I Benchmarked Three VPS Servers So You Don’t Have To: Netcup vs Oracle Free Tier

Every few months I run through my server stack and put the candidates through their paces. This time I had three contenders sitting in front of me: my existing Netcup VPS in Virginia, a freshly provisioned Netcup root server with DDR5 RAM in Nuremberg, and the Oracle A1 Free Flex instance I finally managed to claim after months on the waitlist. I ran the same Yet Another Bench Script across all three, and the results were… revealing.

The Contenders

Before we get into numbers, here’s what we’re working with:

Netcup VPS (Virginia, US): 4 vCPU on an AMD EPYC-Genoa processor, 7.7 GB RAM, 503 GB storage, running Ubuntu 22.04. Located in Manassas, Virginia.

Netcup Root Server DDR5 (Nuremberg, DE): 4 vCPU on an AMD EPYC 9645 (96-core Genoa-based platform), 7.7 GB RAM, 251 GB storage, Ubuntu 24.04. The DDR5 designation here refers to the host platform’s memory architecture, which matters for memory bandwidth.

Oracle Cloud Free A1 Flex (Chicago, US): 4 vCPU ARM Neoverse-N1, 23.4 GB RAM, 45 GB storage, Ubuntu 24.04. The crown jewel of Oracle’s Always Free tier. ARM architecture, noted as experimental in YABS.

CPU Performance: Intel vs ARM, or Rather AMD vs ARM

Geekbench 6 gives us a clean apples-to-apples view here:

The Netcup DDR5 machine pulls ahead by a meaningful margin. The EPYC 9645 is a newer silicon generation and it shows. The Oracle ARM instance comes in last — not terrible in absolute terms for a free server, but for PHP-heavy WordPress workloads (WooCommerce checkout, LearnDash quiz processing, BuddyBoss activity queries), single-core performance is what actually matters. And at 1,088 points, it’s 46% slower per core than the DDR5 Netcup.

For WordPress specifically, higher single-core scores mean faster PHP execution, faster WP-Cron jobs, and snappier admin panel responses.

Disk I/O: The Number That Will Make or Break Your WordPress Site

This is where things got shocking.

The Oracle numbers are not a typo. At 1,500 IOPS for 4K random reads, Oracle’s free tier disk is roughly 33x slower than Netcup. For WordPress, this translates directly to:

• Slow database queries. Every MySQL lookup, every wp_posts join, every options table read hits this ceiling.
• Painful plugin activation/updates. File operations crawl.
• Object cache misses hurt more. When Redis or Memcached can’t serve a request, the fallback disk read is painfully slow.
• Backup jobs drag. Running UpdraftPlus or similar on this disk is going to be painful.

The Netcup DDR5 node, on the other hand, is genuinely exceptional. Sequential reads above 1.5 GB/s put it in enterprise NVMe territory. For production membership sites running MemberPress, LearnDash, and BuddyBoss, this makes a tangible difference.

Network Performance: Oracle’s Surprise Party

Here’s the twist. Oracle’s networking turned out to be legitimately competitive, especially for US-based traffic:

Oracle absolutely dominates US domestic routes, and Netcup DE is the clear winner for European connectivity (as you’d expect from a Nuremberg data center with sub-11ms ping to Amsterdam). The Netcup Virginia node had notably inconsistent European sends, which is worth flagging if you’re hosting European users from a US server.

For most WordPress sites, network bandwidth isn’t the bottleneck — but for sites serving large media assets, video-based LMS platforms, or running CDN origin pulls, these numbers matter.

What Does This Actually Mean for WordPress Hosting?

Here’s my honest take, server by server:

Netcup DDR5 Germany: The clear winner if your audience is in Europe. Best CPU, best disk, solid network. At roughly €5-10/month (depending on configuration), this is extraordinary value for production membership and LMS sites. This is what I now use as the primary host for several client sites.

Netcup Virginia: A solid, reliable performer for US-targeted sites. The EPYC-Genoa CPU is a generation behind the 9645, which shows in benchmarks, but it’s still miles ahead of Oracle for day-to-day WordPress performance. The larger disk (503 GB vs 251 GB) is a real advantage for media-heavy sites.

Oracle A1 Free (ARM): Here’s the nuanced answer. The 24 GB of RAM is genuinely exciting, and the network bandwidth is impressive. But the disk I/O makes it unsuitable as a primary production WordPress host. Where it shines:

• As a staging environment with a RAM-based tmpfs for MySQL (if you’re running tests, you can mount /var/lib/mysql to RAM and sidestep the disk entirely)
• As a Redis/Valkey node — caching is memory-bound, not disk-bound
• As a build server for CI/CD pipelines
• As an additional compute node in a multi-server stack where your primary database lives elsewhere

The ARM architecture is also worth noting. Most WordPress plugins work fine on ARM, but if you’re running custom native extensions or anything that compiles to x86-specific binaries, test carefully.

The Free Tier Catch Nobody Talks About

Oracle’s Always Free tier is genuinely generous on paper. But there are a few things worth knowing beyond the benchmark numbers:

1. Getting an instance is hard. Oracle regularly shows “out of capacity” for A1 instances in popular regions. It took me significant time and effort to finally provision one. There are scripts people use to retry automatically, but this is a well-known pain point.
2. Reliability questions. The Always Free tier is “best effort” from a support standpoint. There’s no uptime SLA. For production client sites, that’s a real consideration.
3. Egress costs on paid tiers. If you ever move off the free tier, Oracle’s egress pricing is notoriously aggressive. Plan your exit strategy.
4. Boot volume = block storage. That painful 1,500 IOPS figure comes from Oracle’s remote block storage architecture. It’s not local NVMe, and it shows.

My Recommendation

If you’re running WordPress, WooCommerce, LearnDash, MemberPress, or BuddyBoss in a VPS environment and your users are in Europe, Netcup’s DDR5 servers in Nuremberg are currently my top recommendation. The price-to-performance ratio is the best I’ve tested, and I’ve tried quite a few.

For US-focused sites, the Netcup Virginia VPS holds up well. I switched from Hetzner to Netcup a while back after benchmarking showed Netcup coming out ahead, and these results continue to justify that choice.

The Oracle Free tier is a brilliant complement to a paid VPS setup — use its RAM generously for caching layers, staging environments, or low-write workloads. Just don’t put your production MySQL database on it and expect good query times.

A Note on YABS

All tests were run using Yet Another Bench Script v2025-04-20. The fio disk tests use mixed 50/50 read/write with a partition-level test (not a file-level test), which gives a more realistic picture than sequential-only benchmarks. Geekbench 6 scores reflect the actual CPU resources allocated to the VM, not the underlying host’s theoretical peak.

Benchmarks are a snapshot, not a guarantee. Your workload may differ. But for PHP-heavy, database-driven WordPress sites, disk IOPS and single-core CPU score are the two numbers I watch most closely. On both metrics, the paid Netcup options win decisively.

If you’re running benchmarks on other VPS providers — Hetzner, Contabo, Vultr, DigitalOcean — I’d love to see the numbers in the comments.