I switched from Webfaction to Linode about six months ago, because the WF server I was on kept experiencing hard drive failures leading to an unacceptable amount of downtime. Once is tolerable, but they should have replaced the drive then. They didn't, and two months later it failed again. Again they tried to repair the filesystem. It failed two days later again. When I challenged them on this, they admitted they knew the drive was bad, and that it had no redundancy (seriously?!!!), but blamed the guys managing the hardware (which is evidently NOT Webfaction). Not to mention a ridiculously slow control panel at random times.
Linode has been a dream-come-true. I pay only a few bucks more a month than I did for my Tier-4 plan at Webfaction. Plus, I'm back to managing my own server and no longer have to deal with all the Apache port-forwarding weirdness, local profile software installs, etc.
I've used other VPS hosting companies in the past, but Linode blows them all out of the water. Their VPS infrastructure is very well engineered, and fast. Nobody can touch their price/performance ratio. EDIT: BTW - I am excluding OpenVZ-based VPS's which come with a number of issues that I don't care to deal with.
This is a coincidence. I had a funny experience with Linode just today!
I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago.
"Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all."
So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for a month at a stretch.
They deleted my linode. It´s completely gone.
I feel a little sick ... it was just for personal use (for now), and I have all of the git repos on my local machine as well, but I´m not yet to the point where everything I do on the server is in a repo somewhere. Poof, hundreds of hours of server mangling, gone forever.
Literally, if you forget to check your email, they delete it in 20 days. If your bank card expires while you´re out of touch ... for some strange reason ... anyway, instead of warehousing your data for even a few months, they kill you.
I like linode. I just feel sick right now.
On the one hand, I´m an idiot.
On the other hand, 20 days?!?!?! When you know how precious a customers´data is in this context, and it´s purely a question of temporary storage, why?!?
I need a drink. Oh, yeah, Go Linode!
edit: okay, I´m over it now. Leaving the original, melodramatic writing because, darn it linode, someone from Slicehost posted that Slicehost did it differently, and my reaction is relevant to your business.
I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience- I know how frustrating it can be to have unexpected loss, particularly here, where it feels like it could have been prevented.
I'm not associated with Linode; I don't even host anything there, but I can see things from their perspective on this.
With a service like this, you'll sometimes see people who never cancel a service, they just stop paying for it. Maybe their card expires and they decide not to renew, maybe their business closed, or any number of other things.
If I were in their position, I'd certainly reach out to you- I'd warn you it was ending soon, and I'd remind you to renew. For one, it'd be the decent thing to do, and for another I'd want to get the renewel revenue! As the expression goes, 'It's easier to keep a customer than gain a new one.'
That said, if the time came and you hadn't renewed, I'd have a decision to make.
I want to keep you as a customer, but from my perspective, I have no indication you want to stay as a client- You haven't sent me any email about it, and you're not paying me anymore.
I'd probably archive off the data for a while, and shut it down.
My mental thought process would be akin to "I'll turn it off, and keep the files around for a few weeks. If he's using the site, then he'll notice when it gets shut down, and pay to stay with us. If not, Good luck in the future!"
From my perspective, it looks like that's exactly what Linode did. They gave you 20 days; That's nearly 3 weeks of the server being off, without you even writing them an email to say "Hey, Noticed it's off and I'm not paying you, could you please give me a few more weeks?"
I understand it's very frustrating for you, but I really can't blame Linode at all.
The other thing I'd touch on briefly is that you really should have backups.
I don't want to harp on it, because I know it must feel like kicking you when you're down, but servers fail..
What if Linode's datacenter caught fire? What if they were bought out by a company who wanted to convert them all to Windows servers? ;) Who knows. Things happen. Having the service turned off for nonpayment is among the smallest of problems.
If you were running a nightly backup job at this point, you'd be very frustrated that you had to copy everything back, but you'd have not lost anything.
In any event, I'm sorry that things didn't work out, and hope that your experiences with Linode (Or whomever you use to replace them) are more positve going forward.
