[account_taken]

That's suprising, when I benchmarked I/O on several DigitalOcean VPS I was getting mechanical disk performance. Which plan are you running? 10-20x faster is kind of high, are you sure you weren't hitting a cache? I usually see around a 5x speed increase on a good host with sSD.

[lukeman]

I had some benchmarks show odd results and others were the expected increase.

You might try building a new server on Digital Ocean with VirtIO enabled. It's an experimental option for new servers and you can contact support to have it enabled on existing ones, but should show further improvements according to some other folks in the support community.

[isalmon]

My database is on their $20/month plan. I'm not sure, maybe I was just unlucky with Linode. Just to give you an example - I have an SQL query that was taking ~90 seconds on Linode and when I moved it became 5 seconds. Again, YMMV.

[rickyc091]

Linode's 8GB($319) plan to Digital Ocean's 4GB($40) plan and we were seeing a 10-12% increase in performance for large queries.