This is why I love Linode ... they do stuff like this, once a year or so and its so fantastic ... they upgraded me from a 328MB linode to 512MB last year for free ... now this ...
I wish more companies would follow suit. It inspires loyalty in very subtle ways ... I was going to get a 512MB linode anyway, but with the money I saved, I added their backup service for $4.95 a month ... I couldn't imagine going anywhere else for my vps hosting.
However, my apartment complex has jacked up my rent on me, even though I've lived there and paid my rent on time for 4 years now.
I'm certainly happy with how pricing has gone there: start out half the price of slicehost, then add RAM and disk space every 6 months!
It's a competitive industry, though. I could see how price of a given allocation of computer resources tends to go down, like we're used to seeing with hardware.
I absolutely love Linode. I made the HORRIBLE mistake of using vps.net for over a year (from September 09 to September 10) and it was honestly the worst hosting experience of my life (and I keep an eye on them, still as bad as ever) so when I switched to Linode I was expecting more of the same, in over 8 months I have never had a problem, I've submitted 1 support ticket and that was because I needed help enabling backups (the host machine was disallowing it) and that was resolved in 5 minutes.
Linodes pricing isn't the cheapest but it's well worth it. I have 6 servers with them at the moment.
VPS.NET was the worst VPS service I've ever tried. By far. It's hard to convey how bad and unreliable they were. Friends who tried VPS.NET had nothing but headaches as well, so it wasn't just me.
They were super helpful with an iptables question I had (I locked myself out of the server as well as took down several services I had running). I honestly expected them to say "you signed up for a VPS you should know this... it's not covered by our support."
Congrats on the anniversary. To provide a balanced perspective on this thread, let me share our experience. We (Visual Website Optimizer) are hosted on Linode since beginning but have experienced degradation of service lately particularly around network availability. There is at least one minor outage every month in their Newark data center (planning around network outage is much harder). While their support is responsive, these regular outages affect our business in a very significant manner. Every time we contact them, their staff just says these outages _happen_ and unavoidable and I cannot believe they are okay with it.
Maybe it is to do with their increased customer base, but earlier these outages were much less frequent and we enjoyed the service.
We own 25+ servers with them and have lately given thought of moving to some other provider. It's their responsive customer service and the pain of migrating everything that has kept us sticking to Linode.
I notice a few blips now and then, too - it's visible on my graphs. Sometimes they can be as long as an hour or two. But then, I'm not getting any user reports in these times which makes me just wonder about the monitoring.
I was having some major problems with a server that would flip out under heavy load. Turns out it was the specific kernel I was using. Linode support was quite helpful once I actually contacted them about it.
If you have 25+ servers, aren't some of them in other data centers and configured in some sort of high-availability setup? What's your technology stack?
Huh. I have a number of our pre-launch hosting customers on a web server in the Newark center; I get a text message within a few seconds of an outage, and haven't received any notifications in quite a while (unless it was due to my own error).
Maybe it's something on your particular rack or node? Have you tried setting up new Linodes in Newark and migrating to those?
My Linode in Newark has not had network issues since last year. Acquaintance has a large deployment there with 100.0% availability. Positive this is not problems with your stack or monitoring?
I've been using Linode for about 4 years now for dev and [small] production servers. They're such a joy to use. I agree that I could probably get VPSs cheaper somewhere else, but ... meh. And, though I rarely need support, Linode's support is second to none and it's a real help with something's going wrong. More than anything, I'm happy to pay a bit extra to support quality products and services.
> I agree that I could probably get VPSs cheaper somewhere else...
A couple of people have brought this up in this thread, and all I can think each time is that they must not place any value on their time or hassle when it comes to dealing with the cheaper providers.
I'm extremely happy with my Linode VPS. Never had any problems and the performance seems great.
Getting a VPS was my first real foray into Linux and I've learnt so much since I started by just messing around. The Linode library has also been a great source of help.
I recommend anyone who likes to spend hours perfectly configuring services they will likely never use, because it's fun, should get one to hone their terminal chops.