I lost my credit card and got a new one, so the charges from slicehost were bouncing because they had my old number. They sent me several e-mails about it but I wasn't checking the e-mail account they were sending it to, so this went on for about 2-3 months past due. Eventually I logged onto the e-mail account and found out about it -- I hadn't even noticed anything was wrong because they kept my VM running. I just logged on, payed the $60 or whatever it was in back payments and that was it.
(I don't know whether this is their normal policy or not, so don't use this post as an excuse to try it.)
It's unfortunate, but I don't think linode was in the wrong here. probably more than half of my customers who cancel do so by not paying any more. If you want a 'free two months' at the end of your contract, well, they are going to have to start charging more up front.
Maybe another option would be to charge the customer an (optinal) up-front deposit and say "when we shut you down, we'll upload this to S3 with the following credentials" or something. That'd be some programming work, but it'd result in better outcomes. hmm.
For the record: The Planet will cut your server, wipe it, and reassign after 5 days of non-payment. That's standard operating procedure at every server host I've ever used. I'm honestly surprised that Linode gives you 20 days; that's very generous in my experience.
I'm not sure if you are more upset at the loss of the particular server setup or of the data. It sounds like the former. In that case take this as an opportunity to create an infrastructure for your servers where you can easily bring up new servers as you need them. Instead of logging into a new box and installing and configuring software, write a deployment script. That way you can migrate to/from Linode quickly.
A reasonable thing to do would be for them to call if your credit card expires to see if you accidentally let it slip without updating the info. If it was any other situation (e.g. the card was declined but still valid date-wise), I think how they handled it would be perfect.
Just sent SliceHost an email, got an answer within minutes:
Hi Alex,
Unfortunately, we don't have any word on future pricing at the moment, but we are aware of Linode's recent price drops.
Thanks,
--
Tim - Slicehost Support
I've had sites on linode and slicehost, and have found Slicehost to have less downtime, packet loss, network problems (unreachable), and so on. I'm satisfied with both, overall.
One thing I personally like about Linode is that they continue to contribute code, sponsor conferences, and otherwise support the open source community. Of course there is a certain amount of self interest involved, but not every VPS hosting company gives back like this.
My sole reason for picking Linode for hosting was RAM, as there was no one else out there who matched the RAM for the price. And now, WOW, I am a very happy customer. Thank You, Linode!!!
After conducting the tests outlined here (http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison) I switched from Slicehost to Linode. Apart from two network outages in their Newark datacenter I've been very happy with the switch.
Both Slicehost and Linode have top notch service. I switched because of price/ram and 32bit support. I found that the overhead on a 64bit machine on low ram instances is just not worth it for the kind of stuff I'm doing now.
I've tried slicehost, linode, and mosso (now rackspace - cloud servers) they were all pretty similar. I think the new linode pricing now matches the old mosso pricing.
Not much to tell -- I switched because of price, and have been very happy. Good support, good community, nice docs (e.g. for things like upgrading OS images).
I have a question about VPS, hope someone could help and not be much offtopic:
I have a dedicated server (in Softlayer) with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3220 @ 2.40GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB (which I only use 5 or 6, so it's not an issue) and 2000Gb transfer. Price is 189$ a month.
Is it worth to switch to Linode's 4GB ram plan? I was thinking in getting a new server in softlayer with 12-16GB ram.
tl;dr: is it worth switching from a dedicated to a vps with similar specs?
We've done some performance and price comparisons of different providers including Linode and Slicehost (a.k.a. RackspaceCloud). In that price range there are a lot of options you could consider with cloud providers. Although cloud is generally (but not always) multi-tenant, many provide dedicated CPU cores so CPU performance is very predictable. One advantage to cloud also, is that oftentimes the OS runs of an external SAN so if the physical host machine does fail, it can be immediately migrated to another host with very little downtime. There are other benefits like backup images and instant upgrading.
