If you are looking for an unmanaged VPS, then Digital Ocean and RamNode are both worthy contenders. Both offer SSD hard drives that are supposed to be faster than the conventional hard drives.
Both are reputed to own their own hardware and co-locate with well known datacenters.
The pricing of both is very reasonable.
If you are planning to load apache, php and mysql and wordpress on the VPS, then it is desirable to have 1 GB RAM. You can manage with less though at times of traffic, your mysql may crash for want of memory and lead to unpleasant experience for the visitors.
The Digital Ocean and RamNode VPS stack up as follows:
| Details | Digital Ocean | RamNode* |
| Memory | 1 GB | 1 GB |
| CPU | 1 Core | 4 Cores @ 3.3 GHz |
| Hard Disk | 30 GB SSD | 30 GB SSD |
| Bandwidth | 2 TB | 3 TB |
| IPv4 address | 1 | 2 |
| Price | $10 | $10.50 |
| Port | 100MBps | 1Gbps |
* Based on an offer in WHT in Sept 2013
Lets look at the performance of the Digital Ocean VPS first
CPU model : QEMU Virtual CPU version 1.0
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 2299.998 MHz
Total amount of ram : 491 MB
Total amount of swap : 0 MB
System uptime : 19 days, 23:01,
Download speed : (7.52MB/s)
I/O speed : 276MB/s
Now lets look at the performance of the RamNode VPS
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz
Number of cores : 4
CPU frequency : 3300.161 MHz
Total amount of ram : 1024 MB
Total amount of swap : 1024 MB
System uptime : 15:47,
Download speed : (34.3MB/s)
I/O speed : 625MB/s
Well, as you can see, for the same price (~ $20) you are getting slightly more with RamNode with a better processor, better download speed, better I/O and an extra IPv4 address.
Support is a bit slow with RamNode. I haven’t tried Digital Ocean support but I suppose it will also be slow.
For reference purposes, the BurstNet Premium 1 GB RAM VPS (~$20) (non SSD) specs are as follows:
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3210 @ 2.13GHz
Number of cores : 2
CPU frequency : 2133.407 MHz
Total amount of ram : 2049 MB
Total amount of swap : 0 MB
System uptime : 14 days, 9:41,
Download speed : (10.8MB/s)
I/O speed : 67.5MB/s
Yes. More than enough. Use a cache plugin. What is relevant is the number of concurrent visitors on the site at any point of time. For instance, if you get 10,000 visitors in a day, but they come in evenly over a 12 hour period, you have only 800+ visitors in an hour or 13 visitors a second. Your 512MB RAM VPS can handle this easily. However, if all 10,000 come together, then even a dedicated VPS with 4GB RAM may crumple. What is also relevant is whether the visitors will just browse pages or download files etc.
Hi
Thank you for that comparison. Do you think an OpenVZ SSD VPS plan with 512 megabyte of RAM is enough for running 4 WP website (very low traffic)? I will set up it with LEMP without any contol panel.
I have a server in digital ocean(6 month and still going, netherlands server) and their support has been blazing fast. I never had any issues at all, I only messaged them for random silly questions, I never had any downtime(not that I noticed). The server for 5$ has been very solid. Ramnode is very highly rated as well and I am considering getting an openvz server there because digital ocean storage is very tiny(40 GB for 20$ vs ramnode's 150 GB for 15$ ) however, Ramnode has a policy about using more than one core's worth for an "extended period" ( whatever that means) So even if you get a quad core, you can't deploy anything that uses more than one core. I'll stick to DO for cpu intensive apps(they don't have such a policy) and I will know that the core I bought is my core. And I'll use ramnode for file storage…The worst time I would want my server suspended is when my product is getting popular…
Do you know if it is possible to clone one Ramnode VPS into another?
I am using the IGB RAM VPS with the following specifications:
1024MB SVZ
• RAM: 1024MB
• VSwap: 1024MB
• Cores: 4 @ 3.3GHz+
• 30GB RAID10 SSD Space
• 1 IPv4 Address (+1 FREE)
• 16 IPv6 Addresses
• 3000GB Bandwidth
I’m using Ramnode OpenVZ SSD VPS:
Can I know what plan are you using to get the results above for Ramnode?
Mine is:
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz
Number of cores : 4
CPU frequency : 3300.178 MHz
Total amount of ram : 4096 MB
Total amount of swap : 4096 MB
System uptime : 8 days, 16:31,
Download speed : (54.8MB/s)
I/O speed : 849MB/s
Hello,
Can you include a upload test too.
A python tool is available here https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli
I did that here using the python tool: http://vps2.me/how-to-check-upload-download-speeds-of-vps/
I can do it again:
Digital Ocean Upload & Download Speed Test
vps@ubuntu:~$ python speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Testing from Digital Ocean (37.139.22.14)…
Selecting best server based on ping…
Hosted by Elite Game Servers (Dronten) [4.33 km]: 13.272 ms
Testing download speed………………………………….
Download: 441.65 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed…………………………………………..
Upload: 257.06 Mbit/s
vps@ubuntu:~$
RamNode Upload & Download Speed Test
root@vps:~# python speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Testing from RouteLabel V.O.F. (176.56.236.46)…
Selecting best server based on ping…
Hosted by Solcon (Dronten) [4.33 km]: 9.696 ms
Testing download speed………………………………….
Download: 513.09 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed…………………………………………..
Upload: 281.01 Mbit/s
root@vps:~#
Both are awesome. If you want the Disk I/O then here it is:
Digital Ocean I/O:
vps@ubuntu:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 5.52465 s, 194 MB/s
vps@ubuntu:~$
root@vps:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.06351 s, 1.0 GB/s
root@vps:~#
Ramnode touched 1 GB/sec which is a record, I think.