I am looking for a new not so expensive VPS provider. When I was looking arround for something that would suit my needs I came up with ScaleWay and Hetzner as possible candidates. scalewayvshetzner I need a VPS with 4GB of RAM, so the following offers would suit me and the price is what I want to pay.

Specs ScaleWay VC1M Hetzner CX21
CPU 4 2
Memory 3941 MB 3848 MB
Disk 50 GB 40 GB
Price €4.99 €5.93

We can see that on paper ScaleWay specs are better and for a lower price. Both claim on their site 4GB of memory, but ScaleWay has a little more if we look at the total memory available to the OS. But specs dont say everything.

So I want to test, you can pay by the hour, so no harm there. I deploy them both with their Ubuntu 18.04 LTS default install, installed latest patches and kernel 4.15.0-23-generic x86_64. So in this way they are the same on OS and Kernel. I noticed when deploying that Hetzner system was online is second, ScaleWay took a little longer, maybe a minute or so. That would be a plus for Hetzner. But I only deploy a system one time, so no real gain here for me.

###CPU

First I tested CPU and RAM with GeekBench. This shows that ScaleWay gives better performance on single thread and multi thread. Als I compiled fio, a tool I later wil use to test disk performance. This compiles faster on ScaleWay.

Test ScaleWay Hetzner
Geekbench Single 3073 2482
Geekbench Multi 7443 4652
Fio Compile 18.843s 21.443s

###Disk To test Disk performance I used fio to test read and write performance. With random read/write it is a tie. With read ScaleWay wins and with Write Hetner.

Test ScaleWay Hetzner
Random read/write 59223/19711 59457/19782
Random read 129198 83405
Random write 37007 75129

Fio parameters used for this test

#Random Read Write
./fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randrw --rwmixread=75

#Random Write
./fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randread

#Random Read
./fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randwrite

###Conclusion

After this test I decided to give ScaleWay a try, will migrating some services to them soon.

update 8 Sept 2018, running now on ScaleWay for about 6 weeks, found no problems and everything is performing well.