UpCloud Balanced (1 GB) vs. Vultr Cloud Compute (2 GB)

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Fresh benchmarks coming at ya. Today I've got brand new instances from UpCloud and Vultr and ran some benchmarks. Each instance was running 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

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Thu, 01 Oct 2026 05:02:17 GMT Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:06:02 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 7.0.0-29-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 €7.00 $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)UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB)
Memory (read MiB/s)UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB)
Disk I/O (MiB/s)UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB)
Redis (GET/sec)UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB)
Value (CPU events per $/mo)UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) takes 5 of 5 categories.

CPU

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Vendor AuthenticAMD GenuineIntel
Model Name AMD EPYC 9575F 64-Core Processor Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
Clock Speed (MHz) 3,295.42 2,593.90
CPU Cache Size (KB) 512.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 6,590.84 5,187.80
Events per Second 4,771.17 811.02
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.19 0.96
Average Latency (ms) 0.21 1.23
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.26 5.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.23 1.61

Memory

Memory Read

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Operations per second 6,936,402.22 2,932,814.92
Mebibytes per second 6,773.83 2,864.08
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 0.35 2.06
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Operations per second 6,762,728.29 3,012,810.64
Mebibytes per second 6,604.23 2,942.20
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.65 2.18
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Reads per Second 2,763.16 1,720.67
Writes per Second 1,842.11 1,147.11
Fsyncs per Second 5,897.24 3,681.86
Read Mebibytes per Second 43.17 26.89
Written Mebibytes per Second 28.78 17.92
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.09 0.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 44.23 13.92
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.3 0.55

Mutex

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 1,275.54 2,497.94
Average Latency (ms) 1,282.62 2,514.76
Maximum Latency (ms) 1,289.72 2,531.03
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1,280.93 2,539.17

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 4,434.00
Queries per second 0.00 44,340.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 1.67
Average Latency (ms) 0 2.25
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 6.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 2.81

MySQL Write-only

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 3,735.00
Queries per second 0.00 37,350.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 1.39
Average Latency (ms) 0 2.67
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 23.22
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 3.68

MySQL Read/Write

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 1,945.00
Queries per second 0.00 19,450.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 3.65
Average Latency (ms) 0 5.13
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 12.99
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 6.79

MySQL INSERT

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 7,066.00
Queries per second 0.00 70,660.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0.79
Average Latency (ms) 0 1.41
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 11.58
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 1.96

MySQL Bulk INSERT

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 669,209.00
Queries per second 0.00 6,692,090.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0.02
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 671.55
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 122,191.00
Queries per second 0.00 1,221,910.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0 0.08
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 2.56
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0.12

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 2,672.00
Queries per second 0.00 26,720.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 1.31
Average Latency (ms) 0 3.74
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 9.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 5.09

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 2,421.00
Queries per second 0.00 24,210.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 1.47
Average Latency (ms) 0 4.13
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 8.77
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 5.88

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 6,495.00
Queries per second 0.00 64,950.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0.8
Average Latency (ms) 0 1.54
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 18.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 2.22

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 6,851.00
Queries per second 0.00 68,510.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0.75
Average Latency (ms) 0 1.46
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 14.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 2.03

MySQL DELETE

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
Transactions per second 0.00 45,040.00
Queries per second 0.00 450,400.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0 0.22
Maximum Latency (ms) 0 16.88
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 1.34

Redis

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 36,218.76 27,419.80
PING_MBULK per Second 45,454.54 29,069.77
SET per Second 48,449.61 26,476.04
GET per Second 48,685.49 22,988.51
INCR per Second 48,449.61 23,618.33
LPUSH per Second 50,175.61 24,201.36
RPUSH per Second 48,828.12 25,252.53
LPOP per Second 50,942.43 25,568.91
RPOP per Second 49,603.17 25,227.04
SADD per Second 47,438.33 27,472.53
HSET per Second 48,685.49 25,207.96
SPOP per Second 46,403.71 28,320.59
ZADD per Second 47,687.18 26,838.43
ZPOPMIN per Second 47,103.16 27,824.15
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 36,114.12 14,322.54
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 23,266.64 7,071.64
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 15,227.65 4,639.51
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 11,837.12 4,115.40
MSET (10 keys) per Second 44,964.03 23,402.76

Redis Average Latency (ms)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – Cloud Compute (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.881.11
PING_MBULK0.641.04
SET0.631.16
GET0.611.32
INCR0.621.28
LPUSH0.611.27
RPUSH0.621.21
LPOP0.611.21
RPOP0.621.23
SADD0.631.12
HSET0.621.22
SPOP0.641.09
ZADD0.651.16
ZPOPMIN0.631.10
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)0.872.14
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)1.384.07
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)2.086.04
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)2.626.75
MSET (10 keys)0.761.58

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The UpCloud instance wins overall due to superior Redis benchmarks, especially with operations like LPUSH and LRANGE achieving higher RPS and lower average latencies compared to the Vultr instance. While Vultr provides more RAM and has a higher throughput in MySQL bulk inserts, UpCloud's CPU and memory performance metrics are more favorable, making it better suited for CPU-intensive and memory-dependent tasks.

From the friendly human:

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