Trying to decide between Vultr vs Linode for your cloud VPS hosting needs? Read on to compare features, performance, price and support of Vultr and Linode in this battle of the VPS cloud servers.
Battle of the VPS Cloud Servers: Vultr vs Linode
There’s a good reason why cloud hosting has become so popular in recent years: it offers many benefits over other web hosting options. Cloud hosting offers a flexible pricing structure, fantastic uptime and availability, better website performance, safety from server hardware issues, and simple deployment, among many other things.
The only problem is that there are now so many cloud hosting providers that choosing the right one can be a real challenge. If you’ve narrowed down your search to Vultr and Linode but don’t have or energy to compare their features, performance, price, and other metrics, this Vultr vs Linode comparison is here to help you make your choice.
Instead of just going through the same technical specifications that you can read on countless other websites, our breakdown of Vultr vs Linode actually explains where each of these two cloud hosting providers has the upper hand and why, allowing you to make your own educated decision.
Vultr Global Cloud Hosting
Vultr describes itself as a provider of high-performance edge services, and its products include cloud compute instances with Intel CPUs, fully automated dedicated servers with zero virtualization layer, fast SSD-backed storage up to 10 TB volumes, and dedicated cloud compute instances without any neighbors.
The company was founded in 2014 by David Aninowsky, who is also behind Clan Servers Hosting and Choopa. Today, Vultr proudly offers its services to customers around the world thanks to its 16 server locations that enable developers to easily scale a low latency infrastructure solution no matter where they are located.
Linode SSD Cloud Servers
Founded in 2003 by Christopher S. Aker, Linode is a much older hosting company than Vultr, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from its product offering alone. Yes, Linode was ahead of its time when it launched, but the most important thing is that the company has remained firmly committed to offering excellent web hosting services, which is why it’s now a leader in virtualization hosting.
Despite being around longer, Linode is outmatched by Vultr when it comes to global presence, running only 9 datacenters in 3 regions. North America is clearly Linode’s biggest focus, and it’s a shame to see that the company still doesn’t have a data center in Australia, for example.
Feature Comparison Vultr vs Linode
In this Vultr vs Linode comparison, we’ve already established that Vultr has the upper hand when it comes to the number of data centers, but what other features do the two cloud hosting providers offer?
Both Vultr and Linode don’t believe in long-term contracts, so you only pay for the hours you actually use. Deploying a cloud instance is a breeze regardless of whether you choose Vultr or Linode, and you can expect to get a server running in just a few minutes.
Automatic backups are available as premium options from both cloud hosting providers, but there are certain minor differences between them that you should know about. Vultr charges a 20% higher base monthly/hourly fee for an instance with automatic backups enabled, and it stores two most recent backups. You can configure backups to run daily, every other day, weekly, or monthly, and all backup settings can be conveniently managed through the Vultr control panel.
Linode prices its backup services according to the base plan you choose. There are three backup slots that Linode automatically executes and rotates—a daily backup, a 2–7 day old backup, and an 8-14 day old backup—plus one extra slot for on-demand backups. ‘
In addition to password authentication, both Vultr and Linode allow you to use key-based authentication to authenticate with your server without needing a password, which protects you from brute-force login attempts and greatly reduces the risk of authorization credentials being exposed in the event of a successful attack by a hacker.
Both Vultr and Linode let you quickly and seamlessly deploy virtually all popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, openSUSE, and others. If you want to, you can even upload your own custom ISO and use Vultr and Linode as your virtualized development environment. Unfortunately, Linode doesn’t officially support Windows even though it’s possible to install Windows on Linode, albeit with a lot of trial and error.
In summary, it’s clear that Vultr and Linode are aware of each other’s existence, and the features they offer reflect this. Even though the two cloud hosting providers share more similarities than differences, there is one key feature that makes Vultr better than Linode in our eyes: support for Windows.
