A VPS can be bought for a cheap price these days and many hosting providers have various plans to choose from, ranging from a few hundred MB of RAM and a single core CPU, to virtual private servers with lots of RAM and speedy Gigabit connections. Mostly, a Linux server doesn’t need that much resources to function properly, howerver, high I/O speeds and lots of RAM can certainly help you running an optimized database.

To test your VPS’s download speeds as well as its IO speed, open your SSH client, setup a connection to your server and perform this command:

wget https://thomas.vanhoutte.be/dl/vpstest.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash

Your output should look similar to this one, but of course, with different values based on your VPS:

[user@hostname html]# wget thomas.vanhoutte.be/dl/vpstest.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 V2 @ 3.40GHz
Number of cores : 2
CPU frequency : 3401.000 MHz
Total amount of ram : 1024 MB
Total amount of swap : 1024 MB
System uptime : 22 days, 20:20,
Download speed from CacheFly: 44.2MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 35.2MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 4.47MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 4.12MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 5.24MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 14.6MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 1.61MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 6.10MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 3.16MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 53.6MB/s
I/O speed : 106 MB/s

You can run this speedtest twice to make sure these values are correct. When you run this test, it is a snapshot of your server and if at that moment your server is busy with other tasks (let’s say handling HTTP requests and performing SQL queries because of visitors on your site), it might not be fully accurate.