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.
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.