Vultr and Linode Performance and Pricing
| Plan name | Memory | CPU | Storage | Bandwidth | Price | Price (hourly) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vultr 1 GB | 1 GB | 1 CPU core | 25 GB | 1 TB | $5/mo | $0.007/h |
| Linode 1 GB | 1 GB | 1 CPU core | 25 GB | 1 TB | $5/mo | $0.0075/h |
| Vultr 2 GB | 2 GB | 1 CPU core | 55 GB | 2 TB | $10/mo | $0.015/h |
| Linode 2 GB | 2 GB | 1 CPU core | 50 GB | 2 TB | $10/mo | $0.015/h |
| Vultr 4 GB | 4 GB | 2 CPU cores | 80 GB | 3 TB | $20/mo | $0.030/h |
| Linode 4 GB | 4 GB | 2 CPU cores | 80 GB | 4 TB | $20/mo | $0.030/h |
| Vultr 8 GB | 8 GB | 4 CPU cores | 160 GB | 4 TB | $40/mo | $0.060/h |
| Linode 8 GB | 8 GB | 4 CPU cores | 160 GB | 5 TB | $40/mo | $0.060/h |
| Vultr 16 GB | 16 GB | 6 CPU cores | 320 GB | 5 TB | $80/mo | $0.119/h |
| Linode 16 GB | 16 GB | 6 CPU cores | 320 GB | 8 TB | $80/mo | $0.12/h |
You don’t need to study the table above too long to notice that Vultr and Linode share basically the same pricing structure with just a few minor differences here and there. It might seem then that they both offer the same performance for the money, but that’s actually not the case at all.
Regardless of whether we’re talking about raw CPU power, performance stability, disk input/output performance, or network performance, Vultr consistently performs better than Linode in both benchmarks and real-world tests.
For instance, the average response time of a database-intensive web application with Vultr’s 8 GB plan is around 50 ms, but it’s over 80 ms with Linode’s 8 GB plan. Running Sysbench, a popular free and open source benchmarking tool, with the Vultr 2 GB plan results in 420 operations per second but running the same test with the Linode 2 GB plan results only in 260 operations per second.
Clearly, you don’t get what you pay for with Linode because it’s possible to get a lot more bang for your buck by choosing Vultr. If you google the phrase “Linode performance problems,” you will find a lot of threads where Linode customers complain about various performance problems, which proves that it’s not just artificial benchmarks where Linode struggles.
Unfortunately for Linode, Vultr offers significantly better performance without asking its customers to pay more money for it, which is why it wins.
Comparing Linode vs Vultr Customer Support
Vultr has 24×7 technical support staff and a ticket system, but it doesn’t provide a phone number nor live chat. Linode’s customer support is more comprehensive, and the cloud hosting provider even has two phone numbers that are available to customers around the clock.
Both Vultr and Linode offer comprehensive documentation whose purpose is to help customers solve their problems on their own, without having to contact customer support staff. Because Vultr accepts articles and tutorials from independent writers, its documentation consists of hundreds and perhaps even thousands of articles, which means that you can go far beyond basic administration and learn, for example, how to diagnose Minecraft server lag, how to install DokuWiki on FreeBSD, or how to configure IPv6 on your VPS. Linode’s documentation is considerably less extensive even though it covers a fair bit of ground as well, and it’s also harder to navigate.
You can expect both Vultr and Linode to respond to customer support requests in a timely matter, typically in less than an hour. During our testing, we were pleased with how friendly, knowledgeable, and professional Vultr’s and Linode’s customer support staff were.
The Best VPS Cloud Server Option is Vultr
Vultr and Linode share many similarities because the two services fiercely compete with each other. When one introduces a certain feature, the other one is always quick to follow, which is something you as a customer should be delighted about because it means that you can’t really make a bad decision when choosing which of these two cloud hosting providers to choose. However, there can be only one winner of this Vultr vs Linode showdown, and it should be clear to you by now that the winner is Vultr. Thanks to its extensive global infrastructure, Vultr is able to consistently provide better performance than Linode, and the difference can be quite significant. And since Vultr doesn’t charge anything more for its services than Linode, there’s simply no reason not to give it a try first.
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