Technical Beef -

I thought about VPS benchmarking when I was looking for a new server, and found out that Gandi was providing a lot of useful information in their benchmark page, and they used this UnixBench program to evaluate the processor-equivalence of their shares.

Having trust issues myself ^^ I ran the program on a bunch of VPS I manage:

• Gandi (of course)
• OVH, another famous french hosting provider.
• Slicehost
• Linode
• Myself, as I own a few linux computers at home

So here's the result (the higher the score, the better):



To get those results, I ran the benchmarks at several hours of the day (to cope with timezone issues impacting the performance of european servers vs. US servers), and always kept the lowest values. Anyway, I never got more than a 10% variation between the results taken at several hours.

For the details of the results, check the full table:

NOTES:

• Performance are strongly dependant on the host and time of the day, so your mileage may vary. However, all the results I provide were ran several time to check the consistency of the results. I usually got differences <0.3 on the final score.
• OVH's RPS are not VPS, they are real servers, but they use network disks. Consequently, the restriction above does not apply, except for the disk usage (shared on their network)

I was really surprised by the good performance of linode, but keep in mind that all those providers are excellent, and all provide a very different kind of service, while this benchmark only provides a score on CPU and Disks (not bandwidth, not additional services, not reliability, nor capacity).

I couldn't test all the possible configuration and flavours of these providers, but hopefully it gives a good picture of their respective performance.