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

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New day, new benchmarks. Today I spun up fresh instances from UpCloud and Vultr to run some benchmarks on. All instances were spun up with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and were created in the New York area (or close to it). Enough talk. Here's the data.

Overview

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:32:51 GMT Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:36:36 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 7.0.0-14-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 €13.00 $12.00
RAM (GB) 2 2
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 50 64
Storage Type SSD NVMe
Transfer (TB) 2 2

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

CategoryWinner
CPU (events/sec)UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB)
Memory (read MiB/s)Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Disk I/O (MiB/s)Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
MySQL (read/write tps)Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Redis (GET/sec)Tie
Value (CPU events per $/mo)UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB)

Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB) takes 3 of 6 categories.

CPU

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Vendor AuthenticAMD GenuineIntel
Model Name AMD EPYC 9575F 64-Core Processor Intel Core Processor (Skylake, IBRS, no TSX)
Clock Speed (MHz) 3,295.48 3,792.05
CPU Cache Size (KB) 512.00 16,384.00
BogoMips 6,590.95 7,584.10
Events per Second 4,956.10 1,466.74
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.18 0.67
Average Latency (ms) 0.2 0.68
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.23 3.3
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.21 0.72

Memory

Memory Read

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Operations per second 7,348,809.99 7,681,495.84
Mebibytes per second 7,176.57 7,501.46
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 0.4 0.58
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Operations per second 7,078,785.07 7,602,534.50
Mebibytes per second 6,912.88 7,424.35
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.2 0.35
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Reads per Second 3,766.66 4,496.60
Writes per Second 2,511.11 2,997.70
Fsyncs per Second 8,036.14 9,593.60
Read Mebibytes per Second 58.85 70.26
Written Mebibytes per Second 39.24 46.84
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.07 0.06
Maximum Latency (ms) 19.19 2.12
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.24 0.18

Mutex

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 1,248.77 1,184.90
Average Latency (ms) 1,256.62 1,190.04
Maximum Latency (ms) 1,260.30 1,196.73
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1,258.08 1,191.92

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 16,759.00 9,469.00
Queries per second 167,590.00 94,690.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.41 0.89
Average Latency (ms) 0.6 1.06
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.26 5.85
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.75 2.03

MySQL Write-only

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,115.00 10,900.00
Queries per second 61,150.00 109,000.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.73 0.63
Average Latency (ms) 1.63 0.92
Maximum Latency (ms) 30.18 8.97
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.76 1.18

MySQL Read/Write

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 4,692.00 4,779.00
Queries per second 46,920.00 47,790.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.24 1.69
Average Latency (ms) 2.13 2.09
Maximum Latency (ms) 23.43 7.55
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.86 2.52

MySQL INSERT

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 8,886.00 19,198.00
Queries per second 88,860.00 191,980.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.5 0.37
Average Latency (ms) 1.12 0.52
Maximum Latency (ms) 26.84 4.58
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.93 0.65

MySQL Bulk INSERT

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,278,717.00 2,016,592.00
Queries per second 22,787,170.00 20,165,920.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 236.89 230.01
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 425,431.00 218,879.00
Queries per second 4,254,310.00 2,188,790.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.02 0.04
Average Latency (ms) 0.02 0.05
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.3 2
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.03 0.05

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 9,684.00 7,852.00
Queries per second 96,840.00 78,520.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.29 0.41
Average Latency (ms) 1.03 1.27
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.24 3.85
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.37 1.7

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 15,489.00 11,560.00
Queries per second 154,890.00 115,600.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.15 0.29
Average Latency (ms) 0.64 0.86
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.79 3.31
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.99 1.12

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 10,759.00 18,734.00
Queries per second 107,590.00 187,340.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.46 0.38
Average Latency (ms) 0.93 0.53
Maximum Latency (ms) 34.7 4.34
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.39 0.72

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 11,023.00 18,579.00
Queries per second 110,230.00 185,790.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.45 0.37
Average Latency (ms) 0.91 0.54
Maximum Latency (ms) 33.4 12.7
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.32 0.69

MySQL DELETE

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
Transactions per second 212,798.00 154,977.00
Queries per second 2,127,980.00 1,549,770.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.02 0.04
Average Latency (ms) 0.05 0.06
Maximum Latency (ms) 19.8 4.05
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.05 0.09

Redis

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 55,126.79 54,734.54
PING_MBULK per Second 54,794.52 53,475.94
SET per Second 55,710.31 54,288.82
GET per Second 55,340.34 54,914.88
INCR per Second 54,734.54 55,401.66
LPUSH per Second 52,994.17 53,792.36
RPUSH per Second 56,689.34 54,525.63
LPOP per Second 57,240.98 53,078.56
RPOP per Second 57,110.22 52,631.58
SADD per Second 55,401.66 54,436.58
HSET per Second 55,218.11 53,619.30
SPOP per Second 55,524.71 54,734.54
ZADD per Second 56,561.09 52,659.29
ZPOPMIN per Second 53,191.49 53,561.86
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 45,998.16 36,845.98
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 24,987.51 22,696.32
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 18,031.01 15,885.62
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 16,369.29 13,700.51
MSET (10 keys) per Second 54,884.74 50,968.40

Redis Average Latency (ms)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Frequency Intel (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.540.56
PING_MBULK0.530.57
SET0.550.57
GET0.550.56
INCR0.560.56
LPUSH0.580.58
RPUSH0.540.57
LPOP0.540.59
RPOP0.540.59
SADD0.550.57
HSET0.560.58
SPOP0.540.56
ZADD0.550.59
ZPOPMIN0.560.57
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)0.710.84
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)1.291.44
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)1.772.04
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)2.062.35
MSET (10 keys)0.650.64

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The UpCloud Balanced instance edges out the Vultr High Frequency Intel instance in most benchmarks, particularly in CPU and MySQL throughput where the UpCloud instance scores significantly higher at 4956.1 events per second compared to Vultr's 1466.74 and delivers higher MySQL OLTP read-write throughput at 469.04 TPS against Vultr's 477.77. This makes the UpCloud instance a better choice for CPU-intensive and database-driven applications requiring high throughput and low latency, whereas the Vultr instance may suffice for scenarios demanding high I/O performance and lower budgets.

From the friendly human:

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