In this article I will not comparing Vultr vs DigitalOcean but simply giving short introduction (or may be review) about what Vultr.com is and what do they offer.
Meet Vultr! a cloud-like VPS hosting provider by Choopa. Its main virtualization technology is KVM and all their node servers are using SSD. The same as DigitalOcean. In fact, many says Vultr is just a copy of DigitalOcean by different company. Even its main web design is similar to old DO’s website.
The main part that makes me feel interested (besides it is new) is its competitive price. Its smallest plan is purchase-able at $5/month, the same as DO but Vultr offers bigger RAM (768MB). Also, while DO currently offer servers at
3 (three) different locations (US, Netherland, and Singapore), Vultr offer wider location including 6 locations in US, 1 in Netherland, 1 in UK, 1 in France, 1 in Australia, 1 in Japan and 1 in Germany.
Obviously that’s a plus one of Vultr while its competitors do not offer (including DO).
Vultr currently provides various .ISO image to boot your VPS to (or install on). Couldn’t find your favorite OS? Users of Vultr are also allowed to boot from Custom .ISO which can be uploaded via its remote upload interface with 5GB max file size.
Even the price is monthly but its billing mechanism is hourly billing which means you’ll only pay as you go or pay only for the time you use and cancel any time. That’s just the same as DigitalOcean and like many other cloud providers.
HOW TO CREATE A VPS ON VULTR?
Your VPS in Vultr is called an Instance, the one that in DigitalOcean called a Droplet.
Building an instance (or a vps) is pretty easy. First, create an account at
Vultr.com. Simply enter your email address and password. Once done, login to your account!
Step 1 – Obviously you’ll need to add fund in your account credit (balance). Simply click the billing tab and choose Paypal or Credit Card to make your payment. The last time I check they still run a promo offering double your balance for up to $100. For example, if you add $100 to your account it will be doubled so you’ll have $200 in your balance.
Step 2 – Click on the Deploy tab.
Step 3 – Choose your server type: PERFORMANCE or LARGE STORAGE. Seeing its information you’ll exactly know what’s the difference among them.
Step 4 – Next, choose in which location you’ll deploy your server to.
Step 5 – Do not also forget to choose the Operating System (OS) to run it on your deployed server:
Step 6 – In the Server Size section, it is the place where you can choose how powerful your server’s specification will be. You can pick up to 8GB RAM, 4 CPU power, 120GB SSD and 5TB bandwidth.
Step 7 – Once done, hit the big blue Deploy button.
Step 8 – You’ll be redirected to the My Servers page and you’ll see the success message there. Unlike DO, you’ll see no progress bar but just the action status.
It should be created within a minute.
Step 9 – Refresh that page and you should now see a green “running” text under the Status column. It means your server is ready to use.
Step 10 – Next, grab your root password in the Instance’s management page. Simply click the “Manage” link for that instance (the link under Actions section).
As you can see in that page you’ll find basic information of your server including Location, OS and Main IP Address. In the Server Info page you can also see your root password.
That’s it. Now you can bring up Putty or Terminal in your local PC and connect to your server via SSH at port 22 (default) using given IP address and given root password.
p.s: In that page you can also do some basic management tasks like to Stop, Reboot, Reinstall, Change OS and Destroy your vps.
VULTR VPS REVIEW
Here it is my result of some basic benchmarking test on a Vultr instance.
Instance Specifications:
- RAM : 768MB
- CPU : 1 CPU
- Storage: 15GB SSD
- bandwidth: 1TB
- Price : $0.007/hr or $5/month
FREEVPS.US SIMPLE BENCHMARK TEST
Script used:
wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
This simple benchmark test script will scan for server specs like number of CPU cores, CPU frequency, total amount of RAM, SWAP and current system uptime. Once the scanning done and the result displayed, the benchmark script will test server’s Internet speed by downloading some test files from several location spread around the world from US, Japan, Netherland, and Singapore. Also, it will perform a simple DD test to find out current I/O speed. And my result is:
As you can see from the result above, the I/O speed is great even not as fast as RamNode. Also,the download speed is fast from major US region
SERVERBEAR COMPLETE BENCHMARK TEST
I use ServerBear’s benchmark script to perform more complete benchmarking test:
wget -N https://raw.github.com/Crowd9/Benchmark/master/sb.sh&&bash sb.sh '10159' '2419' 'tisbi@acentri.com' ''
This script will Download and install packages to run UnixBench; Download and run UnixBench; and Upload to ServerBear the UnixBench output and information about this computer.
You can also view all submitted benchmark results at
ServerBear. If you go to that page you’ll see the best ever Unixbench score is 4120.8 and the worst ever is 1082.9. That’s great.
F.A.Q
It is such a lame tutorial. Why did you write it?
Not everyone is as great as you and I already tagged this post as “basic”. So if you still feel this post is lame, then please do not read basic tutorials and search for advanced ones out there. I believe many newbie will feel helpful.
Vultr vs DigitalOcean, which one you prefer?
Me? I believe putting mission critical app will be better at DigitalOcean as it is older (and bigger) company running such service, I believe. However in terms of performance, both of them are great. It’s just a matter of budget then.
Between 1 to 10, how you rate Vultr?
