I have servers on Vultr, AWS, Azure, physical hardware in data centres and a few others. The physical servers are by far the fastest obviously, but when looking at the VPS / 'cloud' services Vultr is by _far_ the fastest and most reliable servers out of the lot, a close second would be Sitehost (AU/NZ Only). On the other end of the scale, the least reliable services we've experienced is easily those hosted on Azure where constant network issues, unreliable performance and random unexplained outages are frequent. Rackspace used to be good, going back say 2 or so years ago, then it felt like they were struggling although their technology far exceeded that of AWS - Amazon's marketing and targeting of management level sales seemed to outweigh and caused them to buckle.
You know, this is the kind of of knowledge that we all like to have, but even then, all we have is your word (I don't have any reason to doubt it), what I tried to share here is a way to back all of that (at least performance, reliability is a different kind of monster) with numbers.
Let me add my word. Vultr is powerful and reliable. Recently they cut their prices roughly in HALF. They were the best (IMHO) before that. Now it's not even a competition.
Linode seems to provide pretty much exact same plans, but their control panel is a bit too geeky (you need a few extra steps to launch a OS because launching an instance means powering on an empty machine without a disk), touching Vultr control panel feels pretty easy.
I just hope they both get block storage deployed on all their regions.
Linode seems to be working in a new version of their control panel, I hope that they do a great work, because for too much people the current one is a entry barrier, even when they do a very good work.
I second this. Vult is the best in cheap. I run an uptime monitoring service, the box on `vultr` never has any issue despite they are just $2.5 per month
Is it possible to show some benchmarks? I suppose you mean by computational power but if it is by far the fastest, it should be trivial to bring up the differences in numbers.
I did a blog post last year that compared DigitalOcean, Vultr, and my 7 year old laptop for my Git indexing engine. Vultr performed better than DigitalOcean in all my tests.
As Vultr and Linode provide double the memory and other benefits for same price as DO, unless DO provides better plans, it's becoming a bit of a joke concerning raw performance / $.
What I cared the most about is CPU limit. On all these vps if you keep 100% CPU usage they will treat you as a noisy neighbor.
But none of them clearly tell you the baseline of CPU resource that "safe" to use.
This is why I hate using AWS and similar virtual servers. I use them for quick dev stuff then get a non shared server. Massive datacenter scaling doesn't save that much money. The money in cloud is made from huge over-provisioning.
Most providers will artificially limit you below the published limits if you use "too much" CPU or internal network bandwidth. You think that 1Gbps link between your machines isn't shared? See what happens when you try to use it full tilt for a couple days.
As far as I know, AWS and Google cloud instances do not limit your vCPU usage.(Exclude aws t1&t2 instance and Google micro&small instance) . And also they do not limit your bandwidth usage, they bill you instead.
I think you'll find that AWS doesn't do that outside of the vCPU credit-system nodes (which I think are just t1/t2). The resources you have rented from Amazon are your resources, especially as you get up to scale (when it really starts to matter in a big way, capitally speaking).
I didn't make up that sentiment, by the way; an account representative said it to me verbatim. It seemed mostly true in practice, and it's a big driver of why it's tough for firms like Linode and DigitalOcean to compete in the same arena.
FWIW, I've compiled Chromium (which took a while because the build needed more RAM and swapped) and accidentally left random scripts erroneously chewing 100% CPU for hours (woops) on Contabo's $9 offering (6GB RAM, couple cores, 500GB disk, 100Mbps). Never heard a peep from Management™.
Performance is mildly all over the shop - eg, some days packages might install in under a second, other days pacman stalls for 30s+ "resolving dependencies", and then a further 2-3+ minutes regenerating the manpage cache or whatever it's doing - but, you can peg both cores, and they don't seem to care. So there's that.
It's in Germany, and ramp-up time to US servers takes a couple seconds (eg, pulling data from the US will take a moment or two to wind up to ~12MB/s). Similarly, latency is mildly high.
A big plus: it's just QEMU and they give you access to the KVM VNC console. You can kill iptables when it goes rogue! You can disable SSH!
Oh - a tidbit to remember: they do mention that if you use >60Mbps for 6 hours+ they kill your link, but I learned from some friends what that means in practice: your connection goes to 10Mbps for the rest of the month.
Not a shill, just mentioning what I learned from using a friend's instance for a couple months. Would be interested to hear about any negative experiences people have had so I can file those away too.
