VPS Showdown VPS Showdown

DigitalOcean Regular (1 GB) vs. Vultr Cloud Compute (2 GB)

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My friend, I'm so glad you're here! Today I spun up fresh instances from DigitalOcean and Vultr and ran my world famous suite of benchmarking scripts. All instances were running 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) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:00:48 GMT Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:06:02 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 7.0.0-27-generic 7.0.0-28-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 Newark, NJ
Monthly Price $6.00 $10.00
RAM (GB) 1 2
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 25 50
Storage Type SSD SSD
Transfer (TB) 1 2

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

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

Evenly matched across 6 categories.

CPU

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Vendor GenuineIntel GenuineIntel
Model Name DO-Regular Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
Clock Speed (MHz) 2,494.14 2,593.91
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 4,988.28 5,187.82
Events per Second 815.71 929.36
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.98 0.95
Average Latency (ms) 1.22 1.07
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.86 2.29
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.5 1.39

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,956,759.89 3,441,276.65
Mebibytes per second 3,864.02 3,360.62
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.03 1.05
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,883,080.49 3,505,662.23
Mebibytes per second 3,792.07 3,423.50
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 6.51 0.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Reads per Second 2,180.62 2,556.83
Writes per Second 1,453.75 1,704.52
Fsyncs per Second 4,652.64 5,461.18
Read Mebibytes per Second 34.07 39.95
Written Mebibytes per Second 22.71 26.63
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.12 0.1
Maximum Latency (ms) 8.63 36.01
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.34 0.24

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 2,077.12 1,783.52
Average Latency (ms) 2,109.98 1,799.40
Maximum Latency (ms) 2,125.57 1,810.68
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2,120.76 1,803.47

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,111.00 5,535.00
Queries per second 61,110.00 55,350.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.13 1.57
Average Latency (ms) 1.63 1.8
Maximum Latency (ms) 16.53 4.09
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.3 2.07

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,456.00 5,739.00
Queries per second 34,560.00 57,390.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.3 1.19
Average Latency (ms) 2.89 1.74
Maximum Latency (ms) 17.71 29.45
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.57 2.35

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,206.00 2,265.00
Queries per second 22,060.00 22,650.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 2.57 3.24
Average Latency (ms) 4.53 4.41
Maximum Latency (ms) 12.36 30.01
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 6.55 5.67

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,940.00 11,053.00
Queries per second 69,400.00 110,530.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.52 0.65
Average Latency (ms) 1.43 0.9
Maximum Latency (ms) 22.94 17.38
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.57 1.16

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,084,592.00 701,975.00
Queries per second 10,845,920.00 7,019,750.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.01
Maximum Latency (ms) 506.06 625.32
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 160,315.00 152,246.00
Queries per second 1,603,150.00 1,522,460.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.06 0.07
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.76 1.38
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.1 0.1

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,209.00 3,020.00
Queries per second 32,090.00 30,200.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.96 0.76
Average Latency (ms) 3.11 3.31
Maximum Latency (ms) 10.53 8.79
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.57 4.33

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,822.00 2,424.00
Queries per second 58,220.00 24,240.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.52 1.46
Average Latency (ms) 1.71 4.12
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.33 7.2
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.86 5.47

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 9,262.00 10,298.00
Queries per second 92,620.00 102,980.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.52 0.64
Average Latency (ms) 1.08 0.97
Maximum Latency (ms) 21.4 20.63
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.82 1.39

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 8,187.00 10,146.00
Queries per second 81,870.00 101,460.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.53 0.65
Average Latency (ms) 1.22 0.98
Maximum Latency (ms) 14.67 16.18
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.18 1.34

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 79,336.00 87,018.00
Queries per second 793,360.00 870,180.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.13 0.11
Maximum Latency (ms) 11.85 112.3
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.34 0.23

Redis

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 44,722.72 31,908.10
PING_MBULK per Second 44,267.38 33,014.20
SET per Second 47,687.18 32,237.27
GET per Second 45,351.48 32,404.41
INCR per Second 43,535.05 33,300.03
LPUSH per Second 39,047.25 32,722.51
RPUSH per Second 37,481.26 32,404.41
LPOP per Second 40,404.04 32,206.12
RPOP per Second 38,595.14 35,063.11
SADD per Second 38,834.95 34,746.35
HSET per Second 35,932.45 35,001.75
SPOP per Second 32,000.00 35,701.54
ZADD per Second 30,750.31 34,602.07
ZPOPMIN per Second 30,854.68 33,898.30
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 24,789.29 16,764.46
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 13,390.47 7,578.63
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 8,059.32 4,631.56
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 7,098.74 4,000.80
MSET (10 keys) per Second 41,928.72 25,297.24

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.690.96
PING_MBULK0.690.92
SET0.650.97
GET0.680.95
INCR0.710.94
LPUSH0.800.95
RPUSH0.820.96
LPOP0.780.97
RPOP0.810.90
SADD0.790.89
HSET0.860.90
SPOP0.960.87
ZADD1.010.91
ZPOPMIN1.000.91
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)1.311.84
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)2.443.87
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)3.796.03
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)4.256.91
MSET (10 keys)0.811.53

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

Based on the benchmarks provided, DigitalOcean's Regular (1 GB) instance leads overall, particularly excelling in Redis SET operations with a rate of 47,687.18 requests per second compared to Vultr's Cloud Compute (2 GB) instance's 32,237.27 requests per second. This instance also scores better in MySQL bulk insert transactions with 105,308.99 transactions per second versus Vultr's 68,808.93. For users prioritizing CPU-intensive or memory-bound tasks, DigitalOcean offers superior performance at a lower monthly cost of $6.

From the friendly human:

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Providers & pricing

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

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