Josh Sherman
joshtronic.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Josh Sherman writes weekly posts on web hosting, Linux and WordPress, including recurring VPS price and performance comparisons of DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr and Lightsail.
What HN saysHN links his VPS showdown posts in hosting threads, where commenters use them as comparisons of providers at similar prices.
30HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
35stories submitted
672story points
10 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1$5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr4 people · 537 points · first shared 2017 · 151 comments on HN
- 2$10 Showdown: Linode vs. Digital Ocean vs. Amazon Lightsail3 people · 26 points · first shared 2016 · 6 comments on HN
- 3$10 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean2 people · 13 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 4VPS Showdown (May, 2020), DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr2 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 5VPS Showdown, June 2019: Do vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr2 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 6Switching to Linux, you're doing it wrong1 people · 15 points · first shared 2011 · 25 comments on HN
- 7WordPress Login Security with Fail2ban1 people · 11 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8DirectNIC may have been compromised1 people · 10 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 9Screenshots Are Not Documentation1 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 10A month after switching to Debian, I know I made the right call1 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · 2 comments on HN
- 11Why Limit the Format of a Password?1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 12A Week with Cursor Agent CLI1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 13Generating lowercase UUIDs with uuidgen on macOS1 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 148GB Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr1 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 15$5 VPS Showdown Apr 2018 – DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr West Coast Edition1 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
joshtronic · 2026-01-14
https://joshtronic.com -- 13+ years of weekly diatribes and other noise
spellboots · 2015-02-10
Perhaps, perhaps not. You could argue that choosing not to enable data scrubbing was a deliberate decision by DO to place cost savings (simpler / less costly not to scrub SSDs and saves cell wearing) over security, wheras linode was just the victim of a targeted attack and were unlucky but are overall more competent. Or perhaps not.
In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.
In contrast, the performance difference is objectively measurable:
http://joshtronic.com/2014/06/22/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-versus-dig…
terrywang · 2017-02-15
Some feedback: I've been using DO droplets since mid 2013, reliability is excellent, no unexpected reboots at all.
With the help of Ksplice the Ubuntu Server droplet has achieved 555 and 401 days uptime without downtime (could hang on a bit longer but later decided to reboot once every 3 months to address security concerns).
DO support has been responsive and friendly, DO keeps (slowly) delivering new features such as private network, Load Balacer etc. For existing $5/m DO users, I don't think it's worth the hassle to migrate to Linode (or Amazon Lightsail), the performance difference will be unnoticeable for most people's use cases (personal web hosting, strongSwan based IPsec VPN, etc.).
A good reference: https://joshtronic.com/2016/12/01/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-vs-digita…
Will provide the feedback to DO and see if they can match the Linode offer (I am sure they will do something).
hwj · 2019-07-27
I'm surprised nobody mentioned joshtronic's VPS showdown:
https://joshtronic.com/2019/07/01/vps-showdown-digitalocean-lightsail-…
phonon · 2019-06-06
Are they?
They come out fairly comparably here. I think Lightsail is a T3 instance "under the hood".
https://joshtronic.com/2019/06/03/vps-showdown-digitalocean-lightsail-…
jorvi · 2019-04-09
I installed Kubuntu 18.10 on my MacBook Pro 2015 13" (12,1) and sleep doesn't work properly because of the USB3 controller. The MacBook will suspend correctly from a cold boot, but every suspend after that the MacBook immediately wakes up as soon as it successfully suspended. This a is a common issue[1].
As long as I still can't trust Linux to successfully deal with suspending without hacks, I'm not gonna move over. It needs to be bulletproof that if I close my laptop, put it in a bag, and then later open that bag my laptop A. wakes up and B. hasn't overheated and drained the battery. macOS gives that peace of mind, and I feel that is paramount for a laptop to be usable. I can't believe this is still not a fixed problem in the Linux world in general, and especially on a 4 year old device.
[1] https://joshtronic.com/2017/03/13/getting-suspend-in-linux-working-on-…
namaljayathunga · 2018-11-05
I used Laravel PHP framework to build App from scratch quickly. Also used Linode VPS service to host my App. You can choose that fit to you by reading this link.
https://joshtronic.com/2018/08/19/vps-showdown-august-2018-digitalocea…
loony_nrrd · 2017-02-19
daurnimator · 2017-02-19
Hmm, I had a closer look, and most of my instances are old 3.4GHz ones rather than the currently deployable 2.4GHz ones. See https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/567/no-more-3-4-ghz-cpu-cores/p2
Though looking at https://joshtronic.com/2017/02/14/five-dollar-showdown-linode-vs-digit… the current ones still aren't that bad.
stanislavb · 2016-11-30
@samdoidge, I found the article with performance benchmarks I was referring to https://joshtronic.com/2016/07/03/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-versus-di… . A link to it could be found in the medium post as well now. I hope this helps. Cheers!
mnem · 2015-07-02
Are you aware of the command line utility, security? https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference…
Some examples of using it: http://joshtronic.com/2014/02/17/using-keyring-access-on-the-osx-comma…
shpx · 2019-10-06
There are at least 5 providers that will rent you a $5/month server: DigitalOcean, Lightsail, Linode, UpCloud and Vultr. There's a guy that publishes benchmarks of their $5 instance regularly
https://joshtronic.com/2019/09/02/vps-showdown-digitalocean-lightsail-…
DigitalOcean is by far the most popular. Personally, I like Vultr because they also have $2.50 IPv6 only instances and you can upload your own ISO file if you want to try a less popular Linux distribution. Both services have similar user interfaces that are pretty good.
That being said, $60/year is still a lot. If you can get away with just a static site, try GitHub pages https://pages.github.com/. You only get one (unless you create GitHub organizations) but it's free. You can still have your own domain pointing to it with TLS (free through Let's Encrypt). You miss out on the fun of managing a Linux server unfortunately.