Side by Side review between automated SSD VPS providers DigitalOcean, Vultr and VPSie

This post will be a review of the three major VPS providers, which are DigitalOcean, Vultr and VPSie. Since it is pretty hard to decide where you want to go when you decice to choose a SSD based VPS provider, I have decided to write this post and analyze in depth all the pro's and cons of each and every one of them on technical point of view.
Since DigitalOcean was the first on the market offering cheap SSD VPS using the KVM technology it had the advantage of offering an unique design of their website. Vultr seam to copy the layout of DigitalOcean while VPSie choose to take a different approach and get things on his different unique way.

Options##

DigitalOcean and Vultr are both open for customers to register while VPSie chosed to have an invite based customer registration. when asked for the reason of the choice they have told us that this way they can control the quality of the userbase and the service provided.
From the support side DigitalOcean and Vultr offers a ticket based and community based support while VPSie has added live chat and phone based support to the above.

Value##

Taking a look at the startup package of each VPS provider both DigitalOcean and Vultr having the startup package at $5 while vpsie has it's startup package at $4. This startup package will contain the following CPU:

DigitalOcean:###

root@Debian:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor  : 0
vendor_id  : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 6
model  : 2
model name  : QEMU Virtual CPU version 1.0
stepping  : 3
microcode  : 0x1
cpu MHz  : 1999.999
cache size  : 4096 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level  : 4
wp : yes
flags  : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx lm up rep_good nopl pni vmx cx16 popcnt hypervisor lahf_lm
bogomips  : 3999.99
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

Vultr:####

root@install:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor  : 0
vendor_id  : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 6
model  : 60
model name  : Vultr Virtual CPU 2
stepping  : 1
microcode  : 0x1
cpu MHz  : 3400.008
cache size  : 4096 KB
physical id  : 0
siblings  : 1
core id  : 0
cpu cores  : 1
apicid  : 0
initial apicid: 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level  : 13
wp : yes
flags  : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc up rep_good nopl pni pclmulqdq ssse3 fma cx16 pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx hypervisor lahf_lm xsaveopt fsgsbase smep erms
bogomips  : 6800.01
clflush size: 64
cache_alignment: 64
address sizes: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

VPSie:####

processor   : 0
vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 15
model       : 6
model name  : Common KVM processor
stepping    : 1
microcode   : 0x1
cpu MHz     : 2393.998
cache size  : 4096 KB
physical id : 0
siblings    : 1
core id     : 0
cpu cores   : 1
apicid      : 0
initial apicid  : 0
fpu     : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp      : yes
flags       : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx lm constant_tsc nopl pni cx16 x2apic hypervisor lahf_lm
bogomips    : 4787.99
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 128
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

power management:##

I will not comment on the CPU stats since the above says it all and everyone can interpret as they like.
Let's take a look at the disk speed offered by every one of them:

DigitalOcean:###

root@Debian:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=DigitalOcean.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 8.41049 s, 255 MB/s
root@Debian:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=DigitalOcean.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 9.10899 s, 236 MB/s
root@Debian:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=DigitalOcean.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 8.03577 s, 267 MB/s

Vultr:###

root@install:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=Vultr.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 8.4191 s, 255 MB/s
root@install:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=Vultr.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 7.63235 s, 281 MB/s
root@install:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=Vultr.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 7.72145 s, 278 MB/s

VPSie:###

root@debian:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=Vpsie.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 3.49817 s, 614 MB/s
root@debian:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=Vpsie.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 3.21944 s, 667 MB/s
root@debian:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=Vpsie.test bs=4M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 3.02819 s, 709 MB/s

As it can be seen while DigitalOcean and Vultr disk speed is about the same VPSie disk speed is more then double of the Vultr and DigitalOcean's.

Features##

While DigitalOcean and Vultr offer upgrade to a higher package on VPSie we can upgrade/downgrade the memory, CPU separately and for the disk size can be only upgraded using the proper slider. On VPSie you can add additional disk to your windows based VM via support ticket. Vultr and DigitalOcean does not have such functionalities or we don't know about them.
DNS wise Vultr does not have DNS management while both DigitalOcean and VPSie offer full DNS management service with reverse dns included.
All three of them offer x64 based linux templates however only DigitalOcean and VPSie does offer x86 based ones.

As for the linux flavors Vultr and VPSie support 5 distributions while DigitalOcean supports 6 flavors. DigitalOcean and Vultr have support of coreos and DigitalOcean have recently added the support of FreeBSD. However only VPSie and Vultr support the installation of custom OS by uploading the installation image on the account and performing the installation from that image. As for Windows support DigitalOcean does not supports it and Vultr with VPSie does it. They both have windows 2008 and 2012 based windows templates. All three of them supports snapshot on the virtual machines.

Backup wise all supports backup with the mention that on DigitalOcean you can only enable backup at the creation of their droplet while on VPSie you can create a backup at any time, on Vultr you have to enable automated backups. DigitalOcean does make offsite backup to amazon while VPSie takes it's offsite backup to a different datacenter in their own network.

About the spinup time for the vm's Vultr takes about 3 minutes to create a linux based virtual machine and 14 minute for windows based virtual machine. DigitalOcean takes 55 seconds to create a linux based virtual machine (droplet) and VPSie does deploy the linux based virtual machines (vpsies) in 35 seconds and the windows based ones in 2 minutes.
All three of them does support the SSH key. As mentioned above only Vultr and VPSie support the upload of custom ISO.

Both DigitalOcean and Vultr does limit the virtual machines per account to 5 while VPSie limit the virtual machines per account to 2 for unverified accounts and they lift the limit after the account get verified.

As for billing all three of them support PrePay and Vultr and VPSie support Monthly payments but only VPSie has the automated recharge via credit card. They all support payments via direct creditcard, PayPal and PromoCodes.
Utilization graphics all three of them have graphs but only DigitalOcean and VPSie have them for CPU, Memory, Disk Utilization, Bandwidth Utilization while Vultr is missing the gaphs for the Memory.

On DigitalOcean and VPSie there is account utilization logs and VPS based logs while Vultr does not log any activity.

As for consoles VPSie has both embeded and full screen consoles. DigitalOcean have only embeded console and Vultr only full screen console.
Restore time from snapshop on DigitalOcean and VPSie is very fast while Vultr takes his time to restore the VPS. Rebuild time has the same time as the creation time on all of them therefore it's under 1 minute for VPSie and DigitalOcean and around 5 minutes for Vultr. As number of location Vultr shines with it's 12 datacenters followed by DigitalOcean with 5 and VPSie with 4. They all support Private Networking however only VPSie has the option to interconnect Private Networks in different datacenters via prebuilt application (clearos). All have IPv6 support while DigitalOcean with Vultr has it with manual setup and VPSie has it all automated.

Vultr does not support root password recovery while on DigitalOcean and VPSie you can easily recover forgotten/lost password. You can change the hostname on DigitalOcean and VPSie, which is not available on Vultr. VPSie and DigitalOcean have a blog with tutorials. On DigitalOcean and VPSie you can add notes for the created vps. Both of them also support the creation of a new virtual machine from a backup while Vultr does not have this option. Only VPSie has the premade firewall via the application (clearos).DigitalOcean and VPSie offers a large choice of premade apps covering large options for developers, bloggers, system administrators, web designers, or private entities who just want to start with web technologies while this option is beta on Vultr which only offers 4 apps.

Having all these into account I hope you will have a clear vision in choosing your SSD VPS provider.