gsgreen

Have done a lot of VPS testing in Canada lately - seems like this region is not thoroughly represented in the data that's out there currently.

Any thoughts on this or suggestions as to more regions we should test?

Another one in our Bang for Buck series (pretty self-exp: low price - solid perf over 6+ deployments with each 3 vps cluster time-separated by at least a week+).

Really good point. This test is just fresh-instance performance, not IP reputation or whether an assigned address gets caught in blocklists but hear ya.

I’d be interested if you’ve seen this specifically with Linode, or cheap VPS ranges more generally.

Quick notes: For this comp, ran three fresh Scaleway dev1-s instances in Amsterdam and Warsaw at basically same $8 monthly price.

This is only the first observation window - will test again in a week+ and things could (and often do) change....

#3 in the Bang for Buck series. Trying to surface these plans from various providers amidst the skyrocketing prices we're seeing lately...

One other wrinkle: the “same” plan (sa5-medium4) wasn’t the same price either. It was $43.80 in Ashburn, $51.10 in Silicon Valley and Frankfurt, and $58.40 across the Asian regions.

We plead guilty only to measuring it! Each VM was freshly deployed, benchmarked, and destroyed afterward - takes about 7 minutes of uptime each. No Linode servers were harmed in the making of the article. Promise.

Def a real concern. We deliberately didn’t attribute the increases to RAM costs because our data only establishes the price and performance changes — not the cause. But if these prices persist, Hetzner-dependent self-hosting services may face difficult choices.

Still documenting the massive Hetzner price increases and whether better performance coincides at all. Even the least bit....

A little context: we’ve just started adding Exoscale and Tencent Cloud to Webbynode’s ongoing VM benchmarking. This is the first comparison from those runs; we’ll be testing more plans and regions over the coming weeks.

If there are particular regions or instance types you’d like included, let us know.

AWS Lightsail gives some nice bang/buck at $24 but some regions def better than others...

This was one of the most surprising observations from nearly 1,000 repeated fresh cloud deployments. Curious whether others have seen any similar cases where price turned out to be a poor predictor of long-term behavior.

Totally agree. The highest benchmark number is easy to chase. We're more interested in answering a different question: "If I deploy this same VM again next week, what should I expect?" That's the whole reason we keep rerunning the same clusters over time.

Small OCI terminology note that I hadn't realized before adding OCI to the dataset: Oracle uses "OCPU" differently than the vCPU language most AWS/GCP/Azure users are used to. In OCI, 1 OCPU generally maps to 1 physical core / 2 hardware threads, so this 8 OCPU Flex VM reports as a 16 vCPU instance in the benchmark data. That makes it closer to the 16 vCPU / 64 GB class when comparing across providers.

Still an early observation window (3 runs per cluster), so we're not drawing concrete conclusions just yet. We start doing that starting at 6 runs+ with temporal spacing between clusters but these patterns are def interesting so far...

6 fresh GCP Seoul deployments across 2 observation windows...

6 fresh AWS Seoul deployments across 2 observation windows...

Same Nuremberg - EU West endpoint. CPU/storage very stable...

We've been venturing into some new regions lately. Nice to see one that's just quietly stable.

Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Not sure. Fun to ponder either way.

Jun 6: $60.09/mo (first cluster) Jun 15: $153.59/mo (second cluster)

Same provider/region/plan - benchmark data almost identical. But that sizey bump.....

True story. Lot of cheaper providers vs. the biggies (and mediums) and we're slowly documenting all this 'behavior'.

For sure. At some point the math starts favoring bare metal over rented compute.

Especially if VPS prices keep rising faster than the underlying infrastructure.

Yer not wrong. Hetz bang/buck pretty nice for the most part. We'll see how/if that changes going forward with additional clusters we'll be doing.

Nine days apart! Maybe weird timing but pretty insane.

Jun 6: $60.09/month ---> Jun 15: $153.59/month -Same provider/region/plan.

In that span we reran the benchmarks and found the infrastructure behavior was nearly identical despite the 156% price increase.

We've run nearly 500 benchmark runs: provider selection matters but region does too big time.

Still early (3 runs each), so we'll keep adding depth with temporal buffering...

Hundy %.

Totally. Availability in US regions seems much tighter than Europe. Ashburn in particular. We'll see if they ramp up (hopefully) sooner than later.

One thing we've learned doing this: When a result surprises you, the correct response is usually "run it again." Looking forward to running again in later June...

Def wasn't a performance story - geography explained it. 2X? Wow.

Most of the interesting things we've found lately happened because repeated deployments changed and this one def didn't (networking did just a bit).

3 fresh runs of AWS m6i.4xlarge - almost identical. CPU, storage, agentic runtime behavior...everything.

When first allocating that vm I was utterly shocked.

Thought this would be a speed story.

Ended up being a predictability story.

Three fresh deployments looked almost boring. Which is probably exactly what you want from a $512/month VM.