I would recommend the same thing for the same kind of people, but only after you do it on a virtual machine (VirtualBox) on your local machine. It's a much cheaper alternative (free), and you'll have a better idea what you want and what to do when you move to Linode.
Congrats to Linode, 8 years that's a long time. Which makes me wonder, was Linode the earliest or one of the earliest VPS hosting provider? I'm guessing in 2002 it wasn't that mature a market or was there already a few big players hovering about by the time Linode stepped in?
They were one of the earlier ones, but not the earliest. If my memory serves me right, a VPS as a viable option first gained publicity with Johncompanies.com, who were one of the early sponsors on kuro5hin.org following the famous DOS-attack on it. From the domain name registration it would appear that Johncompanies have been around since 2001, while linode.com was registered in 2003.
Website is available in English. You should have no problem communicating in English with their customer support, as well. Also, it's KVM based, in case anyone is wondering.
Well, my experience with Linode started well: good price, great interface, etc. Until somebody unrelated to me sent spam containing a URL pointing to one of my web sites. A recipient complained to Linode. Linode opened a ticket around 2am. At 6am, they simply shutdown my VPS becasue I didn't answer the ticket! I got the message a few hours later when I woke up.
I f you want to take any website hosted on Linode down, you know what to do...
Disk space was the one thing that made Linode feel a bit cramped, for me. Yay! Thanks, Linode.
Incidentally, for those looking for an easy way to free up a little extra disk space on your VPS, look into localepurge. On Debian, it's a piece-of-cake install, and it automatically removes unneeded language and locale files from packages every time you run apt.
I have an account with Linode and loves their service; however, given the competition from AWS and AppEngine, I don't know whether I should stay. Light traffic static website can be run in AppEngine for free. AWS has some very competitive pricing for VPS. Linode's yearly $240 fee is less and less appealing.
Wow! The timing couldn't be better! I was regularly hitting 98% and 99% full, having to purge files here and there. I was just about to increase my space.
I purchased the Linode 512 package a while ago... and
installed an Archlinux image and had it use 100% of the storage capacity. Now, Linode's manager is reporting that I have 80% full... (instead of 75%, as this post would have it)
Except for the fact that the amount of transfer doesn't keep increasing past 2000GB after the 8GB plan, they're not. (If that's what you were referring to, my apologies)
I like Linode and use them. But 25% is almost an insult. Storage is absurdly expensive at Linode: literally 10x what Amazon charges for EBS stores (a little less, as Linode storage is local and there are no usage charges).
I really wish they were more competitive. Right now I have a tiny instance running my personal email, but everything else I do looks more attractive on EC2 or Rackspace.
Storage is expensive at Linode ($1/gb/month as compared to $0.10/gb/month on AWS EBS), but you'll note that data transfer prices are comparable. Linode may be pricing storage to discourage you from using Linode as a storage service. If I were running a VPS-only shop with no real storage "product" and no desire to get outside the niche-in-which-I'm-crushing-it, I might do the same.
Linode storage comes bundled with a virtual machine! The more you pay, the more RAM, network transfer quota, and better CPU contention you get - without any extra costs. It's hardly an apples to apples comparison.
I think the overall value is very high in terms of CPU and bandwidth. However, I agree that the storage is a sticking point for many of my projects.
My solution has been to run my application on Linode, but I push uploaded files into an s3 bucket shortly after upload and redirect download URLs to the bucket url. Since one of my sites is a church with 50 GB of sermons on mp3, this saves a lot of money over getting storage on Linode.
I believe they used to call this "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Almost an insult eh? I hope you never encounter any real insults, you'd likely be traumatized.
[+] [-] trustfundbaby|15 years ago|reply
I wish more companies would follow suit. It inspires loyalty in very subtle ways ... I was going to get a 512MB linode anyway, but with the money I saved, I added their backup service for $4.95 a month ... I couldn't imagine going anywhere else for my vps hosting.
