Conoha vs Vultr Tokyo: 30 Days of Real Traffic

We have been running on Vultr Tokyo for about two years. It is solid, the network is good, and we have had maybe two unplanned outages in that whole time. But the pricing has crept up and Conoha kept coming up in conversation so we decided to actually test it properly instead of just switching on vibes.

The setup was simple. Same Go binary, same nginx config, same Cloudflare in front of both. Conoha on their 2GB plan at around 1760 yen per month, Vultr on their equivalent $12 plan. Roughly similar price at current exchange rates but Conoha was a bit cheaper.

We ran synthetic latency checks from a few locations every 5 minutes using a simple curl timer script:

while true; do
  curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{time_total}\n" https://your-endpoint/health >> latency.log
  sleep 300
done

Results after 30 days from Singapore, Japan, and the US west coast:

From Singapore, both were basically identical. Sub-20ms to Cloudflare edge, the origin barely matters.

From Japan directly (bypassing Cloudflare), Conoha was slightly faster, which makes sense since they are NTT-backed and the routing is more local. Average 8ms vs 12ms to Vultr. Not meaningful for most use cases.

From the US west coast, Vultr had a slight edge. Conoha's international routing was a bit inconsistent.

The actual reason we are considering switching is the disk I/O. Conoha's SSD performance was noticeably better for our SQLite write-heavy workloads. Vultr has been fine but under load the Conoha box handled the same benchmark 30% faster.

The downside with Conoha is the control panel is entirely in Japanese and the documentation is mostly Japanese too. If you are not comfortable with that, it adds friction. The API exists but it is not as polished as Vultr's. Billing is also only in yen, so you need a card that handles foreign transactions without fees.

Our conclusion: if you are targeting Japan or Southeast Asia and want slightly better disk performance, Conoha is worth trying. If you want easier English management and good global distribution, Vultr is still fine. We ended up keeping both for now and splitting traffic.