DigitalOcean Regular (1 GB) vs. Vultr Cloud Compute (1 GB)

Same showdown, different day. Today I've spun up some brand new instance from DigitalOcean and Vultr and ran my world famous suite of benchmarking scripts. Each instance was spun up with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64 and all resided in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Time to see who showed up today.

Overview

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Last Benchmarked	Sat, 07 Feb 2026 17:00:52 GMT	Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:00:52 GMT
Linux Distro	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version	6.8.0-71-generic	6.8.0-90-generic
MySQL Version	8.0.45-0ubuntu0.24.04.1	8.0.45-0ubuntu0.24.04.1
Redis Version	7.0.15	7.0.15
Location	New York, NY	Newark, NJ
Monthly Price	$6.00	$5.00
RAM (GB)	1	1
CPU Cores	1	1
Storage (TB)	25	25
Storage Type	SSD	SSD
Transfer (TB)	1	1

CPU

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Vendor	GenuineIntel	GenuineIntel
Model Name	DO-Regular	Intel Core Processor (Haswell, no TSX, IBRS)
Clock Speed (MHz)	2,494.14	2,400.00
CPU Cache Size (KB)	4,096.00	16,384.00
BogoMips	4,988.28	4,799.99
Events per Second	681.75	815.39
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.91	1.05
Average Latency (ms)	1.46	1.23
Maximum Latency (ms)	5.76	6.35
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	3.07	1.32

Memory Read

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Operations per second	4,730,375.84	4,056,132.83
Mebibytes per second	4,619.51	3,961.07
Minimum Latency (ms)	0	0
Average Latency (ms)	0	0
Maximum Latency (ms)	0.27	0.93
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0	0

Memory Write

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Operations per second	4,781,296.51	4,076,721.57
Mebibytes per second	4,669.23	3,981.17
Minimum Latency (ms)	0	0
Average Latency (ms)	0	0
Maximum Latency (ms)	1.77	0.43
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0	0

File I/O

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Reads per Second	2,775.06	2,257.57
Writes per Second	1,850.04	1,505.05
Fsyncs per Second	5,921.12	4,819.34
Read Mebibytes per Second	43.36	35.27
Written Mebibytes per Second	28.91	23.52
Minimum Latency (ms)	0	0
Average Latency (ms)	0.09	0.12
Maximum Latency (ms)	14.18	6.11
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0.26	0.29

Mutex

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms)	3,786.68	2,065.69
Average Latency (ms)	3,796.15	2,071.23
Maximum Latency (ms)	3,801.59	2,077.58
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	3,773.42	2,082.91

MySQL Read-only

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	6,446.00	4,753.00
Queries per second	64,460.00	47,530.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	1.16	1.8
Average Latency (ms)	1.55	2.1
Maximum Latency (ms)	13.6	8.07
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	2.14	2.26

MySQL Write-only

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	4,744.00	3,987.00
Queries per second	47,440.00	39,870.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	1.13	1.81
Average Latency (ms)	2.1	2.51
Maximum Latency (ms)	10.07	26.15
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	3.25	3.49

MySQL Read/Write

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	2,267.00	1,915.00
Queries per second	22,670.00	19,150.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	2.88	4.2
Average Latency (ms)	4.41	5.22
Maximum Latency (ms)	28.78	15.46
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	6.09	6.79

MySQL INSERT

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	9,410.00	6,283.00
Queries per second	94,100.00	62,830.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.51	1.15
Average Latency (ms)	1.06	1.59
Maximum Latency (ms)	12.42	7.36
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1.58	2.14

MySQL Bulk INSERT

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	1,026,342.00	898,571.00
Queries per second	10,263,420.00	8,985,710.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0	0
Average Latency (ms)	0.01	0.01
Maximum Latency (ms)	505.75	643.07
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0	0

MySQL SELECT

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	173,103.00	102,823.00
Queries per second	1,731,030.00	1,028,230.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.04	0.07
Average Latency (ms)	0.06	0.1
Maximum Latency (ms)	1.89	8.25
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0.09	0.13

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	4,805.00	4,999.00
Queries per second	48,050.00	49,990.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.63	0.65
Average Latency (ms)	2.08	2
Maximum Latency (ms)	7.11	7.7
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	3.19	2.61

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	5,826.00	6,142.00
Queries per second	58,260.00	61,420.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.56	0.5
Average Latency (ms)	1.71	1.63
Maximum Latency (ms)	5.7	4.51
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	2.97	2.11

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	8,120.00	6,108.00
Queries per second	81,200.00	61,080.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.53	0.99
Average Latency (ms)	1.23	1.64
Maximum Latency (ms)	17.15	7.27
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	2.11	2.3

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	9,355.00	6,551.00
Queries per second	93,550.00	65,510.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.52	0.98
Average Latency (ms)	1.07	1.53
Maximum Latency (ms)	8.55	7.05
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1.61	1.96

MySQL DELETE

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
Transactions per second	73,302.00	40,352.00
Queries per second	733,020.00	403,520.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.04	0.07
Average Latency (ms)	0.14	0.25
Maximum Latency (ms)	27.47	11.03
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0.74	1.5

Redis

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second	52,110.47	37,622.27
PING_MBULK per Second	53,106.74	38,008.36
SET per Second	49,164.21	38,138.82
GET per Second	41,034.06	38,022.81
INCR per Second	45,146.73	37,864.45
LPUSH per Second	50,479.56	37,850.11
RPUSH per Second	51,572.98	36,724.20
LPOP per Second	47,036.69	37,064.49
RPOP per Second	47,551.12	37,133.31
SADD per Second	49,285.36	38,270.19
HSET per Second	51,098.62	38,153.38
SPOP per Second	51,894.13	38,343.56
ZADD per Second	50,787.20	37,383.18
ZPOPMIN per Second	47,058.82	36,656.89
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second	29,069.77	22,660.32
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second	12,439.36	12,860.08
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second	8,328.47	8,591.07
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second	7,141.84	7,468.82
MSET (10 keys) per Second	39,463.30	33,955.86

Redis Average Latency (ms)

	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)	Vultr – Cloud Compute (1 GB)
PING_INLINE	0.64	0.88
PING_MBULK	0.62	0.87
SET	0.68	0.88
GET	0.81	0.88
INCR	0.74	0.88
LPUSH	0.67	0.89
RPUSH	0.65	0.91
LPOP	0.72	0.91
RPOP	0.71	0.91
SADD	0.68	0.87
HSET	0.65	0.88
SPOP	0.64	0.87
ZADD	0.66	0.90
ZPOPMIN	0.71	0.90
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)	1.21	1.48
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)	2.94	2.64
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)	4.35	3.96
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)	5.05	4.53
MSET (10 keys)	0.89	1.04

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

When comparing the benchmark performance of the DigitalOcean and Vultr VPS instances, the DigitalOcean "Regular (1 GB)" instance shows slightly higher Redis performance metrics, notably in operations per second and latency across various Redis commands, as well as higher file I/O throughput. The Vultr "Cloud Compute (1 GB)" instance, while also strong, has better CPU performance in terms of events per second and lower average latency in CPU and thread benchmarks. Considering cost, Vultr offers a slightly lower monthly fee. Therefore, DigitalOcean might be preferable for workloads heavily reliant on Redis and file I/O operations, while Vultr could be better for CPU-intensive tasks at a lower cost, making both suitable depending on the specific needs of the user’s applications.

From the friendly human:

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