Comparative performance evaluation of popular virtual private servers

Virtual Private Server (VPS) enables user access to an operating system instance with a fine-grained control of private software and hardware resources. Many various factors can affect VPS performance and they primarily include physical server hardware specifications, installed operating system, virtualization layer, and the underlying network infrastructure. Therefore, it is very important to properly select a VPS host that meets users, applications and services resource and performance requirements. This paper presents a performance evaluation of three popular VPS hosts; namely Digital Ocean, Linode and VULTR. Performance measurement was conducted under the same controlled conditions for all three VPS hosts using a popular benchmark application for Unix operating systems - UnixBench. Three performance evaluation experiments with a focus on examining and studying key performance metrics which include CPU scheduling, memory management, hard disk drive management and Unix operating system task scheduling, were conducted. Performance measurement results show that VULTR achieves the best results under most of the tests in the first two experiments making it the best choice for low demand users, while DigitalOcean achieves the best results in the third experiment making it the best solution for high demand users who are looking for a high performance VPS.