UpCloud, THE cloud service

I’ve tested for a bit over 2 weeks now and there’s still a lot to be done in order to have a full 360 overview of the service, but here’s my two cents.

It’s a shme I only recently started to use their services. You’ll get why after this brief review.

WordPress

I’m a WordPress developer and of course I tested the cloud service for my use case scenario.

It could use a point-and-click installer for WordPress and other platforms but since I’ve gotten quite savvy with the terminal I can’t complain. Installation of WordPress was a breeze. I’ve only felt the lack of a simple installer because I got used to it while using Digital Ocean.

I spun up two simmilar machines both on UpCloud and DO:

4GB RAM
2CPUs
80GB SSD
Ubuntu 16/18
Same datacenter location

and got to work installing a LAMP stack and WordPress. No tweaks, no optimizations, I tested everything as it comes out of the box. By deafult on UpCloud you get Ubuntu 18 and also by default you get access to the PHP 7.2 PPA.

Performance

Here’s a few things I noticed from my bench.sh test.

UpCloud uses slightly higher frequency CPUs
The connectivity of UpCloud is better, resulting in faster network speeds

DO has a slightly faster network but is more consistent across results.

Ubuntu 18 + PHP 7.2 offers a huge boost in requests processing speed and increases the amount of requests that the box can handle.

WordPress loads about 30% quicker on UpCloud and the box can handle 76% more requests compared to DO (^{1, 2, 3, 4}). Testing was done on the 2019 theme with no plugins installed, no caching, no optimization done.

Buddy.works integration

One service that I recently discovered and love to use is Buddy.works. In laymans terms it connects to your Git repo, pulls the latest code and pushes it to your server be it a shared cPanel host, a dedicated box or a VPS.

UpCloud has direct integration with Buddy and from my tests it is quicker to deploy compared to SFTP, FTPS or SSH.

If you host all your projects on UpCloud and you also use Buddy for code deployment this is the dreamteam. It will be extremely easy to manage projects: stress free deployments.

The dash

The UpCloud dashboard has a clean look, works flawlessly and has all the tools you’d expect from a VPS management interface. Anyhow, everythinig works so great you won’t ever have to touch the dash after the initial setup, unless you want to upgrade your box.

The only thing I couldn’t test so far was their support. Honestly I didn’t have questions since they have a massive library of articles written in plain English, usable by slightly less technical users.

I did not get paid to write this article. UpCloud offered me some free credit and asked my opinion on their service.