Goes up to $299 December 15 when monthlies land, but monthlies are a mere $15/month and integrate 1-clicks, firewall, outbound milter, and resource containment. APNSCP is available on DigitalOcean’s Marketplace and eats cPanel and Plesk’s lunch:
Machine IPs: 64.225.38.212, 64.225.38.207, 64.225.38.224, all deployed in SFO2. 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage standard Droplet.
Baseline w/ 1 site:
APNSCP : 806 MB free. If we enable low memory, which will introduce a slight delay in processing panel jobs as well as disable SNI for Dovecot/Postfix, memory increases by 99 MB to 905 MB free.
cPanel : 1025 MB free.
Plesk : 819 MB free… then it slowly began gobbling memory - 763 MB
cPanel is the clear winner here helping you save a whopping stick of RAM in 1996 terms.
Let’s talk WordPress performance, where the real concerns come into play.
ab -n 1000 -c 1 http://test-domain.com/
, we’re taxing the CPU without much consideration for SSL overhead.
APNSCP : 36.90 requests per second (0 failures), 27.10 ms per req
cPanel : 2.95 requests per second (0 failures), 339.26 ms per req ( default settings )
cPanel w/ OPcache + PHP-FPM: 28.27 requests per second (0 failures), 35.37 ms per req
Plesk : 13.57 requests per second (0 failures), 73.71 ms per req (yes OPcache is enabled)
APNSCP trades memory for performance. If your CPU is pegged there’s little that you can throw its way to ameliorate the situation. If you’re constrained by memory, just resize the VM. If 256 MB is impossible to append onto your machine, I’d recommend stepping back in the TARDIS and returning to the present.
Performance is cumulative. Shave a little off here and there and holistically you have a platform that hauls balls.
PS: Blesta module is in the works too.