
Maximum Latency (ms) 21.4 5.09
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.82 0.9

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 8,187.00 16,540.00
Queries per second 81,870.00 165,400.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.53 0.44
Average Latency (ms) 1.22 0.6
Maximum Latency (ms) 14.67 5.98
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.18 0.83

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 79,336.00 129,377.00
Queries per second 793,360.00 1,293,770.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.04
Average Latency (ms) 0.13 0.08
Maximum Latency (ms) 11.85 5.6
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.34 0.13

Redis

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 44,722.72 74,850.30
PING_MBULK per Second 44,267.38 75,075.07
SET per Second 47,687.18 72,202.16
GET per Second 45,351.48 71,174.38
INCR per Second 43,535.05 68,027.21
LPUSH per Second 39,047.25 67,114.09
RPUSH per Second 37,481.26 71,377.59
LPOP per Second 40,404.04 65,189.05
RPOP per Second 38,595.14 66,934.41
SADD per Second 38,834.95 70,521.86
HSET per Second 35,932.45 71,174.38
SPOP per Second 32,000.00 71,479.62
ZADD per Second 30,750.31 68,587.11
ZPOPMIN per Second 30,854.68 72,358.90
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 24,789.29 33,167.50
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 13,390.47 17,540.78
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 8,059.32 12,242.90
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 7,098.74 10,551.86
MSET (10 keys) per Second 41,928.72 62,421.97

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.690.42
PING_MBULK0.690.42
SET0.650.44
GET0.680.44
INCR0.710.47
LPUSH0.800.48
RPUSH0.820.45
LPOP0.780.49
RPOP0.810.48
SADD0.790.45
HSET0.860.45
SPOP0.960.44
ZADD1.010.47
ZPOPMIN1.000.44
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)1.311.01
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)2.441.83
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)3.792.73
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)4.253.06
MSET (10 keys)0.810.65

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

Based on benchmark results, the Premium Intel (2 GB) instance from DigitalOcean outperforms the Regular (1 GB) instance in almost all metrics, particularly in Redis benchmark operations where it achieves higher requests per second (e.g., 74,850.3 RPS for PING_INLINE compared to 44,722.7 RPS) and lower latency across various operations. For CPU-heavy workloads and applications that benefit from more RAM, the Premium instance clearly leads due to its superior performance in bulk insert operations for MySQL and higher throughput for memory operations. This instance is ideal for users who need more computational power and RAM for demanding applications.

From the friendly human:

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Providers & pricing

DigitalOcean overviewDigitalOcean Regular (1 GB) pricing DigitalOcean Premium Intel (2 GB) pricing

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