Linode Nanode (1 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Regular (1 GB)

Welcome to another round of the VPS Showdown. Today I've spun up some brand new instance from DigitalOcean and Linode and ran my world famous suite of benchmarking scripts. Each instance was spun up with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64 and were created in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Time to see who showed up today.

Overview

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Last Benchmarked	Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:00:52 GMT	Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:00:52 GMT
Linux Distro	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version	6.8.0-71-generic	6.8.0-71-generic
MySQL Version	8.0.44-0ubuntu0.24.04.2	8.0.44-0ubuntu0.24.04.2
Redis Version	7.0.15	7.0.15
Location	Newark, NJ	New York, NY
Monthly Price	$5.00	$6.00
RAM (GB)	1	1
CPU Cores	1	1
Storage (TB)	25	25
Storage Type	SSD	SSD
Transfer (TB)	1	1

CPU

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Vendor	AuthenticAMD	GenuineIntel
Model Name	AMD EPYC 7713 64-Core Processor	DO-Regular
Clock Speed (MHz)	2,000.00	2,294.61
CPU Cache Size (KB)	512.00	4,096.00
BogoMips	3,999.99	4,589.21
Events per Second	1,696.55	460.64
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.28	0.97
Average Latency (ms)	0.57	2.17
Maximum Latency (ms)	8.35	5.86
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	2.76	3.62

Memory Read

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Operations per second	3,710,655.78	2,759,292.62
Mebibytes per second	3,623.69	2,694.62
Minimum Latency (ms)	0	0
Average Latency (ms)	0	0
Maximum Latency (ms)	6.08	3.55
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0	0

Memory Write

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Operations per second	5,361,073.52	3,811,404.42
Mebibytes per second	5,235.42	3,722.07
Minimum Latency (ms)	0	0
Average Latency (ms)	0	0
Maximum Latency (ms)	0.32	1.03
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0	0

File I/O

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Reads per Second	2,090.82	1,889.66
Writes per Second	1,393.91	1,259.77
Fsyncs per Second	4,462.12	4,041.51
Read Mebibytes per Second	32.67	29.53
Written Mebibytes per Second	21.78	19.68
Minimum Latency (ms)	0	0
Average Latency (ms)	0.13	0.14
Maximum Latency (ms)	3.84	6.41
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0.31	0.38

Mutex

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms)	1,691.70	1,820.55
Average Latency (ms)	1,702.25	1,835.23
Maximum Latency (ms)	1,711.53	1,845.93
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1,708.63	1,836.24

MySQL Read-only

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	7,867.00	6,018.00
Queries per second	78,670.00	60,180.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	1.17	1.21
Average Latency (ms)	1.27	1.66
Maximum Latency (ms)	8.46	9.12
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1.44	2.11

MySQL Write-only

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	5,861.00	2,695.00
Queries per second	58,610.00	26,950.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	1.05	2.05
Average Latency (ms)	1.7	3.7
Maximum Latency (ms)	5.54	39.1
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	2.3	5.09

MySQL Read/Write

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	3,019.00	1,693.00
Queries per second	30,190.00	16,930.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	2.5	3.89
Average Latency (ms)	3.31	5.9
Maximum Latency (ms)	8.17	27.97
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	4.1	7.56

MySQL INSERT

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	9,073.00	4,397.00
Queries per second	90,730.00	43,970.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.64	1.47
Average Latency (ms)	1.1	2.27
Maximum Latency (ms)	19.67	10.52
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1.42	3.13

MySQL Bulk INSERT

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	1,521,467.00	865,805.00
Queries per second	15,214,670.00	8,658,050.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0	0
Average Latency (ms)	0.01	0.01
Maximum Latency (ms)	331.87	534
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0	0

MySQL SELECT

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	162,791.00	160,781.00
Queries per second	1,627,910.00	1,607,810.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.05	0.04
Average Latency (ms)	0.06	0.06
Maximum Latency (ms)	3.24	2.38
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0.08	0.1

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	9,655.00	4,346.00
Queries per second	96,550.00	43,460.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.29	0.69
Average Latency (ms)	1.03	2.3
Maximum Latency (ms)	5.08	9.26
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1.32	3.43

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	10,008.00	4,243.00
Queries per second	100,080.00	42,430.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.24	0.57
Average Latency (ms)	1	2.35
Maximum Latency (ms)	5.91	8.6
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1.27	4.18

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	8,909.00	3,843.00
Queries per second	89,090.00	38,430.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.66	1.48
Average Latency (ms)	1.12	2.6
Maximum Latency (ms)	5.21	48.5
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1.58	3.96

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	8,627.00	4,146.00
Queries per second	86,270.00	41,460.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.67	1.48
Average Latency (ms)	1.16	2.41
Maximum Latency (ms)	9.33	89.28
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	1.55	3.25

MySQL DELETE

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
Transactions per second	80,867.00	28,617.00
Queries per second	808,670.00	286,170.00
Minimum Latency (ms)	0.05	0.04
Average Latency (ms)	0.12	0.35
Maximum Latency (ms)	5.05	20.62
95th Percentile Latency (ms)	0.37	2.22

Redis

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second	46,339.20	48,614.49
PING_MBULK per Second	47,036.69	45,146.73
SET per Second	46,620.05	43,706.29
GET per Second	45,495.91	46,490.00
INCR per Second	46,339.20	44,964.03
LPUSH per Second	45,934.77	42,662.11
RPUSH per Second	46,970.41	42,789.90
LPOP per Second	45,871.56	46,554.93
RPOP per Second	46,040.52	43,821.21
SADD per Second	46,339.20	47,528.52
HSET per Second	46,189.38	45,126.35
SPOP per Second	46,970.41	47,778.31
ZADD per Second	45,955.88	41,841.00
ZPOPMIN per Second	47,014.57	49,900.20
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second	31,715.82	19,770.66
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second	17,780.94	9,430.40
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second	12,304.66	5,985.87
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second	10,728.46	5,319.15
MSET (10 keys) per Second	42,716.79	40,387.72

Redis Average Latency (ms)

	Linode – Nanode (1 GB)	DigitalOcean – Regular (1 GB)
PING_INLINE	0.74	0.69
PING_MBULK	0.73	0.73
SET	0.74	0.77
GET	0.75	0.72
INCR	0.74	0.74
LPUSH	0.74	0.79
RPUSH	0.73	0.78
LPOP	0.75	0.72
RPOP	0.74	0.77
SADD	0.74	0.70
HSET	0.74	0.74
SPOP	0.73	0.69
ZADD	0.75	0.81
ZPOPMIN	0.73	0.67
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)	1.09	1.82
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)	1.95	3.82
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)	2.73	5.91
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)	3.18	6.66
MSET (10 keys)	0.82	0.89

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

After analyzing the benchmark results for both DigitalOcean's Regular (1 GB) and Linode's Nanode (1 GB), it's clear that Linode's instance outperforms DigitalOcean's in most metrics, particularly in Redis operations and CPU throughput, likely due to the more powerful AMD EPYC processor. DigitalOcean's instance shows slightly better file I/O performance and lower latency in MySQL operations. For CPU-intensive tasks and high Redis throughput, Linode's Nanode is the better choice, while for scenarios where file I/O and MySQL performance are more critical, DigitalOcean's Regular instance might be more suitable.

From the friendly human:

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