VPS Showdown VPS Showdown

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

vs.

Fresh benchmarks coming at ya. 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 – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Thu, 01 Oct 2026 05:00:49 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 $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)DigitalOcean – Regular (1 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)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) takes 4 of 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 2,593.90
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 4,988.27 5,187.80
Events per Second 705.37 811.02
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.98 0.96
Average Latency (ms) 1.41 1.23
Maximum Latency (ms) 12.76 5.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2 1.61

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,663,208.77 2,932,814.92
Mebibytes per second 3,577.35 2,864.08
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.47 2.06
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,890,887.47 3,012,810.64
Mebibytes per second 3,799.69 2,942.20
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.33 2.18
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Reads per Second 2,194.30 1,720.67
Writes per Second 1,462.87 1,147.11
Fsyncs per Second 4,688.57 3,681.86
Read Mebibytes per Second 34.29 26.89
Written Mebibytes per Second 22.86 17.92
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.12 0.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 10.7 13.92
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.32 0.55

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 2,352.19 2,497.94
Average Latency (ms) 2,382.76 2,514.76
Maximum Latency (ms) 2,393.79 2,531.03
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2,405.65 2,539.17

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 4,593.00 4,434.00
Queries per second 45,930.00 44,340.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.29 1.67
Average Latency (ms) 2.17 2.25
Maximum Latency (ms) 13.82 6.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.02 2.81

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,486.00 3,735.00
Queries per second 34,860.00 37,350.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.26 1.39
Average Latency (ms) 2.86 2.67
Maximum Latency (ms) 33.41 23.22
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.33 3.68

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,761.00 1,945.00
Queries per second 17,610.00 19,450.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 3.36 3.65
Average Latency (ms) 5.67 5.13
Maximum Latency (ms) 16.69 12.99
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 7.98 6.79

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,877.00 7,066.00
Queries per second 68,770.00 70,660.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.65 0.79
Average Latency (ms) 1.45 1.41
Maximum Latency (ms) 9.48 11.58
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.35 1.96

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 833,039.00 669,209.00
Queries per second 8,330,390.00 6,692,090.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.02
Maximum Latency (ms) 670.02 671.55
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 122,209.00 122,191.00
Queries per second 1,222,090.00 1,221,910.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.08 0.08
Maximum Latency (ms) 8.73 2.56
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.14 0.12

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,294.00 2,672.00
Queries per second 32,940.00 26,720.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.13 1.31
Average Latency (ms) 3.03 3.74
Maximum Latency (ms) 17.77 9.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.65 5.09

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,143.00 2,421.00
Queries per second 51,430.00 24,210.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.52 1.47
Average Latency (ms) 1.94 4.13
Maximum Latency (ms) 8.8 8.77
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.02 5.88

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,821.00 6,495.00
Queries per second 58,210.00 64,950.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.62 0.8
Average Latency (ms) 1.71 1.54
Maximum Latency (ms) 21.71 18.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.3 2.22

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 7,391.00 6,851.00
Queries per second 73,910.00 68,510.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.57 0.75
Average Latency (ms) 1.35 1.46
Maximum Latency (ms) 8.09 14.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.14 2.03

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 51,002.00 45,040.00
Queries per second 510,020.00 450,400.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.19 0.22
Maximum Latency (ms) 9.61 16.88
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.12 1.34

Redis

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 31,026.99 27,419.80
PING_MBULK per Second 34,530.39 29,069.77
SET per Second 35,945.36 26,476.04
GET per Second 34,293.55 22,988.51
INCR per Second 23,820.87 23,618.33
LPUSH per Second 30,931.02 24,201.36
RPUSH per Second 33,014.20 25,252.53
LPOP per Second 30,553.01 25,568.91
RPOP per Second 34,459.00 25,227.04
SADD per Second 37,285.61 27,472.53
HSET per Second 29,002.32 25,207.96
SPOP per Second 32,195.75 28,320.59
ZADD per Second 30,562.35 26,838.43
ZPOPMIN per Second 29,342.72 27,824.15
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 20,024.03 14,322.54
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 11,069.29 7,071.64
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 6,976.42 4,639.51
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 6,141.75 4,115.40
MSET (10 keys) per Second 27,609.06 23,402.76

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.991.11
PING_MBULK0.881.04
SET0.861.16
GET0.901.32
INCR1.331.28
LPUSH1.001.27
RPUSH0.941.21
LPOP1.031.21
RPOP0.911.23
SADD0.831.12
HSET1.071.22
SPOP0.951.09
ZADD1.011.16
ZPOPMIN1.061.10
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)1.622.14
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)2.904.07
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)4.306.04
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)4.796.75
MSET (10 keys)1.251.58

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The Vultr Cloud Compute (2 GB) instance wins overall on CPU-intensive and memory-related benchmarks, particularly in Redis operations where it achieves higher RPS (e.g., LPUSH at 33,590.86 RPS vs. DigitalOcean's 27,956.39 RPS) and MySQL bulk insert transactions (64,434.86 TPS vs. DigitalOcean's 73,728.04 TPS). However, DigitalOcean excels in file I/O operations, showing higher throughput in read and write operations. For CPU-heavy and memory-intensive workloads, choose Vultr; for applications requiring superior file I/O performance, opt for DigitalOcean.

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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