Introducing Vultr High Frequency Compute Servers For Enhanced Performance

We are pleased to announce the availability of Vultr HF servers on the Cloudways Platform. You can now launch a Vultr HF server and experience the massive difference in performance for your hosted websites.

Vultr HF servers offer better hardware than standard machines and deliver superior performance for high CPU demanding workloads. With 3+ GHz processors, low latency memory, and NVMe storage combined with Cloudways server optimization you’d be able to scale your low to mid-end machines for performance-intensive applications.

It All Started…

Around the middle of 2019, we noticed a steady increase in requests to add Vultr High-Frequency Compute servers in our platform. Originally, the availability of Vultr HF in many datacenter locations was limited, thus delaying our decision.

We started evaluating the product and the DevOps teams came up with an implementation plan for the integration. After testing servers by benchmarking Standard and High-Frequency Compute servers, we came to the conclusion that HF does benefit websites that require high read/write and processing power.

Starting today, Vultr HF servers are available on the Platform, complete with all the Cloudways features, support, and server optimization. We have performed an extensive quality assurance process to make sure our customers do not face any issues when they launch their HF servers.

The HF Edge

Vultr HF servers are a distinct product line that focuses on performance and stability regardless of the workload and traffic. With these servers, Vultr offers a solid combination of hardware components that allow users to deploy demanding workload and high-traffic applications without worrying about dips in performance and server slowdowns as the number of users goes up.

The HF servers have a newer generation of Intel processors clocked at 3+GHz that surpass single-core and multi-core performance when compared to standard machines. This power is augmented by equally high-performing NVMe SSD based storage that keeps pace with the processors. As a result, you get a high-performing package that can handle an increasing number of requests and keep on going as the workload increases on the application frontend.

Benchmarking the HF Performance

According to Vultr, the HF server line up is about 40% faster than their standard servers. Given the hype around the performance of the Vultr HF servers, we decided to check out these claims to see if the servers are as good as they say.

Our benchmarking process covers the following two important areas, made even simpler with Vultr Managed Hosting:

Page Response: This evaluates the number of responses the server can handle under a sustained load from the users

I/O Performance: This test compares the disk performance of a Vultr HF server and a set of test servers.

In order to be as comprehensive and transparent as possible, we decided to test 20 Vultr servers with RAM size ranging from 1GB to 16GB. The test environment was:

Test commentary: Consistent and better performance on HF servers from 1GB to 4GB. Since server cache, i.e., Varnish was enabled, we believe that 8GB and 16GB standard Vultr servers produced better results by serving more requests through the cache.

The second comparison was between HF machines and Standard machines, both with Varnish cache disabled which gave us better insights into the power of the underlying hardware.

Test Commentary: With no server cache, the requests drop significantly for both groups. However, HF servers were able to serve a higher number of requests. At 16GB RAM reference point, both standard and HF servers didn’t show much difference in the tests.

In the third comparison, we compared cache-enabled HF machines with cache-disabled HF machines.

As you can see, HF machines performed significantly better than the Standard machines (in some cases, even outperforming them). However, note that the performance boost is not proportional to the increase in machine size and there is a little increase in performance as the machine size increases. Also, the cache component of the Cloudways Stack also played an important role in the performance gain.

I/O Performance

Our test group consisted of a standard DigitalOcean Droplet and a standard Vultr Droplet. We pitted this group against a Vultr HF instance. Note that all three machines have similar specifications of 1 Core CPU and 1GB RAM

As you can see, the HF instance doubles the I/O performance of the standard DigitalOcean and Vultr machines. This clear win of Vultr HF servers is due to NVMe, the new standard of SSD. In contrast, the standard DigitalOcean and Vultr servers are using an older SSD standard.

The Matter of Pricing

The specifications and the benchmarks are impressive, but for many users, the price is often the final question. We are pleased to announce that Vultr HF servers are available at a competitive price.

Compared to a 1GB standard Vultr server that costs about $11 a month, a Vultr HF 1GB server will cost you only $13 a month!

This means that for a couple of dollars more, you can experience a better price to performance server compared to a standard Vultr server. As the specifications go up, the dollar difference between the standard and HF Vultr servers remains minuscule.

                                                                       View Full Pricing Here

Now the question of availability. At the moment, Vultr has decided not to offer HF servers at all of their datacenters. We have compiled the following table to help you pick the right location. We will update this table as Vultr announces HF server availability at their datacenters.

Wrapping up!

With the integration of Vultr HF servers, we believe our users have the opportunity to host their business applications on high-performing servers that add significant value to business processes without any noticeable increase in operational costs.

Go on – give Vultr HF servers a try and let us know your experience with these awesome machines. Also, take snapshots of your results and tag us in your tweets. We would love to see how Vultr HF servers have added to the performance of your applications.

For more in-depth details about Vultr high frequency compute servers, please refer to our comprehensively written knowledge base.