As someone who sells VPSs for a living, well, I'd want a pretty significant discount to take a VPS over a dedicated server of the same specs. The big problem with VPSs is I/O. If you have a 1TB disk and you split it so that two servers are using it, each server, sure, gets 500gb, but each server gets /way less/ than 1/2 the I/O performance. When you have more than one server hitting the same disk, all your sequential transfers become random transfers, and random transfers, especially on the SATA that nearly all VPS providers use, suck.
That depends on what % of your cpu you're using, and how sensitive you are to disk bandwidth. Look at what fraction of the host machine you get ("How many Linodes share a host", http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm ), do you use more than that fraction of the resources that would be shared (disk I/O, CPU time)? How much is having a nice web interface for rebooting and such worth?
Depends on how process hungry your server is, if you constantly maximizing quad core xeon server, then its not a direct comparison in processing. But if you are using processing speed of a dual core, then I think you should move.
They might give you four "virtual cores" but its not a direct comparison to a xeon server. In everything else, memory space and transfer, you are better off moving.
if you're concerned with CPU performance at all, then stick with dedicated. VPS is performant, but i think you can yield a decrease of 10-30ms in pageload times from dedicated.
I was on Slicehost, and I really struggled with whether to change to Linode. It's not that I was having any problems with Slicehost. I loved it. I just kept looking at that extra RAM on Linode, and all those data centers.
When they got the UK data center, that clinched it. I had been hoping to someday expand to UK, so when Linode did that, I changed over that day.
A stupid question: why are the bigger linodes relatively more expensive? You get 512MB for $19.95 and 1024MB for $39.95. If you buy 2x512MB, don't you get twice as much CPU too?
this lack of a 'bulk discount' is something I've given a lot of thought to. I do give a bulk discount that can seem pretty dramatic, in part because I assume the same amount of support on a $8 VPS as on a $68 VPS. -
What I've found is that this is not what many customers assume. Many customers assume that if they buy a larger, more expensive VPS from you, that they will get a higher level of support, even if ram/cpu/disk is deeply discounted on that large VPS vs a small VPS. So from that point of view, adding in a 'bulk discount' doesn't make any sense, because you end up spending just as much money supporting one large (and very demanding) customer as many tiny, undemanding customers, so from that point of view, Linode is doing the exact right thing.
Now, I've tried to tackle this by being more explicit about the "you are paying $4/month for support." bit. I'll be opening orders for large customers again later this month, I hope, and we'll see how well that works.
Another possibility is that Linode sees support costs as fixed... in many ways, they are. You need to acquire a good team, train them in customer service, and then have enough of them that at least one is on line at any time (I'm not quite to that last part yet, which is part of why I need to insure that my prices fly beneath Linode's.)
You need to have enough people to handle peaks, and support is very peaky, so unless you queue it up (causing latency and customer dissatisfaction) much of the time, many of your support people are going to be idle (or working on non-support stuff)
even so, the greater your customer's support demands are, the higher your peaks will be and the more support people you need, so I think the former is far more likely than the latter.
>You get 512MB for $19.95 and 1024MB for $39.95. If you buy 2x512MB, don't you get twice as much CPU too?
If their setup is the way I think it is, your 1024MB instance will have twice the cpu 'weight' as each 512MB instances, so, /in the case of contention/ the 1024MB instance will have twice as much cpu time as the 512.
Of course, my experience has been that cpu usage rarely goes above 50% on most VPS servers, so it makes less difference.
Their FAQ has a section on how many instances are on each host, which is 40 for 0.5GB and 20 for 1GB etc (ie, 20GB of customer instances per host, regardless of instance size). Which would mean that when you go for twice as much ram, you also get twice as much of everything else. The front page lists disk space and bandwidth, and these also scale linearly with ram size.
Linode is pretty much a pay-per-use service in the guise of a VPS host. You use twice as much resources, you pay twice as much. You stop using your VPS for a day, your account is credited back for that day. Overage charges are very similar to regular charges. And so on.
[+] [-] teilo|16 years ago|reply
Linode has been a dream-come-true. I pay only a few bucks more a month than I did for my Tier-4 plan at Webfaction. Plus, I'm back to managing my own server and no longer have to deal with all the Apache port-forwarding weirdness, local profile software installs, etc.