However, my apartment complex has jacked up my rent on me, even though I've lived there and paid my rent on time for 4 years now.
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
It's a competitive industry, though. I could see how price of a given allocation of computer resources tends to go down, like we're used to seeing with hardware.
[+] [-] cosgroveb|15 years ago|reply
I guess what I'm saying is if you want to lock in a low rent you need to negotiate for a longer lease.
[+] [-] citricsquid|15 years ago|reply
Linodes pricing isn't the cheapest but it's well worth it. I have 6 servers with them at the moment.
[+] [-] acangiano|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosgroveb|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paraschopra|15 years ago|reply
Maybe it is to do with their increased customer base, but earlier these outages were much less frequent and we enjoyed the service.
We own 25+ servers with them and have lately given thought of moving to some other provider. It's their responsive customer service and the pain of migrating everything that has kept us sticking to Linode.
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
I was having some major problems with a server that would flip out under heavy load. Turns out it was the specific kernel I was using. Linode support was quite helpful once I actually contacted them about it.
[+] [-] callmeed|15 years ago|reply
(FYI, I'm asking purely out of curiosity)
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|15 years ago|reply
Maybe it's something on your particular rack or node? Have you tried setting up new Linodes in Newark and migrating to those?
[+] [-] robflynn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkassis|15 years ago|reply
I personally haven't had issues with the network in the Dallas DC.
[+] [-] steve___|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsprinkles|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoffeeDregs|15 years ago|reply
So, joining the chorus: happy birthday!
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|15 years ago|reply
A couple of people have brought this up in this thread, and all I can think each time is that they must not place any value on their time or hassle when it comes to dealing with the cheaper providers.
[+] [-] samuarl|15 years ago|reply
Getting a VPS was my first real foray into Linux and I've learnt so much since I started by just messing around. The Linode library has also been a great source of help.
I recommend anyone who likes to spend hours perfectly configuring services they will likely never use, because it's fun, should get one to hone their terminal chops.
[+] [-] sixtofour|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonquest|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codelust|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brlewis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nasmorn|15 years ago|reply
Sure the website is in german, traffic is not unlimited but I have used them for more than a year now and service is totally fine.
Edit: Prices include VAT, so the 1024 comes out to 15 USD without taxes, which is 12% more than a third, but still.
[+] [-] deno|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jusob|15 years ago|reply
I f you want to take any website hosted on Linode down, you know what to do...
[+] [-] tasaro|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keidian|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damianzaremba|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|15 years ago|reply
Incidentally, for those looking for an easy way to free up a little extra disk space on your VPS, look into localepurge. On Debian, it's a piece-of-cake install, and it automatically removes unneeded language and locale files from packages every time you run apt.
[+] [-] Macha|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
Thanks guys!
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yatsyk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] initself|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swlkr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmyjim|15 years ago|reply
I purchased the Linode 512 package a while ago... and installed an Archlinux image and had it use 100% of the storage capacity. Now, Linode's manager is reporting that I have 80% full... (instead of 75%, as this post would have it)
[+] [-] w01fe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thelibrarian|15 years ago|reply
20 GB + 25% = 25 GB
20 GB / 25 GB = 80% used.
[+] [-] jules|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuxt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|15 years ago|reply
I really wish they were more competitive. Right now I have a tiny instance running my personal email, but everything else I do looks more attractive on EC2 or Rackspace.
[+] [-] CoffeeDregs|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drtse4|15 years ago|reply
(1) check every benchmark performed on both platforms
[+] [-] caker|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|15 years ago|reply
I think for many people, RAM and CPU become an issue long before disk space.
[+] [-] seany|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] singlow|15 years ago|reply
My solution has been to run my application on Linode, but I push uploaded files into an s3 bucket shortly after upload and redirect download URLs to the bucket url. Since one of my sites is a church with 50 GB of sermons on mp3, this saves a lot of money over getting storage on Linode.
[+] [-] epo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsprinkles|15 years ago|reply