We are looking for a replacement for Digital Ocean among domestic hosting companies

I am a fan of virtual servers, as in most cases they provide more freedom and opportunities than classic shared hosting and at the same time it is more convenient to use than dedicated servers.
Just three years ago, there was almost no alternative to the Digital Ocean virtual servers. There were practically no similar services in Russia. And the prices for foreign offers started from $ 5 per month, which in terms of the exchange rate at that time was about 150 rubles and was comparable to regular hosting. However, when the dollar and the euro jumped twice in price, it became very expensive to use the services of foreign providers.

At the end of 2014, I noticed that many clients of low-cost foreign hosts (Hetzner, OVH, and so on), after a sharp fall in the exchange rate of the ruble, began to transfer their projects to domestic sites. I, like many users of Habr, used the services of Vultr and Digital Ocean before, but in the current economic situation I began to think about finding a similar service in Russia.

It is necessary to pay tribute: domestic companies started warning in time and starting from the second half of 2014, providers that are almost Digital Ocean clones began to enter the hosting services market: with a very similar set of configurations, with a similar set of services, and even with a similar control panel design . Everything would be fine, but many of us have one interesting feature: we have a great deal of distrust, and we often treat with disdain everything that is produced in our own homeland and a priori consider it to be worse than foreign analogues. As I said about my domestic equipment many years ago, my first leader: “Only champagne can be Soviet!”.

So is it worth using budget domestic “virtuals” or is it still better to tighten your belts more tightly, but at the same time stay with the tried and true DO? In this review I will try to give an impartial and unbiased answer to this question. For this, I will compare Digital Ocean with popular domestic virtual server providers: SimpleCloud, Flops, VDSina and Vscale.
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Brief information about companies

SimpleCloud is a company from St. Petersburg. Entered the market in 2014. All the equipment of the company is located in the St. Petersburg data center Miran 2.
Flops is a project of the company Performix, launched in 2014. The equipment is located in a data center in Moscow.
Vscale - a project of the company “Selectk”. Launched in August 2015. The entire hardware infrastructure of Vscale is currently located in the data center Selektela in St. Petersburg.
VDSina - Project Hosting Technologies. According to the information on the official website, the company's equipment is located in a data center in the Netherlands.

Tariff Plans

I will begin by comparing the most popular tariffs for all providers considered:

Provider	Virtualization	CPU, number of cores	RAM, GB	SSD, GB	Traffic, TB	Price, rub / month
Vscale	KVM	one	one	thirty	2	400
Digital ocean	KVM	one	one	thirty	2	10 USD (~ 700 rubles)
Simple cloud	KVM	one	2	40	Unlimited	500
Flops	KVM	one	one	32	1.8 (60 GB per day)	500
Vdsina	KVM	one	one	thirty	2	399

All configurations are very similar and about the same. However, with the current situation of the value of foreign currency, the offer from Digital Ocean for the Russian user is the most expensive. Flops has a lower rate than DO, but higher than Vscale and VDSina. SimpleCloud has a very interesting offer: 2 GB of memory and 40 GB SSD (this is more than all providers presented in the review), unlimited traffic. And this pleasure costs only 500 rubles.

We’ll check what VDS providers can offer for 400-500 rubles.

Number of operating systems

Vscale offers the following Linux distributions for installation on virtual machines: Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, CentOS and Fedora. By the way, the other day - immediately after the official release - Ubuntu 16.04 appeared at Vscale and Digital Ocean. Windows is not and will not be - the creators stated this in one of the promotions on Habré.

Digital Ocean offers a very wide range of distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, CoreOS, FreeBSD. There is no Windows and, as far as I know, is not yet planned.

Flops has the following Linux distributions: Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Fedora. You can also install Windows Server 2008R2 and 2012R2 on virtual servers. True, the prices for Windows servers can hardly be called affordable: for 11,200 rubles a month (the cost of the “advanced” configuration) you can already rent a dedicated server with comparable characteristics. There are no images with preinstalled software.

Simple Cloud offers a wide range of Linux distributions for installation: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, ArchLinux, Gentoo, CoreOS, CloudLinux and the exotic Exherbo. You can also install FreeBSD. In addition, there is a good selection of images with pre-installed software: these are popular CMS, hosting control panels, engines for online stores and much more.

In VDSina, only CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu are available from Linux distributions. It is also possible to install FreeBSD and Windows. There are no images with preinstalled software.

If you don’t use Windows, Digital Ocean is the leader in the choice of operating systems, and domestic virtual server providers still have work to do in this regard.

API

Digital Ocean has an API documented in great detail. For him, there are dozens of clients developed by the community. No domestic provider can boast such a thing.

Vscale is equipped with a simple and highly documented API. With it, you can perform basic operations with servers (create, delete, reboot, reinstall, switch to another tariff plan), manage domains, view information about the current account, work with a ticket system. Vscale is already starting to form a community of users who develop their own clients for the API: Go, Ruby and Java. Not so long ago a plugin for the Docker Machine appeared. According to my data, other domestic providers so far cannot boast of anything like this.

There is a public API and SimpleCloud. It is documented in sufficient detail. With it, you can perform the same operations as with the Digital Ocean API: create new servers, enable, disable and reboot them, add domains, create backup copies. I was unable to find anything about the availability of clients for this API in the process of working on this article.