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Another option: online.net have dediboxes based on Atom C2350s with 4GB RAM, 1TB and 1Gbps networking, for €8.99/mo (+€20.00 setup).
But on the other hand it's a dedicated machine. The CPU has virtualization support (despite being 1.7GHz :D hahaha). That's gonna translate to 100% usage sooner or later... so... that may be a potential alternative.
I haven't tested this option, it would be very interesting to pit it against a Contabo VM.
I hope that there was a easy way to know that clearly, but happens the same with support, is very hard to know what kind of support they are going to offer you until you experience it firsthand.
That's one of the reasons why I started this, all the reviews and comparisons along the web have some kind of bias -even when is positive and truthful by grateful users- and is very hard to know what is right from wrong. I wanted to offer some way to have transparency and reproducibility all the way.
> I have serious doubts about the OVH’s and Scaleway’s unlimited traffic, seems more marketing strategy than real to me (joe di castro).
Anecdotal, of course, but I have an application on OVH (on the USD $3.50/month plan) that pushes/pulls >10TB/month - coming close to saturating the 100/100 connection at times - and I've not heard anything from OVH about it being an issue.
Yeah, they have no problem with that. But I do recall years ago when a few customers were running hundreds of seedboxes OVH changed ToS and asked them to leave.
That, I no like it. I understand it, but not like it.
It's like being at their mercy (or other clients) or like if the rules were written in the shore's sand, you're well until the tide rises. I would prefer clear lines into this kind of things.
I was not referring here about the "activity" per se, I was talking about quotas and percentages of use. No matter for what kind of activity you are going to use the service, I would like to have clear from the beginning what limits of use I have.
Another thing completely different is the permissibility about certain illegal activities or loopholes in their servers. That's not my concern, that's only a question of moral/ethics/legal between the client, the provider and the authorities.
There aren't any limits. I've run my port at 100% for a full month and they've never batted an eye. The only time I've heard of anyone getting the banhammer is for repeatedly getting abuse notifications due to illegal torrenting.
Obviously, always that there is a limit, would be people trying to abuse them. The key is to trace clear limits between what is a fair use of the service and what is a clear abuse, but sometimes the creativity of your clients can easily surpass any expectations or planned use cases that you had.
Oh! That's nice to know, I'm glad to hear that and that they keep that promise. I knew that they have their own infrastructure, but even then, I really have doubts because in my experience almost all of the providers have "little marketing white lies".
Scaleway are owned by one of the largest ISPs in France. Bandwidth is typically brought symmetric, but home traffic is nearly entirely download. It's my assumption that they use their server buisness to offset their bandwidth costs for their underutilised outbound links.
I really want to try out OVH but I don't like their requirement that you need to send a copy of your passport. None of the other ones DO, Scaleway, Linode etc. requires this.
I've been very keen with https://UpCloud.com at first their servers don't seem to be cheap. But when you factor in the actual performance, those do provide a good on bang ratio. So far I don't have any complaints about UpCloud. But it's not the same story with OVH. UpCloud didn't throttle the disk I/O, even it was truly insane, due to a software bug. That's what I recommend, if you're looking for good instead of just cheap. UpCloud doesn't oversell resources, so full CPU / RAM utilization is totally acceptable. Also VPS resources are guaranteed and performance is pretty much constant.
Scaleway is actually quite good when you factor in the performance / price ratio with it. (VC1S) But that's not something I would recommend for 'production use'. Yet, it's very nice for hobby projects.
All systems are under constant monitoring. CPU, RAM, Disk I/O & Networking. Unfortunately the data collected isn't something I can publish.
Btw. OVH SSD VPS 1 does provide IPv6, yet it's not being tested. Why? - Yes, you'll need to manually add the routing once to enable it.
Yes, I know about the OVH plan and IPv6, but in the hurry and in the middle of all the tasks to accomplish I left behind a few things. I'll keep improving it. Thanks!
This is a great set of tests. Once you move out of the side-project phase and start turning stuff into a business, you probably care about security features too. Unfortunately, most VPS providers don't have a great track record there. With the big Cloud providers, you have tools like AWS' VPCs and security groups to help fence off parts of your app from the rest of the world.
In a perfect world, you wouldn't care so much about network reachability and care a lot more about, say, mTLS or at-rest crypto. But as a young company, managing that probably isn't the best thing to spend your resources on right now. Much like Google's BeyondCorp: just because you can expose some apps to the internet with years of work and millions in resources doesn't mean that a VPN or a SG isn't a pretty good idea for now -- if nothing else, it'll do a pretty decent job protecting you from the background radiation of the Internet :)
I was asked recently (2017) by Linode to provide scanned my credit card (after paying, then eventually refunded). The reason - fraud prevention, whatever that means. Certainly leaves bad flavor and decided to go w/ DO.
