UpCloud Balanced (2 GB) vs. Vultr High Performance AMD (1 GB)

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Welcome to another round of the VPS Showdown. Today I've spun up brand new instance from UpCloud and Vultr and ran my world famous suite of benchmarking scripts. All instances were running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64 and all resided in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Let's get into the numbers.

Overview

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Last Benchmarked Wed, 13 May 2026 07:00:52 GMT Sun, 10 May 2026 21:00:52 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 6.8.0-111-generic 6.8.0-111-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 €13.00 $6.00
RAM (GB) 2 1
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 50 25
Storage Type SSD NVMe
Transfer (TB) 2 2

CPU

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Vendor AuthenticAMD AuthenticAMD
Model Name AMD EPYC 9575F 64-Core Processor AMD EPYC-Genoa Processor
Clock Speed (MHz) 3,295.48 2,899.97
CPU Cache Size (KB) 512.00 1,024.00
BogoMips 6,590.95 5,799.93
Events per Second 5,025.21 4,622.39
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.18 0.2
Average Latency (ms) 0.2 0.22
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.35 1.95
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.22 0.23

Memory

Memory Read

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Operations per second 5,932,400.60 7,509,543.91
Mebibytes per second 5,793.36 7,333.54
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.22 4.72
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Operations per second 6,706,599.41 7,535,339.68
Mebibytes per second 6,549.41 7,358.73
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.56 0.31
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Reads per Second 3,214.64 4,902.51
Writes per Second 2,143.03 3,268.27
Fsyncs per Second 6,864.71 10,464.22
Read Mebibytes per Second 50.23 76.60
Written Mebibytes per Second 33.48 51.07
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.08 0.05
Maximum Latency (ms) 20.14 1.71
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.31 0.11

Mutex

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 1,349.13 1,231.80
Average Latency (ms) 1,353.60 1,235.99
Maximum Latency (ms) 1,361.99 1,242.95
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1,352.03 1,235.62

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 19,090.00 13,277.00
Queries per second 190,900.00 132,770.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.31 0.69
Average Latency (ms) 0.52 0.75
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.34 3.74
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.64 0.8

MySQL Write-only

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 3,974.00 10,040.00
Queries per second 39,740.00 100,400.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.87 0.67
Average Latency (ms) 2.51 0.99
Maximum Latency (ms) 38.67 4.8
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 5 1.39

MySQL Read/Write

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 2,830.00 5,116.00
Queries per second 28,300.00 51,160.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.29 1.57
Average Latency (ms) 3.53 1.95
Maximum Latency (ms) 56.72 6.23
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 6.32 2.39

MySQL INSERT

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 4,647.00 17,372.00
Queries per second 46,470.00 173,720.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.61 0.43
Average Latency (ms) 2.15 0.57
Maximum Latency (ms) 28.58 2.19
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 4.41 0.7

MySQL Bulk INSERT

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 2,249,592.00 2,569,967.00
Queries per second 22,495,920.00 25,699,670.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 207.34 244.33
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 645,161.00 350,666.00
Queries per second 6,451,610.00 3,506,660.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.01 0.02
Average Latency (ms) 0.02 0.03
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.26 3.48
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.02 0.04

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 8,546.00 14,543.00
Queries per second 85,460.00 145,430.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.13 0.24
Average Latency (ms) 1.17 0.69
Maximum Latency (ms) 172.57 3.06
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.58 0.87

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 11,562.00 14,708.00
Queries per second 115,620.00 147,080.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.22 0.24
Average Latency (ms) 0.86 0.68
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.07 2.34
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.27 0.87

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 4,711.00 14,482.00
Queries per second 47,110.00 144,820.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.73 0.43
Average Latency (ms) 2.12 0.69
Maximum Latency (ms) 30.41 12.9
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.96 1.06

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 5,393.00 16,290.00
Queries per second 53,930.00 162,900.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.48 0.43
Average Latency (ms) 1.85 0.61
Maximum Latency (ms) 39 3.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.43 0.87

MySQL DELETE

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
Transactions per second 101,195.00 221,408.00
Queries per second 1,011,950.00 2,214,080.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.01 0.02
Average Latency (ms) 0.1 0.04
Maximum Latency (ms) 39.3 4.12
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.17 0.07

Redis

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 130,208.34 43,233.89
PING_MBULK per Second 130,208.34 43,936.73
SET per Second 130,890.05 43,459.36
GET per Second 129,198.97 43,365.13
INCR per Second 128,534.70 43,516.10
LPUSH per Second 128,040.97 43,402.78
RPUSH per Second 126,582.27 43,402.78
LPOP per Second 124,688.28 43,047.79
RPOP per Second 127,226.46 43,233.89
SADD per Second 129,198.97 43,687.20
HSET per Second 133,511.34 43,290.04
SPOP per Second 139,275.77 38,684.72
ZADD per Second 130,039.02 42,992.26
ZPOPMIN per Second 129,701.68 43,706.29
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 55,524.71 33,670.04
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 28,785.26 21,743.86
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 18,942.98 16,334.53
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 17,038.68 14,539.11
MSET (10 keys) per Second 108,225.10 41,476.57

Redis Average Latency (ms)

UpCloud – Balanced (2 GB) Vultr – High Performance AMD (1 GB)
PING_INLINE0.250.77
PING_MBULK0.250.76
SET0.260.77
GET0.260.77
INCR0.260.77
LPUSH0.260.78
RPUSH0.270.77
LPOP0.270.78
RPOP0.270.78
SADD0.260.77
HSET0.260.77
SPOP0.240.89
ZADD0.260.77
ZPOPMIN0.260.76
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)0.660.99
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)1.271.50
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)1.952.05
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)2.162.30
MSET (10 keys)0.340.81

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The UpCloud Balanced (2 GB) instance demonstrates superior overall performance with higher requests per second (rps) and lower latencies across various benchmarks, especially in Redis operations and MySQL OLTP tasks, indicating it is better suited for CPU-intensive and I/O-heavy workloads. Conversely, the Vultr High Performance AMD (1 GB) instance shows respectable but lower benchmark scores, suggesting it might be more cost-effective for less demanding applications where lower performance isn't a critical factor. Hence, for developers needing high-performance computing and low-latency tasks, the UpCloud instance is preferable, while the Vultr instance could be sufficient for more budget-conscious, less demanding applications.

From the friendly human:

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