Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.

Tonight I want to compare DigitalOcean offerings versus Linode 512, which is my prefered and used LEMP stack enviroment for production. SSD is nice to have but Linode doesn’t provide an instance with it, but for the sake of comparing apples-2-apples these are the configurations:
Linode 512 | Price: $19.95 | Cores: 1 CPU | Memory: 512 | Disk: 24GB | Transfer: 2TB DigitalOcean | Price: $5.00 | Cores: 1 CPU | Memory: 512MB | Disk: 20GB | Transfer: 1TB DigitalOcean | Price: $160 | Cores: 8 CPU | Memory: 16Gb | Disk: 160GB | Transfer: 1TB
My tests were using CentOS 6.3 with Nginx 1.3, PHP 5.3.21+ installed form CentOS ALT. To generate the load I use http://loader.io/ create by the SendGrid Labs. again using the defaults of 250 maximum users and 60 seconds of duration. Before each run I restart nginx and php-fpm.
The first test was using the APC status page apc.php.
Linode 512: Success responses: 84344 | Avg response time: 37 | Sent from app: 988.90 MB | Rcvd from loader: 9.35 MB Digital 1C: Success responses: 34528 | Avg response time: 107 | Sent from app: 403.97 MB | Rcvd from loader: 3.88 MB Digital 8C: Success responses: 46549 | Avg response time: 79 | Sent from app: 544.63 MB | Rcvd from loader: 5.22 MB
Second test I download and install Symfony 2 framework, use their default Hellow World example. Symfony requirements check pass except PCRE that require version 8.0+.
Linode 512: Success responses: 2672 | Avg response time: 1610 | Sent from app: 28.15 MB | Rcvd from loader: 571.29 KB Digital 1C: Success responses: 486 | Avg response time: 4058 | Sent from app: 5.13 MB | Rcvd from loader: 233.40 KB Digital 8C: Success responses: 8293 | Avg response time: 608 | Sent from app: 87.42 MB | Rcvd from loader: 1.59 MB