Here is a basic comparison between 5 reliable and cheap VPS providers with plans below $5 per month.
| OVH | Linode | DigitalOcean | Scaleway | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation | 1999 | 2003 | 2011 | 2013 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | Roubaix (FR) | Galloway, NJ (US) | New York (US) | Paris (FR) | Matawan, NJ (US) |
| Market | 3° largest | 2° largest | |||
| Website | OVH | Linode | DigitalOcean | Scaleway | Vultr |
| OVH | Linode | DigitalOcean | Scaleway | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Credit Card | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PayPal | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Bitcoin | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Affiliate/Referral | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Coupon Codes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Note:
- Linode needs a credit card associated with the account first to be able to pay with PayPal later.
| OVH | Linode | DigitalOcean | Scaleway | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| European data centers | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Documentation | Docs | Docs | Docs | Docs | Docs |
| Doc. subjective valuation | 6/10 | 9/10 | 9/10 | 6/10 | 8/10 |
| Uptime guaranteed (SLA) | 99,95% | 99,9% | 99,99% | 99,9% | 100% |
| Outage refund/credit (SLA) | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API Docs | API Docs | API Docs | API Docs | API Docs | API Docs |
| Services status page | Status | Status | Status | Status | Status |
| Support Quality | |||||
| Account Limits | 10 instances | Limited instances (e.g. 50 VC1S ) | 10 instances | ||
| Legal/ToS | ToS | ToS | ToS | ToS | ToS |
Note:
- Scaleway has four grades of SLA, the first basic is for free but if you want something better, you have to pay a monthly fee.
- One of the reasons why the Linode's documentation is so good and detailed is that they pay you 250$ for write a guide for them if it's good enough to publish. They are a small team (about 70 people), so it makes sense.
- The Linode API is not a RESTful API yet, but they are working in an upcoming one.
- The default limits usually can be increased by asking support, but not in Scaleway, where you would have to pay fo a higher level of support. Those limits are set by default by the providers to stop abusing the accounts.
- Scaleway also imposes a lot more of limits that can be looked up in the account settings (e.g. 100 images or 25 snapshots).
- Vultr also impose a limit of a maximum instance cost of 150$ per month and requires a deposit when charges exceed 50$.
| OVH | Linode | DigitalOcean | Scaleway | Vultr | Vultr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | VPS SSD 1 | Linode 1024 | 5bucks | VC1S | 20GB SSD | 25GB SSD |
| Monthly Price | 3,62€ | 5$ | 5$ | 2,99€ | 2,5$ | 5$ |
| CPU / Threads | 1/1 | 1/1 | 1/1 | 1/2 | 1/1 | 1/1 |
| CPU model | Xeon E5v3 2.4GHz | Xeon E5-2680 v3 2.5GHz | Xeon E5-2650L v3 1.80 GHz | Atom C2750 2.4 GHz | Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz | Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz |
| RAM | 2 GB | 1 GB | 1 GB | 2 GB | 1 GB | 1 GB |
| SSD Storage | 10 GB | 20 GB | 20 GB | 50 GB | 20 GB | 25 GB |
| Traffic | ∞ | 1 TB | 1 TB | ∞ | 500 GB | 1 TB |
| Bandwidth (In / Out) | 100/100 Mbps | 40/1 Gbps | 1/10 Gbps | 200/200 Mbps | 1/10 Gbps | 1/10 Gbps |
| Virtualization | KVM | KVM (Qemu) | KVM | KVM (Qemu) | KVM (Qemu) | KVM (Qemu) |
| Anti-DDoS Protection | Yes | No | No | No | 10$ | 10$ |
| Backups | No | 2$ | 1$ | No | 0,5 $ | 1$ |
| Snapshots | 2,99$ | Free (up to 3) | 0,05$ per GB | 0,02 € per GB | Free (Beta) | Free (Beta) |
| IPv6 | Yes | Yes | Optional | Optional | Optional | Optional |
| Additional public IP | 2$ (up to 16) | Yes | Floating IPs (0,006$ hour if inactive) | 0,9€ (up to 10) | 2$ (up to 2) / 3$ floating IPs | 2$ (up to 2) / 3$ floating IPs |
| Private Network | No | Optional | Optional | No (dynamic IPs) | Optional | Optional |
| Firewall | Yes (by IP) | No | Yes (by group) | Yes (by group) | Yes (by group) | Yes (by group) |
| Block Storage | From 5€ - 50GB | No | From 10$ - 100GB | From 1€ - 50GB | From 1$ - 10GB | From 1$ - 10GB |
| Monitoring | Yes (SLA) | Yes (metrics, SLA) | Beta (metrics, performance, SLA) | No | No | No |
| Load Balancer | 13$ | 20$ | 20$ | No | High availability (floating IPs & BGP) | High availability (floating IPs & BGP) |
| DNS Zone | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Reverse DNS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Note:
-
OVH hides its real CPU, but what they claim in their web matches with the hardware information reported in the tests (an E5-2620 v3 or E5-2630 v3).
-
Vultr also hides the real CPU, but it could be a Xeon E5-2620/2630 v3 for the 20GB SSD plan and probably a v4 for the 25GB SSD one.
-
Vultr $2.50/month plan is only currently available in Miami, FL and New York, NJ. And it is currently claimed to be sold out.
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OVH throttle network speed to 1 Mbps after excess monthly 10 TB traffic
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The prices for DigitalOcean and Vultr do not include taxes (VAT) for European countries.
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Linode allows you to have free additional public IPs but you have to request them to support and justify that you need them.
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Linode Longview's monitoring system is free up to 10 clients, but also has a professional version that starts at 20$/mo for three client.
-
Linode don't support currently block storage, but they are working on it to offer the service in the upcoming months.
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Linode snapshots (called Images) are limited to 2GB per Image, with a total of 10GB total Image storage and 3 Images per account. Disks of recently rebuilt instances are automatically stored as Images.
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Scaleway also offers for the same price a BareMetal plan (with 4 ARM Cores), but as it is a dedicated server, I do not include it here.
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Scaleway does not offers Anti-DDoS protection but they maintain that they use the Online.net's standard one.
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Scaleway uses dynamic IPs by default as private IPs and you only can opt to use static IPs if you remove the Public IP from the instance.
-
Scaleway uses dynamic IPv6, meaning that IPv6 will change if you stop your server. You can't even opt to reserve IPv6.
-
The OVH panel is terrible to use. I would not suggest to take OVH as an option.
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