This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Serdar Tekin
🤔 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?
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Serdar Tekin
Serdar Tekin | Sciencx (2025-09-03T16:25:40+00:00) The Hidden Costs of ‘Optimized’ VPS: What DigitalOcean Doesn’t Tell You. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/09/03/the-hidden-costs-of-optimized-vps-what-digitalocean-doesnt-tell-you/
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