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In the world of cloud computing there are a lot of different options to choose from. Normally you only need to choose how big your instance will be (2 vCPUs or 4, 2GB RAM or 6), but some cloud compute providers are upping their game and providing an even wider array of options and instance types for you to choose from.
Vultr has 3 different types of compute instances:
- Cloud Compute – You get your own virtual server, but it is sharing hardware resources with lots of friends. Noisy neighbors can definitely be a problem.
- Dedicated – Dedicated servers, but virtualized. I (think) it is possible to run in to noisy neighbor problems in this situation.
- Bare Metal – Dedicated servers and hardware. No hypervisor and no noisy neighbors taking up your resources.
In this article we’re going to see how a very basic WordPress install performs on the different types of Vultr compute instances. We’ll do so using Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing service.
The Test
As per usual with Kernl load tests I imported this blog’s content into each load testing environment. The load test skews extremely read heavy. If you have a site that is write heavy or a mix you may see different results.
Each test was performed for 1 hour with 2000 concurrent users generating load from London and New York to Vultr’s data center in New Jersey.
Configuration
For this test I used Vultr’s pre-built WordPress image with no caching. A lot of readers might say “But you can get much better performance using X or Y!”, and they would be right! But I’m not testing Apache vs Nginx performance, or W3 Total Cache vs WP Rocket, I’m testing Vultr hardware under load in a real world scenario. I simply want to know at the end of this article if Vultr Cloud Compute, Dedicated, or Bare Metal is better for WordPress hosting.
Test 1: Vultr Cloud Compute $10 / Month
The first test I performed was against the $10 per month Vultr Cloud Compute offering. As expected of a $10/month VPS performance wasn’t awesome, but it also wasn’t terrible.
As you can see, lots of failed requests and only maintaining throughput of 16 req/s. Not unexpected with a single core and 1 GB of RAM. After all, I was throwing 2000 concurrent requests per second at the server. The response time distribution was similarly bad.
Overall, the results for the $10 VPS were as expected. This isn’t really an apples to apples comparison (we’ll get to that later), but I wanted to give you an idea of what basic VPS instance performance looks like.
Test 2: Vultr Cloud Compute $80 / Month
With this test we’re starting to get closer to the cost of bare metal and dedicated instances. This server had 6 CPUs and 16GB of RAM. Considerably more robust than the $10 server.
This graph tells a much different story than the previous test. Performance peaked at 169 req/s and then leveled off at 100 req/s. We still saw a lot of errors, but once again this isn’t unexpected. Honestly if you started to get this much traffic you would likely start breaking up WordPress into its components (file system, PHP + Nginx, MySQL) and start scaling horizontally.
The response time distribution was much better for this server as well. The upper end was just as bad as the cheaper box, but the 90% and below ranges were pretty solid for the amount of traffic that was being received.
Test 3: Vultr Bare Metal $120 / Month
The Vultr Bare Metal server was the instance I was most excited about testing. I’ve always had a soft spot for hardware and getting access to a bare metal server is pretty cool. For $120 per month (on sale, price will rise to $300/month eventually) you get 8 CPUs and 32GB of RAM. This is a pretty serious server.
Lots of blue on this graph but also the expected amount of red. You can see that throwing 2 more non-virtual CPUs and 2X the RAM made a pretty big difference. We peaked at 200 req/s and then leveled out at 125 req/s. For reference that is 17.2 million requests per day.
The lower end of the response time distribution was solid, but the upper end wasn’t great at all. With all of those errors it isn’t surprising that this is the case.
Test 4: Vultr Dedicated $120 / Month
I honestly had a tough time figuring out why Vultr priced the bare metal and dedicated instances so close to each other. Dedicated is clearly inferior (far fewer CPUs and RAM) so why would anyone choose it? Anyway, let’s take a look at the graph.
This test peaked at 100 req/s and then leveled off at around 70. I really would expect a lot better performance for this sort of money.
Response time distribution was similar to the other boxes. With all the failures it tends to skew pretty hard in the wrong direction. I’m sure that there is a use case for these dedicated Vultr instances, but it definitely isn’t hosting a WordPress site.
Conclusions
With all of this data it was pretty easy to graph which of these is the best value.
Value was calculated by taking the cost per month and dividing it by the maximum number of requests. Based on the performance we saw above the Vultr Cloud Compute instances seem like your best value for WordPress hosting. For WordPress hosting it looks like Vultr Bare Metal and Dedicated instances aren’t a great choice. As mentioned above, there are likely use cases where they are a good choice though (maybe workloads that require very consistent performance).
As with all of these tests, your mileage may vary! I highly recommend that you run load tests on any new host that you use to get an idea of what sort of performance you can expect.
Load test your own WordPress site with Kernl! Getting started is free!