I've used other VPS hosting companies in the past, but Linode blows them all out of the water. Their VPS infrastructure is very well engineered, and fast. Nobody can touch their price/performance ratio. EDIT: BTW - I am excluding OpenVZ-based VPS's which come with a number of issues that I don't care to deal with.
[+] [-] mr_luc|16 years ago|reply
I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago.
"Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all."
So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for a month at a stretch.
They deleted my linode. It´s completely gone.
I feel a little sick ... it was just for personal use (for now), and I have all of the git repos on my local machine as well, but I´m not yet to the point where everything I do on the server is in a repo somewhere. Poof, hundreds of hours of server mangling, gone forever.
Literally, if you forget to check your email, they delete it in 20 days. If your bank card expires while you´re out of touch ... for some strange reason ... anyway, instead of warehousing your data for even a few months, they kill you.
I like linode. I just feel sick right now.
On the one hand, I´m an idiot.
On the other hand, 20 days?!?!?! When you know how precious a customers´data is in this context, and it´s purely a question of temporary storage, why?!?
I need a drink. Oh, yeah, Go Linode!
edit: okay, I´m over it now. Leaving the original, melodramatic writing because, darn it linode, someone from Slicehost posted that Slicehost did it differently, and my reaction is relevant to your business.
[+] [-] e1ven|16 years ago|reply
I'm not associated with Linode; I don't even host anything there, but I can see things from their perspective on this.
With a service like this, you'll sometimes see people who never cancel a service, they just stop paying for it. Maybe their card expires and they decide not to renew, maybe their business closed, or any number of other things.
If I were in their position, I'd certainly reach out to you- I'd warn you it was ending soon, and I'd remind you to renew. For one, it'd be the decent thing to do, and for another I'd want to get the renewel revenue! As the expression goes, 'It's easier to keep a customer than gain a new one.'
That said, if the time came and you hadn't renewed, I'd have a decision to make. I want to keep you as a customer, but from my perspective, I have no indication you want to stay as a client- You haven't sent me any email about it, and you're not paying me anymore.
I'd probably archive off the data for a while, and shut it down.
My mental thought process would be akin to "I'll turn it off, and keep the files around for a few weeks. If he's using the site, then he'll notice when it gets shut down, and pay to stay with us. If not, Good luck in the future!"
From my perspective, it looks like that's exactly what Linode did. They gave you 20 days; That's nearly 3 weeks of the server being off, without you even writing them an email to say "Hey, Noticed it's off and I'm not paying you, could you please give me a few more weeks?"
I understand it's very frustrating for you, but I really can't blame Linode at all.
The other thing I'd touch on briefly is that you really should have backups.
I don't want to harp on it, because I know it must feel like kicking you when you're down, but servers fail.. What if Linode's datacenter caught fire? What if they were bought out by a company who wanted to convert them all to Windows servers? ;) Who knows. Things happen. Having the service turned off for nonpayment is among the smallest of problems.
If you were running a nightly backup job at this point, you'd be very frustrated that you had to copy everything back, but you'd have not lost anything.
In any event, I'm sorry that things didn't work out, and hope that your experiences with Linode (Or whomever you use to replace them) are more positve going forward.
[+] [-] johnswamps|16 years ago|reply
I lost my credit card and got a new one, so the charges from slicehost were bouncing because they had my old number. They sent me several e-mails about it but I wasn't checking the e-mail account they were sending it to, so this went on for about 2-3 months past due. Eventually I logged onto the e-mail account and found out about it -- I hadn't even noticed anything was wrong because they kept my VM running. I just logged on, payed the $60 or whatever it was in back payments and that was it.
(I don't know whether this is their normal policy or not, so don't use this post as an excuse to try it.)
[+] [-] lsc|16 years ago|reply
Maybe another option would be to charge the customer an (optinal) up-front deposit and say "when we shut you down, we'll upload this to S3 with the following credentials" or something. That'd be some programming work, but it'd result in better outcomes. hmm.
