VPS Performance Compared

Posted on 16th October 2013 by bwf

Stephen K from management compares the speed of various VPS offerings and documents his findings.

We just deployed our fastest and most powerful VPS platform ever this week and I wanted to spend some time proving to myself that the investment we made was very worthwhile. In order to do this I decided to take 5 different VPS servers and benchmark drive performance using this command

dd if=/dev/zero of=test1 bs=64k count=15k conv=fdatasync

Disk performance is important. If the throughput value is too low then a server will struggle to keep up possibly with requests as CPU will sit idle waiting for data to come from the disks, IO wait time will be high and server load may increase as a result. Appropriately high disk IO is important to ensure your server works efficiently and your web applications do not slow down.

This is very well explained in this blog post:

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2011/02/10/understanding-disk-i-o-when-should-you-be-worried

Our new VPS Platform runs on Dual E5 CPU Servers with SSD Disk Arrays for the fastest possible I/O performance possible.

So how did we do? We deployed 5 VPS Servers for testing as listed below:

A Standard VPS from burst.net
A Droplet from Digital Ocean
A Standard VPS from Bigwetfish
A new SSD VPS from Bigwetfish
An SSD VPS from Dediserve

We ran each test 5 times and you can see all the results documented in the table below. As you can see BWF Hosting and Dediserve came out on top with BWF Standard Hosting in third place, Burst came 4th with Digital Ocean coming 5th. Although this is not a scientific test it shows the clear benefits of ensuring your VPS servers run on an SSD disk array as you can clearly see from BWF Hosting and Dediserve results the difference is remarkable.

Our new SSD VPS servers come at no additional cost and any existing server owner who wants to upgrade should pop a ticket in and we can help. We are also offering free trials with a free comprehensive migration service of our fully managed VPS solutions.

VPS Provider	Test One	Test Two	Test Three	Test Four	Test Five	Average
Bigwetfish SSD	395 MB/s	503 MB/s	505 MB/s	506 MB/s	504 MB/s	482.6 MB/s
Dediserve SSD	377 MB/s	432 MB/s	346 MB/s	442 MB/s	429 MB/s	405.2 MB/s
Bigwetfish Standard	117 MB/s	128 MB/s	112 MB/s	108 MB/s	101 MB/s	113.2 MB/s
Burst	66.2 MB/s	68.9 MB/s	54.1 MB/s	53.8 MB/s	60.9 MB/s	60.7 MB/s
Digital Ocean	56.3 MB/s	46.2 MB/s	41.6 MB/s	41.5 MB/s	44.4 MB/s	46 MB/s

Here are some assumptions and additional information:

BWF Standard VPS servers run on 15k SAS disk arrays which are much faster that standard SATA drives so this would explain the difference between Burst and Digital Ocean Perhaps although we have no knowledge of what storage devices these providers use.
The two providers (Bigwetfish and Dediserve) offering SSD servers clearly show best performance and this should help you make a decision about choosing your next VPS server.
We tried where possible to make all servers similar in specification. Whilst not a scientific test all servers were deployed with identical RAM and CPU Cores.

The Digital Ocean Server was 1 Droplet hosted in their New York 1 location. The Burst VPS was their entry Level server in their Scranton Facility. The Dediserve VPS was in their London 3 facility and is one of their newest clouds

The two providers (Bigwetfish and Dediserve) offering SSD servers clearly show the best performance and this should help you make a decision about choosing your next VPS server. We certainly hope you see the benefits of using SSD disk as opposed to standard SATA or SAS arrays and we hope you choose us to help you deploy your next VPS.

If you want to try us out we are more than happy to supply an SSD powered server free of cost with no obligation for 1 month. We would love you to try our new platform and see for yourself how blazingly fast it is.

Screenshot Evidence of Disk Speed Tests

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