UpCloud Balanced (1 GB) vs. Vultr High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)

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My friend, I'm so glad you're here! Today I've spun up brand new instance from UpCloud and Vultr to run some benchmarks on. Each instance was running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64 and were created in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Without further ado, here's the results.

Overview

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Last Benchmarked Sun, 31 May 2026 22:00:51 GMT Sun, 31 May 2026 13:00:55 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 6.8.0-111-generic 6.8.0-117-generic
MySQL Version 8.0.45-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 8.0.45-0ubuntu0.24.04.1
Redis Version 7.0.15 7.0.15
Location New York, NY Newark, NJ
Monthly Price €7.00 $18.00
RAM (GB) 1 2
CPU Cores 1 2
Storage (TB) 25 80
Storage Type SSD NVMe
Transfer (TB) 1 3

CPU

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Vendor AuthenticAMD GenuineIntel
Model Name AMD EPYC 9575F 64-Core Processor Intel Core Processor (Skylake, IBRS, no TSX)
Clock Speed (MHz) 3,295.46 3,791.98
CPU Cache Size (KB) 512.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 6,590.91 7,583.95
Events per Second 5,794.96 1,552.05
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.16 0.62
Average Latency (ms) 0.17 0.64
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.23 4.61
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.18 0.69

Memory

Memory Read

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Operations per second 8,052,564.60 7,875,668.83
Mebibytes per second 7,863.83 7,691.08
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.04 0.12
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Operations per second 7,948,457.28 7,729,812.11
Mebibytes per second 7,762.17 7,548.64
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.02 0.16
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Reads per Second 4,287.35 4,671.85
Writes per Second 2,858.23 3,114.56
Fsyncs per Second 9,154.54 9,976.90
Read Mebibytes per Second 66.99 73.00
Written Mebibytes per Second 44.66 48.67
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.06 0.06
Maximum Latency (ms) 31.06 2.76
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.21 0.17

Mutex

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Minimum Latency (ms) 1,119.74 543.27
Average Latency (ms) 1,130.13 554.74
Maximum Latency (ms) 1,135.70 563.70
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1,129.24 559.50

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 25,948.00 10,621.00
Queries per second 259,480.00 106,210.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.28 0.86
Average Latency (ms) 0.38 0.94
Maximum Latency (ms) 6.93 2.5
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.55 1.03

MySQL Write-only

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 8,119.00 10,229.00
Queries per second 81,190.00 102,290.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.55 0.64
Average Latency (ms) 1.23 0.98
Maximum Latency (ms) 21.4 2.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.14 1.23

MySQL Read/Write

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 5,957.00 5,072.00
Queries per second 59,570.00 50,720.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.96 1.59
Average Latency (ms) 1.68 1.97
Maximum Latency (ms) 25.41 3.94
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.26 2.39

MySQL INSERT

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 9,228.00 16,038.00
Queries per second 92,280.00 160,380.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.4 0.38
Average Latency (ms) 1.08 0.62
Maximum Latency (ms) 122.36 13.18
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.73 0.8

MySQL Bulk INSERT

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 3,239,842.00 2,424,342.00
Queries per second 32,398,420.00 24,243,420.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 164.27 205.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 795,867.00 241,313.00
Queries per second 7,958,670.00 2,413,130.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.01 0.03
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.04
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.71 0.76
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.02 0.05

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 16,199.00 12,080.00
Queries per second 161,990.00 120,800.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.12 0.21
Average Latency (ms) 0.62 0.83
Maximum Latency (ms) 117.1 3.31
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.97 1.04

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 19,217.00 10,527.00
Queries per second 192,170.00 105,270.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.16 0.16
Average Latency (ms) 0.52 0.95
Maximum Latency (ms) 3.51 3.25
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.8 1.23

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 11,047.00 17,123.00
Queries per second 110,470.00 171,230.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.38 0.38
Average Latency (ms) 0.9 0.58
Maximum Latency (ms) 68.36 2
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.34 0.78

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 11,479.00 16,979.00
Queries per second 114,790.00 169,790.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.36 0.38
Average Latency (ms) 0.87 0.59
Maximum Latency (ms) 55.99 4.13
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.25 0.8

MySQL DELETE

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
Transactions per second 421,206.00 156,424.00
Queries per second 4,212,060.00 1,564,240.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.01 0.03
Average Latency (ms) 0.02 0.06
Maximum Latency (ms) 39.7 4.87
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.02 0.07

Redis

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
PING_INLINE per Second 171,821.30 88,652.48
PING_MBULK per Second 175,438.59 89,605.73
SET per Second 161,290.33 90,171.33
GET per Second 166,112.95 90,579.71
INCR per Second 173,913.05 90,744.10
LPUSH per Second 161,030.59 90,497.73
RPUSH per Second 171,526.58 90,415.91
LPOP per Second 170,648.45 90,909.09
RPOP per Second 169,491.53 90,661.83
SADD per Second 161,812.31 90,252.70
HSET per Second 156,006.25 90,415.91
SPOP per Second 168,067.22 89,928.05
ZADD per Second 149,700.61 90,415.91
ZPOPMIN per Second 166,389.34 90,009.01
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 88,967.98 66,533.60
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 40,257.65 36,179.45
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 28,490.03 26,239.83
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 25,056.38 22,547.91
MSET (10 keys) per Second 154,320.98 88,105.73

Redis Average Latency (ms)

UpCloud – Balanced (1 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores)
PING_INLINE0.190.30
PING_MBULK0.190.29
SET0.210.29
GET0.200.29
INCR0.190.28
LPUSH0.210.29
RPUSH0.200.29
LPOP0.200.28
RPOP0.200.28
SADD0.210.29
HSET0.220.29
SPOP0.200.29
ZADD0.230.29
ZPOPMIN0.200.29
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)0.410.39
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)0.890.71
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)1.260.97
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)1.431.14
MSET (10 keys)0.230.30

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

After analyzing the benchmark results for both the UpCloud Balanced (1 GB) and Vultr High Frequency Intel (2 GB, 2 Cores) instances, it is clear that the Vultr instance outperforms the UpCloud in most metrics, particularly in Redis benchmarks where it achieves higher requests per second and lower latencies for various operations. The Vultr instance also provides more CPU cores and RAM, which translates to better performance in CPU-intensive tasks and multitasking. File I/O operations are similarly faster on the Vultr instance. However, the UpCloud instance shows slightly better thread fairness and lower latency for MySQL OLTP operations. In terms of ideal use cases, the Vultr instance is better suited for high-frequency tasks, larger datasets, and applications that benefit from more CPU power and RAM, while the UpCloud instance might be preferred for applications where MySQL performance and thread fairness are critical.

From the friendly human:

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