[+] [-] bbatsell|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JshWright|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invisible|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkassis|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veeti|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchellh|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_c|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melvin|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whyenot|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lr|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trevorturk|16 years ago|reply
This price difference is pretty tempting. Does anyone that's made the switch from Slicehost to Linode care to tell us about their experience?
[+] [-] uggedal|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avar|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siculars|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbester|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcreemer|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akadien|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megamark16|16 years ago|reply
New prices: http://www.linode.com Old prices: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kVmwiN5...
[+] [-] jonknee|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natfriedman|16 years ago|reply
Additional 1 GB Disk Space - (add $2.00/mo)
Additional 2 GB Disk Space - (add $4.00/mo)
Additional 3 GB Disk Space - (add $6.00/mo)
Additional 4 GB Disk Space - (add $8.00/mo)
Additional 5 GB Disk Space - (add $10.00/mo)
Additional 6 GB Disk Space - (add $12.00/mo)
About 20 times higher than Amazon EBS.
[+] [-] askedrelic|16 years ago|reply
Anyone have a referral code they would want to me use?
[+] [-] woogley|16 years ago|reply
Please and thank you.
[+] [-] barredo|16 years ago|reply
I have a dedicated server (in Softlayer) with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3220 @ 2.40GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB (which I only use 5 or 6, so it's not an issue) and 2000Gb transfer. Price is 189$ a month.
Is it worth to switch to Linode's 4GB ram plan? I was thinking in getting a new server in softlayer with 12-16GB ram.
tl;dr: is it worth switching from a dedicated to a vps with similar specs?
[+] [-] jread|16 years ago|reply
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma... http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in...
[+] [-] lsc|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrownaw|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavs|16 years ago|reply
They might give you four "virtual cores" but its not a direct comparison to a xeon server. In everything else, memory space and transfer, you are better off moving.
[+] [-] paolomaffei|16 years ago|reply
a part from this, linode service and facilities (such as instant backup and restore) are great, don't know about softlayer's
[+] [-] jotto|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigsassy|16 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1392700
[+] [-] mahmud|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdx|16 years ago|reply
When they got the UK data center, that clinched it. I had been hoping to someday expand to UK, so when Linode did that, I changed over that day.
[+] [-] markmywords|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dubs|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imp|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jules|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsc|16 years ago|reply
What I've found is that this is not what many customers assume. Many customers assume that if they buy a larger, more expensive VPS from you, that they will get a higher level of support, even if ram/cpu/disk is deeply discounted on that large VPS vs a small VPS. So from that point of view, adding in a 'bulk discount' doesn't make any sense, because you end up spending just as much money supporting one large (and very demanding) customer as many tiny, undemanding customers, so from that point of view, Linode is doing the exact right thing.
Now, I've tried to tackle this by being more explicit about the "you are paying $4/month for support." bit. I'll be opening orders for large customers again later this month, I hope, and we'll see how well that works.
Another possibility is that Linode sees support costs as fixed... in many ways, they are. You need to acquire a good team, train them in customer service, and then have enough of them that at least one is on line at any time (I'm not quite to that last part yet, which is part of why I need to insure that my prices fly beneath Linode's.)
You need to have enough people to handle peaks, and support is very peaky, so unless you queue it up (causing latency and customer dissatisfaction) much of the time, many of your support people are going to be idle (or working on non-support stuff)
even so, the greater your customer's support demands are, the higher your peaks will be and the more support people you need, so I think the former is far more likely than the latter.
[+] [-] lsc|16 years ago|reply
If their setup is the way I think it is, your 1024MB instance will have twice the cpu 'weight' as each 512MB instances, so, /in the case of contention/ the 1024MB instance will have twice as much cpu time as the 512.
Of course, my experience has been that cpu usage rarely goes above 50% on most VPS servers, so it makes less difference.
[+] [-] tbrownaw|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kijinbear|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dirt_McGirt|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimantas|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daevien|16 years ago|reply