Yes, probably is one of the reasons why they do those checks. I suppose also that depends a lot on the kind of plan that are you going to use, probably they do more checks for more expensive plans.
I worked at a hosting company for a few months, and they way the prevented fraud seemed backwards, draconian, and unfair. But I couldn't come up with a better way of doing it. Fraud prevention seems hard.
I did not have to make that with them, but I had to pass a weird process with OVH in order to confirm my identity through a phone call, and in the process have to wait several hours until I have my server available.
Really, they required me to send a copy of my ID (both sides) without anything blanked out. Obviously, I went with Linode instead as they didn't require this.
Half-baked startup idea: because VPS performance is so dependent on the VPS's neighbors, create a service that spins up a bunch and then compares them on demand. Keep the highest performing one. Charge your users to perform these tests.
You mean the 'Netflix Model'? This is what they do all the time on AWS; when needed, spin up a bunch of VM's; test performance, drop the ones that perform worse and use the better ones.
I don't know, but as NKCSS says, you could do probably that in AWS and being a client like Netflix.
But stressing instances regularly to test them to find a better one is something that you could probably do on your own, but as a service I have serious doubts if the providers would like that from a given scale. I'm not sure, but I don't think that would be something rare to have you account suspended. Perhaps, if you arrive a some type of agreement with them and their "business model" is compatible wit that, maybe. But, don't give me too much credit in this, I'm only speculating.
I can't see it being that much of a problem for the providers, as long as running short-term machines isn't already an issue. You always run the risk that the performance of the machine will degrade over time as the host fills up anyway.
Interesting. Any ideas on how to monitor/respond to a new noisy neighbor? Ongoing monitoring to see if performance degrades? Can you filter out your own usage from the performance rating?
I'm a little confused as to why comparing single-threaded performance (for scaleway) is more "fair". Surely you should compare both, to allow people to compare for single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads.
I understand you, but is more fair in the sense of comparing apples to apples if you are going to do one test of a kind. Currently all of this tests as a batch job take several hours, doing more tests, means more time and more job for me. Specially that when I took that decision I didn't gather all the data automatically and I have to collect all of that by hand and put it on the tables. There is a reason for all. Now that I have (almost, I have to add 1 more) all the tests automated and I collect all the data with a python script, I can start to think to do all kind of "alchemy" and improve the comparison.
Thanks for you feedback. I'll add this as an issue into the repository to improve the comparison.
Well, I would like to include more, in fact I would include Ligthsail for sure if they offered a datacenter in Europe. But to start something like this you have to start small, or the costs will bury you pretty son. As a pet and personal project, the way to limit the cost was setting a clear seat of boundaries, like plans under $5 and available in Europe. And being one-man band to make this affordable in terms of time and effort I had to keep it small at the beginning. I worked on this in my spare time for more than two months. If I find a way to sustain the costs, or the providers itself offer me a way to test their machines, I have no problem to expand the comparison. But in the meantime, I share the tools because I knew from the beginning that I only have limited resources. And after all, reproducibility, independence and transparency are the keys IMHO to have a trustful comparison.
you can combine different network adapters/storage options and instance types and also create your own virtual network, with various other options.
while these VPS providers only allow a specific amount of storage for a specific type of instance and also have a included traffic option while ec2 does not have that.
I mean more and more VPS providers have an API, but they still don't have the customizability and services like a cloud has, yet they are preferable in many use cases.
I understand you, but as I said in another comments, I would like to expand the comparison, but in the end is a question of time and costs. If I find a way to sustain the costs, or the providers itself offer me a way to test their machines, I have no problem to expand the comparison.
But in the meantime, I share the tools because I knew from the beginning that I only have limited resources. And after all, reproducibility, independence and transparency are the keys IMHO to have a trustful comparison.
Curious to know if anyone uses Vultr whether they actually hit 100% uptime, or if that's more marketing and they just issue credits for the SLA regularly.
100% uptime is an unrealistical claim. There are so many things that can go wrong with a VPS (that is, by design, only ever running on one node at the time). The probability of that node failing or a messed up route taking offline all routers at once is low, but it's not 0%.
