Linode has recently increased the CPU from 4 cores to 8 cores, and also doubled memories of all their plans.

To be honest, I really don’t know how 8 cores could be fully utilized for a website, with their 1GB or 2GB memory plans. I really wish they should have upgraded to SSD disk, I think that’s the real bottleneck for lower plans.

In the mean time, Digital Ocean is becoming a real competitor, its $5 and $10 low price server options with SSD disk make it stands out.

I purchased and benchmarked 3 different servers:

DigitalOcean 1G: 1 Core CPU, 1GB RAM, 30GB SSD $10 /month
DigitalOcean 2G 2 Cores CPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD $20 /month
Linode 1G 8 Cores CPU, 1GB RAM, 24GB Storage $20 /month

All servers have Ubuntu 12.04 x64 server version installed freshly. Servers from Digital Ocean are all located at New York, whereas Linode server is located at Atlanta. I use the test script from ServerBear.

Detailed results can be found at the links below:

UnixBench Results

DigitalOcean1G:

UnixBench (w/ all processors) 1387.1
UnixBench (w/ one processor) 1386.6

DigitalOcean2G:

UnixBench (w/ all processors) 1873.1
UnixBench (w/ one processor) 1183.7

Linode1G:

UnixBench (w/ all processors) 1860.7
UnixBench (w/ one processor) 491.4

UnixBench gives us a basic idea of the system’s performance. I’m really surprised that Linode’s 8 cores didn’t play well as I expect. To give you an idea of how bad it is, below is the test of one of my cheap 4 Cores dedicated server from OVH:

UnixBench (w/ all processors) 4017.1
UnixBench (w/ one processor) 1603.1

This gives you an idea about how REAL dedicated cores really perform :grin:

IOPS FIO Results

DigitalOcean1G:

Read IOPS 4444.0
Read Bandwidth 17.7 MB/second

Write IOPS 2295.0
Write Bandwidth 9.1 MB/second

DigitalOcean2G:

Read IOPS 3838.0
Read Bandwidth 15.3 MB/second

Write IOPS 2572.0
Write Bandwidth 10.2 MB/second

Linode1G:

Read IOPS 776.0
Read Bandwidth 3.1 MB/second

Write IOPS 624.0
Write Bandwidth 2.4 MB/second

FIO provides a view of system’s I/O performance. Without SSD, Linode did play bad as I expect. But the result is about right at the average level of existing VPSs.

Conclusion

Yes, yes, these raw performance results don’t mean everything. But not everyone can resist the temptation from a cheaper server with better performance.