VPS Showdown VPS Showdown

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

vs.

Same showdown, different day. Today I spun up fresh instances from DigitalOcean and Vultr and did some benchmarking. All instances were running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and were created in the New York area (or close to it). Let's get into the numbers.

Overview

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Last Benchmarked Thu, 01 Oct 2026 05:08:17 GMT Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:03:03 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 $16.00 $5.00
RAM (GB) 2 1
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 70 25
Storage Type NVMe SSD
Transfer (TB) 2 1

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

CategoryWinner
CPU (events/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 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)Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) takes 5 of 6 categories.

CPU

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Vendor GenuineIntel GenuineIntel
Model Name DO-Premium-Intel Intel Core Processor (Broadwell, no TSX, IBRS)
Clock Speed (MHz) 1,995.31 2,400.00
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 3,990.62 4,799.99
Events per Second 1,383.84 747.20
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.5 1.23
Average Latency (ms) 0.72 1.34
Maximum Latency (ms) 26.1 4.19
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.35 1.61

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Operations per second 4,333,625.92 3,468,220.65
Mebibytes per second 4,232.06 3,386.93
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.09 2.53
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Operations per second 4,219,640.73 3,710,866.55
Mebibytes per second 4,120.74 3,623.89
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.16 0.76
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Reads per Second 2,349.38 1,891.00
Writes per Second 1,566.26 1,260.60
Fsyncs per Second 5,019.91 4,039.68
Read Mebibytes per Second 36.71 29.55
Written Mebibytes per Second 24.47 19.70
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.11 0.14
Maximum Latency (ms) 3.32 6.15
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.41 0.33

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 2,294.95 2,212.92
Average Latency (ms) 2,302.17 2,218.18
Maximum Latency (ms) 2,308.09 2,222.25
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2,320.55 2,238.47

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 8,290.00 4,645.00
Queries per second 82,900.00 46,450.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.02 1.76
Average Latency (ms) 1.2 2.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 3.93 6.84
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.82 2.97

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 4,835.00 3,815.00
Queries per second 48,350.00 38,150.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.03 1.64
Average Latency (ms) 2.06 2.62
Maximum Latency (ms) 28.71 21.48
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.86 3.55

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 2,440.00 1,258.00
Queries per second 24,400.00 12,580.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 2.47 3.82
Average Latency (ms) 4.09 7.94
Maximum Latency (ms) 34.94 2585.43
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 5.77 8.58

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 8,740.00 4,318.00
Queries per second 87,400.00 43,180.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.61 1.13
Average Latency (ms) 1.14 2.31
Maximum Latency (ms) 31.28 41.5
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.86 4.18

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 1,201,092.00 800,273.00
Queries per second 12,010,920.00 8,002,730.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.01
Maximum Latency (ms) 416.59 573.78
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 233,729.00 99,416.00
Queries per second 2,337,290.00 994,160.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.07
Average Latency (ms) 0.04 0.1
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.09 3.29
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.06 0.15

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 5,487.00 3,664.00
Queries per second 54,870.00 36,640.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.53 0.6
Average Latency (ms) 1.82 2.73
Maximum Latency (ms) 7.49 10.72
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.76 4.25

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 6,975.00 5,031.00
Queries per second 69,750.00 50,310.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.49 0.67
Average Latency (ms) 1.43 1.98
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.05 12.72
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.11 3.25

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 8,563.00 5,894.00
Queries per second 85,630.00 58,940.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.61 1.05
Average Latency (ms) 1.17 1.69
Maximum Latency (ms) 31.11 17.67
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.86 2.39

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 7,986.00 5,867.00
Queries per second 79,860.00 58,670.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.64 1.04
Average Latency (ms) 1.25 1.7
Maximum Latency (ms) 33.18 10.56
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.96 2.48

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second 90,875.00 27,369.00
Queries per second 908,750.00 273,690.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.07
Average Latency (ms) 0.11 0.36
Maximum Latency (ms) 22.2 22.97
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.19 1.86

Redis

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 65,876.16 29,316.92
PING_MBULK per Second 63,856.96 27,233.12
SET per Second 62,972.29 23,980.81
GET per Second 57,339.45 27,925.16
INCR per Second 61,538.46 29,316.92
LPUSH per Second 66,889.63 26,260.50
RPUSH per Second 64,892.93 27,292.58
LPOP per Second 65,359.48 28,810.14
RPOP per Second 63,572.79 27,517.89
SADD per Second 63,613.23 28,776.98
HSET per Second 66,489.37 28,490.03
SPOP per Second 54,112.55 25,746.65
ZADD per Second 65,487.89 27,987.69
ZPOPMIN per Second 64,557.78 28,176.95
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 38,895.37 20,345.88
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 18,539.12 10,920.61
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 12,931.59 7,457.12
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 11,428.57 7,261.64
MSET (10 keys) per Second 58,105.75 29,188.56

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
PING_INLINE0.481.04
PING_MBULK0.491.10
SET0.511.29
GET0.551.08
INCR0.511.03
LPUSH0.481.17
RPUSH0.491.12
LPOP0.491.07
RPOP0.501.11
SADD0.501.05
HSET0.481.07
SPOP0.591.18
ZADD0.491.09
ZPOPMIN0.491.07
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)0.851.57
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)1.722.84
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)2.593.99
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)2.864.07
MSET (10 keys)0.691.15

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The DigitalOcean Premium Intel instance outperforms the Vultr Cloud Compute instance across key benchmarks, notably achieving higher requests per second (rps) in Redis operations such as SET and GET, and superior file I/O performance with higher reads and writes per second. DigitalOcean's instance also demonstrates better MySQL bulk insert transactions per second (tps) and lower latency across various benchmarks, making it more suitable for CPU-heavy and memory-intensive applications where low latency and high throughput are crucial.

From the friendly human:

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Providers & pricing

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