In this benchmark I am comparing the performance of $5 VPS plans from Hetzner Cloud, Scaleaway, DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode (new). This is a follow up to my previous cloud provider benchmarks (e.g. October 2019, March 2019).
Pricing and specifications
| Company | Specifications | Price (Monthly) |
| Hetzner Cloud | 1vCPU, 2GB RAM | 2.99 EUR |
| Scaleaway | 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM | 2.17 USD (1.82 EUR)1 |
| DigitalOcean | 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM | 5 USD |
| Vultr | 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM | 5 USD |
| Linode | 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM | 5 USD |
1 Scaleaway price reduced from 1.99 EUR to 1.82 EUR (since 2019)
Benchmark Results
The tool used for the benchmark is nench. All tests were performed in AMS regions (with exception to Hetzner Cloud which was FSN).
Conclusion
As like previous benchmarks, there is no overall winner and the best will depend on your workload, budget and location, however both Linode and Scaleaway perform consistently well with networking tests, with Hetzner Cloud still under-performing in this area. CPU performance between the five providers is fairly balanced, although Vultr may outperform the others in some cases. Linode seems to offer quite high IO bandwidth, but is perhaps under-performing with IOPS.