In order to even come close to 100%, you need a multi-region distributed system and even then, so many things can go wrong.
I totally agree with this, after all is common sense. Even if all the hardware were perfect, and all the software were bugless, you would still have to deal with physics and with those imperfect and error-prone machines that set up all the things called humans.
Oh that is a nice overview, perhaps regarding IP reputation, include an overview which of those providers has the most ip addresses on RBL lists too?
Performance is nice, but if you are already on (a) blacklist (s) from your start.. :) since most of those providers, have a lovely reputation in regards of compromised machines being abused in botnet and other malicious activities... i think it might be an interesting index.
Interesting idea... it didn't though of that for sure. I thought of talking about how permissive the providers are with certain type of contents (like legal adult content), but it is an information not easy to collect and so I went with the official legal terms/ToS instead.
I'll have to think about that, and how collect that information. Thanks!
This is just what I needed! I'm downsizing from a colo and looking for just this sort of data. Vultr seems really appealing especially with the ability to upload my own iso (My preferred linux distro isn't one of the common host offerings). I would love to hear people's experiences good and bad with them as a provider.
Well, the only thing that you need is to execute the tests on the three of the providers, and compare them yourself if you want. Those are the keys of the project so far, reproducibility, independency and transparency.
I'm inclined to expand the review, but only if I find a way to get free credits from providers or another way to finance the tests. But right now, the best thing I can offer you is the same tools that I used here in the repository itself.
Their pricing model seems similar to http://clouding.io, but it forces you to get more CPU if you want, say, 8GB RAM. It's a bit cheaper with HDD instead of SSD though.
I put you here the same reply that I gave to another user, because the answer is essentially the same. Anyway, thanks for you feedback.
I understand you, but as I said in another comments, I would like to expand the comparison, but in the end is a question of time and costs. If I find a way to sustain the costs, or the providers itself offer me a way to test their machines, I have no problem to expand the comparison. But in the meantime, I share the tools because I knew from the beginning that I only have limited resources. And after all, reproducibility, independence and transparency are the keys IMHO to have a trustful comparison.
Very nice. One other datapoint that could be useful for some: Terraform provider support (and how capable the provider is). Terraform has providers for Digital Ocean, Scaleway and Lightsail but nothing for Linode or Vultr.
I suppose that is the same with another tools and providers. The community size and the work that the providers put on this makes a big difference IMHO. Another reason to share this in the comparison.
Thanks!
Yeah, I agree, that would be nice, but as I automate the creation of those tables and cut/paste them every time that I run a set of new tests, to do that would require a lot of manual job to me. That's the reason why I don't do that, to keep it manageable.
Yes, there is always that possibility, is a question only of time, more tests implies more time to complete the full batch. And of course, more time to implement it.
I have the intention to keep improving it, and thanks to the Ansible tags, the tests can be run individually and independently (I tried from the beginning to make them as atomic as possible for this same purpose). Thus is very easy to extend.
Well, it's very useful, and in continue development.
In the end you have to know what you are doing, but it will point you to very useful tips and show some warnings that you can look to improve the security of you server. But in this, I still don't know two SysAdmins that concur on the best way to harden a server. There is a lot of things to consider and there are very strong opinions on how to do certain things.
But without doubt, it's a very useful tool, even if you know what you are doing you can use it like a checklist to know if you are forgetting something. It's not perfect (nothing is, and less in this field) but I can only recommend it.
Very impressive reference. Would be interested in ec2 as well.
And I think "datacenter in the EU" does not necessarily mean "bound to EU law" since the parent company is in the US, right?
Well, I would like to include more, in fact I would include Ligthsail for sure if they offered a datacenter in Europe. But to start something like this you have to start small, or the costs will bury you pretty son. As a pet and personal project, the way to limit the cost was setting a clear seat of boundaries, like plans under $5 and available in Europe. And being one-man band to make this affordable in terms of time and effort I had to keep it small at the beginning.
Maybe, If providers offer me free credits to make the tests or if I found a way to assume the costs, them I could think to expand the project.
I've used all the service providers available and these opinions include my historical experience with them (I've used all providers for many years, my account with DO is since 2013). Most of my service uses were focused in those service provider's North America locations, Asia locations, and Oceania locations. Note I did do a short comparison between DigitalOcean and Vultr back in 2014 here: https://vpsboard.com/threads/digitalocean-vs-vultr-the-asian...
Most service providers here are fairly decent.
