LunaCloud is an interesting provider. They don’t have the most powerful servers, but they have some interesting services like Jelastic -for deploying applications in PHP and Java and consume MongoDB, CouchDB, PostgreSQL, MySql, MariaDBability, Memcached-, cheap Load Balancers (16 USD/month), the ability to launch instances very fast, and with as low as 512 MB of RAM. That’s cool if you need more CPU and less RAM, so you avoid paying that extra.

They allow also to reserve an amount of bandwidth for the instance, that’s pretty interesting.

Like CloudSigma they allow you to balance the amount of RAM you want for the instance, and they allow to choose between 1 to 8 cores at 1,500 Ghz. That part is the most limited as the most powerful server, 8 cores, scores 1859 CMIPS, in the low band. In the other hand the great part is that the price for a 8 CPU with 512 MB of RAM is very interesting.

LunaCloud 8 cores at 1,500 Ghz (max.) scores a bit more than an Amazon M1 Extra Large, but it costs a fraction than the Amazon’s. 0.0817 USD/hour per LunaCloud instance,  0.48 USD/hour per Amazon’s m1.xlarge instance.

LunaCloud has the cheapest price per unit of power for a public instance, only over Linode. But taking in count that Linode charges per day, and so is not useful for Scaling up and down we can say that LunaCloud has the cheapest price per unit of power from the providers reviewed up to date (as said CPU maxed and memory minimized to 512 MB).

Also they are the only analyzed to the date with Data Centers in Lisbon (Portugal) and Paris (France).

Thanks to LunaCloud for providing 300 € in free credit to do the benchmarks.

We also add one of the physical servers from hetzner.de to be precise the EX-40 SSD (200 GB SSD in Raid 1) 32 GB RAM as it has an unbeatable price 81 USD/month (59 €/month *) for the CPU power that brings, and the amount of memory.

* Please note that this model has a one-time setup fee of 59 € that we did not include in the price per hour.

It is interesting to see that this server from hetzner has an Intel Core i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz CPU scoring 6172 CMIPS, almost a 6% more, comparing to the performance of my workstation equipped with an Intel Core i7-4770S scoring 5842 CMIPS.

This dedicated physical server costing 80 USD/month scores 6172 CMIPS that is the same score than the Digital Ocean 48GB RAM – 16 Cores – 480 GB SSD costing 480 USD per month, and scores much more than the RackSpace First Generation 30 GB RAM – 8 Cores – 1200 GB costing 1425.6 USD/month and scoring 4539 CMIPS or the M2 High Memory Quadruple Extra Large with 64 GB RAM costing 1180 USD/month and scoring 4281 CMIPS.

The graphic comparing the CPU performance (CMIPS score):

The graphics of the costs, CUP – Cost of Unit Process:

As you can see a dedicated server brings a lot of performance at the cheapest price.