Flops API is, but not public: access to it is provided only on request. I did not find any documentation on the site.

VDSina is the only survey participant who hasn’t found any API information in open source.

Performance tests

We now turn to the most interesting and important part of the review - performance tests. All the tests below were carried out on the basis of virtual servers of the following configurations:

● Vscale - 1 CPU / 1 GB RAM / 30 GB SSD /;
● Digital Ocean - 1 CPU / 1 GB RAM / 30 GB SSD /;
● Flops - 1 CPU / 1 GB RAM / 32 GB SSD;
● VDSina - 1 CPU / 1 GB RAM / 30 GB SSD;

The following tests were conducted:

● UnixBench test
● CPU and memory tests using the Sysbench utility;
● I / O tests using the fio utility.

Sysbench Tests

CPU test

$ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run 

The lower the number, the better the result.

In this test, Vscale shows the best result - 3.02 milliseconds. In second place is SimpleCloud with a score of 3.07 ms. In the third place is Digital Ocean (3.84 ms). Next comes VDSina with a score of 4.09 milliseconds. Last place - at Flops (4.25 mc).

Memory test

 $ sysbench --test=memory --memory-total-size=1G run 

With the help of the above command, a read-write test of 1 GB of data into RAM is started. The results are shown in the following illustration (the smaller the number, the better the result):

As you can see, the fastest copes with the SImple Cloud test (0.3663 c). On the second place —Vscale (0.5663 c), on the third - VDSina (0, 5883 c). Next come Digital Ocean (0.8304 c) and Flops (1.0674 c).

UnixBench Tests

The UnixBench utility is often used to test Linux virtual servers. It runs performance tests and, based on them, calculates the final result - the so-called System Benchmark Index Score. The higher this figure, the better the result:

According to the results of this test, Digital Ocean (1243.0) comes first. Next come VDSina (1198.0) and Vscale (1056.0). In fourth place - SimpleCloud (530.4). The lowest result is in Flops (380.3).

Disk subsystem performance

Now compare the performance of the disk subsystem for all providers. All tests (results are given below) were carried out using the fio utility.

Random read / write

 $ fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randrw --rwmixread=75 

Final comparative table:

Provider	Result
Digital ocean	read iops = 53,171, write iops = 17,731
Vscale	read iops = 53 145, write iops = 17,722
Vdsina	read iops = 48 459, write iops = 16 160
Simple cloud	read iops = 3 751, write iops = 1,250
Flops	read iops = 556, write iops = 185

Random reading

 $ fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randread 

Random entry

 $ fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randwrite 

Test to perform a real task: collect from the source library Boost

Tests with the help of specialized utilities are, of course, good, but the problem is that they are divorced from real life. Let's try to perform a real task on all participating servers in the test: building from the sources the C ++ Boost library set. This is a rather lengthy and resource-intensive procedure, which takes a decent amount of time even on high-performance “iron” dedicated servers. Let's try to collect Boost on our VDS - and here's the result (the smaller the number, the better):

Vscale did a great job with this task, gathering Boost in 13 minutes 44 seconds. Second place gets SimpleCloud (14 minutes 40 seconds). In third place - VDSina with a score of 15 minutes 33 seconds. On the Digital Ocean server, the Boost build took 18 minutes, 36 seconds. In the last place - Flops (44 minutes 52 seconds).

Conclusion

Summarize the results of the comparison. Of all the considered providers, Simple Cloud offers the widest choice of operating systems and images with pre-installed software. Another undoubted advantage of this provider is the most interesting and attractive tariff.

Vscale does not have such a wide selection of OC and images like SimpleCloud, but there is another advantage: very good performance. According to the results of most tests, Vscale outperforms SimpleCloud and all other reviewers (including the Digital Ocean). I will also note other advantages: good network connectivity (after all, this is “Selektel”), a convenient control panel (simple and modern design, nothing superfluous). And the prices at Vscale are very reasonable. In general, I recommend paying attention to them.

After exploring VDSina, I had a dual impression: on the one hand, the performance of the virtual machines of this provider is almost as good as Digital Ocean. On the other hand, it is somewhat alarming that there is little information about this service in open sources. VDSina does not have many useful functions that other survey participants have: neither the ability to manage domains, nor backup ... However, for me personally, this is not very critical.

Flops looks very nice: a convenient control panel in the style of Digital Ocean, the presence of all the necessary functions, reasonable prices. But performance tests show that in all tests Flops looks worse than other reviewers.

I hope my review showed that the Russian is not always the worst, but everything expensive is not always the best. Domestic providers VDS, not inferior (almost not inferior) foreign counterparts, in our country all the same there, and they are worth it to get to know them better.

I did not in any way wanted to blacken someone, or vice versa to highlight in this review. Therefore, I ask the representatives of hosting companies to treat with understanding the stated point of view and my methods of testing. My review is just the result of a search for domestic alternatives to foreign companies. And can serve as a methodology for readers to conduct their own research.

I have been writing reviews on hosting since 2013. This article on Habré is an attempt to combine all previous developments and see the reaction of an already more savvy audience.