From my experience, OVH's KVM VPSes weren't worth the time, but their VMWare VMs were absolutely top notch.
Linode has had two major security events over the last few years, one of which was in early 2016 which included release of credit card information. However, they also offer paypal payments now and are fairly top notch in terms of performance. (They've taken approaches to fix their problems from 2016 with this blog post here: https://blog.linode.com/2016/02/19/security-investigation-re... ).
DigitalOcean is fairly reliable. Their Singapore location early on had regular packet loss events, but they've been shaping up pretty nicely over time.
Vultr has been a major problem for me. Vultr for a while (on their storage instances in Japan) had terrible I/O which took a solid two hours just to install Ubuntu 14.04. When contacted support, they stated they "stopped a noisy neighbor and to retry" but no real improvements were seen.
We had a service running on a VC2 that irregularly required a large amount of CPU power (higher than 0.5 load on a 1 CPU instance for a period of 1 hour a night). The same task was completed faster with VMs from DigitalOcean and Linode. But the biggest problem I've experienced is their network.
For the longest time their Japan location was single-homed and routing was funky. We'd regularly see any traffic going outside of Japan being routed back through their Los Angeles location, so adding 300+ ms latency for any of our users in Korea, China, and anywhere in South-East Asia. Today it's much better with 40 ms latency from their Japan location to our Korea client, and a solid 80 ms latency to our Singapore client.
A colleague of ours had very important clients who required 100% uptime (which Vultr agreed to) but over a period of a month had regular packet loss events or network loss (regularly 40 minutes per event and around one event every few days monitored via external monitoring systems such as uptimerobot, statuscake, and a GCP server running Icinga2). Didn't receive much help from Vultr's engineers nor could they find the issue. They ended up moving to Google Cloud Platform. They did end up getting SLA credit from them but no reason to have SLA credit when you're not on their platform anymore.
I regularly return to Vultr every few months to every year or so to see how it's going and they've come a long way with the services they're offering. I'd recommend them for a dev environment and testing over a period of an hour a day or so. However, I would caution with production systems. Your mileage may vary, but I'd suggest reviewing the quality of the product in addition to the price tag per resource.
It's truly helpful to hear experiences first hand across different providers - especially so specifically.
I'm really interested in your experience with OVH - how long ago did you last use it, and what problems did you have?
I've used OVH successfully for various unimportant things for a while now. I'm about to setup a prod environment on OVH for a side project that we anticipate getting some good initial traction. So, not trying to spend a ton, but willing to forego the conveniences of AWS the best cost to performance ratio.
OVH has made a big Openstack push, it seems. "VPS Cloud n" series is KVM (Openstack), with NVMe drives, using Ceph (Openstack) storage, and a moderate 99.99% uptime (same as DO).
It's quite attractive at their prices - so I'm trying to gather as much relevant intel as possible on others' experience with them.
I have multiple dedis (not VPSs) at OVH Canada (Windows on bare metal as well as Proxmox with Linux and Windows VMs). You'll want multiple dedis there too, if you use them.
Occasionally a server will hard lock and when you got into the management web app and ask for a reboot it will say that the system is not responding and they have to send a tech to go physically power cycle it. When that happens (and it will, it's happened to ALL of my dedis there at some point) you're down for 30-90 minutes.
They provide remote reboot and a java-based ILO which can solve most weird issues, but the hard lock stuff continues to confound us.
We currently have multiple dedicated servers out of OVH BHS Canada (bare metal servers) and I have never ran into that problem. Most of the time I believe OVH gives you all the tools necessary. If I recall correctly, I believe their power-cycle feature is sending a SNMP command to the UPS, so their online control panel should technically work, but mileage may vary.
We've started moving on to Colocated hardware though. Unless you specifically need OVH's VAC system or their network (or free 256 IPs with setup fees), I've found OVH's availability of hardware and configurations to be fairly lacking. Glad it works out for you guys though!
My experiences with OVH's cloud platform has been a bit dated. I've been using their cloud platform since 2012, especially when their OpenVZ "Cloud" VMs were nested VMs inside their VMWare containers and had regular network outages (due to noisy neighbors) or restarting the VM every few hours. I switched to their VMWare VMs and they work like a charm. Granted some see it as a bit pricey for a small project but it's still cheaper than some other options.
My experience with OVH's KVM Openstack line was when it was still maturing as a RunAbove product. I remember they had problems out the gate and at one point had regular service restarts and I think at one point had a storage problem becoming read-only. I stopped using them since then and just chalked it up as another problem with using OVH's cheapest cloud platform. They've never worked out for me.
