🤔 The Story
Our production server was struggling. Simple tasks taking forever. It was running on DigitalOcean's "CPU-Optimized" droplet ($42/month).
Our staging server? Blazing fast. Same app, more traffic, zero issues. It was on a basic $20 VPS.
Something didn't add up.
🧪 So I Ran Some Tests
The Setup:
- Both: 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, AlmaLinux 9
- DigitalOcean CPU-Optimized: $42/month
- Raff Technologies Standard: $20/month
The Benchmark:
sysbench cpu --threads=2 --time=10 run
📊 The Surprising Results
Single-Core Performance:
DigitalOcean ($42): 450 events/sec
Raff Tech ($20): 1,339 events/sec
Multi-Core Performance:
DigitalOcean ($42): 708 events/sec
Raff Tech ($20): 2,673 events/sec
The cheaper VPS was 3x faster. I ran it five times. Same results.
🔍 What I Discovered
Curious, I dug deeper into the actual hardware:
DigitalOcean's "CPU-Optimized":
- Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 (from 2017)
- 8MB total cache
- No frequency scaling
Raff's Standard VPS:
- AMD EPYC 8224P (from 2019)
- 33MB total cache (4x more!)
- Also no frequency scaling
The "optimized" server was running on 7-year-old processors.
💡 The Lesson
CPU cache matters more than marketing labels.
More cache = your data stays closer to the CPU = everything runs faster.
Here's a simple test for your VPS:
# Check your CPU model and cache
lscpu | grep -E "Model name|cache"
# Quick performance test
sysbench cpu --threads=$(nproc) run | grep "events per"
📈 Performance Per Dollar
I created a simple metric:
Performance Score ÷ Monthly Price = Value Rating
DigitalOcean: 708 ÷ 42 = 16.8
Raff: 2673 ÷ 20 = 133.6
The $20 VPS delivers 8x better value.
✅ When Premium Makes Sense
DigitalOcean isn't bad. They excel at:
- Managed databases
- Beautiful UI/documentation
- Predictable billing
- Great uptime
But for raw compute? The numbers speak for themselves.
🎯 How to Choose Your Next VPS
Don't look at:
- Marketing terms ("optimized", "premium", "high-performance")
- Brand size
- Price (expensive ≠ better)
Do look at:
- CPU generation (newer = better)
- Cache size (more = faster)
- Actual benchmarks
- Performance per dollar
Follow-up: I'm testing 10 more providers this month. Which ones should I include?
Top comments (2)
Really solid breakdown — this highlights something most people overlook: CPU cache and generation often matter more than marketing labels.
I’ve seen the same pattern when testing VPS providers:
Newer EPYC or Xeon chips with larger L3 caches consistently outperform “optimized” instances running on older hardware.
Many providers recycle older CPUs for their mid-tier or “optimized” SKUs, banking on the label rather than raw specs.
Your benchmark results line up with what sysbench usually reveals — cache-heavy workloads scale much better on modern CPUs, even if the advertised vCPU/RAM is the same.
I especially like that you included a simple lscpu + sysbench test. Too many developers assume price = performance, when in reality performance per dollar can be 5–10x different depending on the CPU generation.
Great writeup — I think a lot more people should be doing these quick checks before committing production workloads.
While those are all good, you should also be looking at your code more to see if there are things that needs to be optimised/improved.
When you mention total cache size, what do you even mean? There are multiple cache layers so total cache doesn't tell us what you mean. Besides, I looked up their spec and they're very similar with cache size except for L3.
You didn't mention if your production server and staging run the same amount of workload/services. If you have various services using up the cores in production, you can't expect it to match a staging server with multiple idle cores.