VPS Showdown VPS Showdown

DigitalOcean Regular (1 GB) vs. Vultr High Performance Intel (2 GB)

vs.

Same showdown, different day. Today I spun up fresh instances from DigitalOcean and Vultr to run some benchmarks on. Each instance was spun up with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and were created in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Time to see who showed up today.

Overview

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:28:23 GMT Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:41:06 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 Newark, NJ
Monthly Price $6.00 $12.00
RAM (GB) 1 2
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 25 50
Storage Type SSD NVMe
Transfer (TB) 1 3

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

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

Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB) takes 5 of 6 categories.

CPU

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Vendor GenuineIntel GenuineIntel
Model Name DO-Regular Intel Xeon Processor (Cascadelake)
Clock Speed (MHz) 2,294.60 2,893.17
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 4,589.20 5,786.33
Events per Second 843.27 1,021.39
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.05 0.89
Average Latency (ms) 1.18 0.98
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.34 2.88
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.47 1.12

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,368,867.41 4,986,398.08
Mebibytes per second 3,289.91 4,869.53
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.83 0.86
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Operations per second 3,248,162.62 5,001,584.28
Mebibytes per second 3,172.03 4,884.36
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.26 0.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Reads per Second 545.13 5,577.48
Writes per Second 363.42 3,718.32
Fsyncs per Second 1,169.66 11,911.32
Read Mebibytes per Second 8.52 87.15
Written Mebibytes per Second 5.68 58.10
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.48 0.05
Maximum Latency (ms) 78.76 5.29
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.79 0.15

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 2,099.34 1,709.06
Average Latency (ms) 2,145.49 1,721.94
Maximum Latency (ms) 2,160.95 1,728.31
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2,159.29 1,739.68

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,001.00 7,873.00
Queries per second 50,010.00 78,730.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.21 1.05
Average Latency (ms) 2 1.27
Maximum Latency (ms) 17.66 3.75
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.66 1.55

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 738.00 9,331.00
Queries per second 7,380.00 93,310.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 4.83 0.77
Average Latency (ms) 13.55 1.07
Maximum Latency (ms) 58.05 6.46
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 25.28 1.47

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 613.00 3,770.00
Queries per second 6,130.00 37,700.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 7.34 2.02
Average Latency (ms) 16.32 2.65
Maximum Latency (ms) 67.72 13.8
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 30.81 3.3

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,035.00 16,828.00
Queries per second 10,350.00 168,280.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 3.79 0.43
Average Latency (ms) 9.65 0.59
Maximum Latency (ms) 48.93 3.44
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 16.71 0.78

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 734,741.00 1,201,092.00
Queries per second 7,347,410.00 12,010,920.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.01
Maximum Latency (ms) 888.59 343.87
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 128,886.00 197,771.00
Queries per second 1,288,860.00 1,977,710.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.05 0.04
Average Latency (ms) 0.08 0.05
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.52 2.68
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.12 0.08

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,691.00 5,632.00
Queries per second 26,910.00 56,320.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.22 0.64
Average Latency (ms) 3.71 1.77
Maximum Latency (ms) 15.34 5.59
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 5.28 2.35

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,433.00 7,779.00
Queries per second 34,330.00 77,790.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.79 0.41
Average Latency (ms) 2.91 1.28
Maximum Latency (ms) 7.06 3.5
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 5 1.73

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,000.00 17,005.00
Queries per second 10,000.00 170,050.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 3.62 0.43
Average Latency (ms) 9.99 0.59
Maximum Latency (ms) 38.48 4.03
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 18.28 0.81

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 835.00 17,369.00
Queries per second 8,350.00 173,690.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 3.33 0.42
Average Latency (ms) 11.98 0.57
Maximum Latency (ms) 340.24 3.59
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 24.38 0.75

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,488.00 137,403.00
Queries per second 34,880.00 1,374,030.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.04
Average Latency (ms) 2.87 0.07
Maximum Latency (ms) 57.43 1.75
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 14.73 0.14

Redis

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 32,051.28 44,563.28
PING_MBULK per Second 29,629.63 44,014.08
SET per Second 30,571.69 44,782.80
GET per Second 26,511.13 43,440.48
INCR per Second 36,469.73 42,553.19
LPUSH per Second 26,709.40 44,702.73
RPUSH per Second 23,741.69 44,014.08
LPOP per Second 29,700.03 42,863.27
RPOP per Second 28,985.51 43,047.79
SADD per Second 29,700.03 44,345.89
HSET per Second 29,770.77 43,917.44
SPOP per Second 28,473.80 43,554.01
ZADD per Second 29,806.26 44,052.86
ZPOPMIN per Second 31,104.20 44,523.60
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 17,519.27 29,239.77
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 7,340.53 16,025.64
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 5,113.52 11,116.05
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 4,561.42 9,961.15
MSET (10 keys) per Second 30,562.35 40,783.04

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB) Vultr – High Performance Intel (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.970.68
PING_MBULK1.030.67
SET1.030.68
GET1.180.69
INCR0.850.71
LPUSH1.180.68
RPUSH1.310.70
LPOP1.050.72
RPOP1.080.72
SADD1.040.69
HSET1.050.70
SPOP1.080.70
ZADD1.050.70
ZPOPMIN0.990.68
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)1.841.08
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)4.071.96
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)5.662.86
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)6.313.15
MSET (10 keys)1.250.80

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The Vultr High Performance Intel (2 GB) instance outperforms the DigitalOcean Regular (1 GB) instance in most benchmarks, especially in Redis operations with significantly higher requests per second and lower latencies, e.g., the LPUSH operation achieved 44702.73 rps with an average latency of 0.684 ms compared to DigitalOcean's 26709.4 rps and 1.177 ms. Additionally, the Vultr instance excels in CPU and MySQL bulk insert benchmarks, showing 1021.39 events per second and 119731.62 TPS respectively. Overall, the Vultr instance is better suited for CPU-intensive and I/O-heavy tasks, while the DigitalOcean instance is more budget-friendly if headroom and slightly lower performance are acceptable.

From the friendly human:

If you found this VPS Showdown helpful in your search for a hosting provider, please consider supporting my efforts by signing up using my referral links for DigitalOcean and Vultr.

You can also support me next time you shop on Amazon.

Related comparisons

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