However, for those who stuck around and also bought KVMs from OVH after they "graduated" from RunAbove, I believe it works to an extent. It's not the best, it's obviously focused on minimizing costs and maximizing possible resources and reliability, and (this is my own speculation now) I think their server density is fairly high (VMs per host node). I haven't heard of any major problems lately with their KVM platform but again, I wouldn't put anything intensive on there either.
If cost is a major factor for you, then go with OVH's Openstack KVM line. If you still need fairly solid reliability, I think going with AWS or GCP might be worth another look. If you're fine with a VPS starting out without Ceph, NVMe, etc, then I'd really suggest you hit up Linode. Linode offers some of the best resources per cost ratio while still providing a decent reliability factor. If you really do need reliable storage then I'd look at DigitalOcean's Block-Storage (also known as network storage). Once you've grown your operation a bit more and have more resources and funds, then I think it'd be worth re-visiting the idea of moving to AWS or GCP or any other cloud platforms.
YMMV as I am just one person.
If you want a more detailed response feel free to let me know.
And thank you very much to share your experience with us. I think that the same provider can offer you a very different experience in different regions. Even AWS is not immune to that, they had datacenters with some major outages in some US regions while in another countries almost none big problems.
That's a very true statement. There are things outside our control (and sometimes in it) that can result in downtime. Like a datacenter downtime event in 2013 where a road construction crew were performing maintenance and ended up cutting their fiber (the location fiber actually was didn't line up with where it was supposed to be on paper). Since then they've built another fiber connection out of the building.
In the end, what matters is how they respond to these kinds of events and issues and what actions they take to prevent those issues in the future. While I can't say for certain what issues were avoided through proactive measures, I will state that Linode has been great with setting up fixes that hopefully prevents problems in the future. DigitalOcean recently had a problem twice with their billing and control panel system going down (in addition to their API being down). They've also taken action to prevent this in the future and have been fairly open about it (one was their SFO datacenter being down if I recall correctly).
My only gripe about Vultr is that their support responses are very basic. Limited to "try again now" and "we've turned off a neighbor". Honestly I was hoping a solution that would work long-term and communication on how they're working to ensure that. DO and Linode focus on relaying that information and I feel really works with me. This is why I'm really fine with buying through them even if they're technically "twice" as expensive as Vultr. That peace of mind is really worth it.
Singapore is a big problem. The network there is so fragmented. Last I checked, Singtel owns a large portion of Singapore's networks but won't peer with certain ISPs or anyone peering with certain ISPs. This meant a Singapore user trying to communicate with a Singapore server sometimes needs to be routed through Hong Kong or another exchange before returning back to Singapore.
Don't forget SoftLayer's network in Asia. It's a real hit or miss on residential ISPs. One time a client of ours in Seoul on SK was being routed through Japan to hit SoftLayer Hong Kong. What is usually 40ms latency from Seoul to Hong Kong turned into 90ms of latency with a higher chance of packet loss during peak hours (for those who aren't familiar with Asia network, all countries are connected via submarine cables which really makes it expensive to expand bandwidth between countries. During peak internet usage you really can sometimes experience the packet loss unless you pay more. Expect higher operation costs in Asia especially since many central IX countries are currently experiencing power shortages).
More than two months in my spare time. To collect the "static" information, and create the Ansible roles and python scripts to collect the "dynamic" info (the results from the benchmarks) and finally compose the final document.
I lost a lot of time waiting for the benchmark tests to finish ;-)
Well, there are some very good comments in this thread, very little to add.
All of those plans that I compare there use the same technology in the the end, KVM virtualization. The differences are in the "flexibility" and "services" that they offer in order to act more as a cloud or more as a classic VPS. But the lines are very blurred these days. You can almost achieve the same things with any of them in these kind of plans. IMHO I think that you can really start talking about clouds when you're playing in the same league as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Virtualisaton is the basic task you're doing, you're making a "virtual" computer. The idea of the "cloud" is more that these virtual machines are hosted in a room somewhere far away with other virtual computers there as well.
For instance, I can install VMWare and get virtualisation going on my laptop, but I wouldn't consider that the cloud. Similar, you can get bare metal computers on the cloud which aren't virtualised.
Last I recall Linode and DigitalOcean were VPSes. They're on a single node with local storage. You can use block storage to set up network storage, but they're all VPSes.
