Realize, of course, that "Free" usually means, "We'll let you use a lot for free, until you use too much, at which point we'll either (A) Rate Limit you, (B) Have a conversation about why you are abusing the Free Incoming ALlocation, (C) Charge you for your excessive incoming data (D) Suggest you take your business elsewhere.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it's inaccurate of Linode to suggest they can provide unlimited free inbound data.
The statement "This means you can upload an unlimited amount of data to your Linode without having to pay for any of the incoming data transfer." will not stand for all of their customers - the vast majority, yes, but don't create a business on the belief that you can do unlimited uploads into your linode VPS at full speed. You won't be able to in the long run.
I would have preferred they provide wildly generous inbound allocations (First 5 Terabytes inbound is free, or something like that) than make a claim they can't stand behind.
I'm a service provider, and we have similar "unlimited" offers, and I see where you're coming from. For us, there's the problem that many of our customers have no idea whether "5GB" or "10GB" or what-have-you is enough for them. We're willing to offer enough capacity that we're betting that they won't ever have a problem with it, and the shorthand for that is "unlimited". We're also gambling that if we do have one or a few customers that abuse the unlimitedness to such an extent that we have to talk to them about it, that we can have a reasonable conversation with them.
I think reasonableness is a big part of claims like this. Would a reasonable person expect to be able to download the internet into Linode? I don't think so, even though they're saying that it's unlimited.
If someone can think of a better way to tell most customers "don't worry about resources" without annoying a select few, I'm all ears.
This is how business between ordinary people is usually done.
Paper napkins are free at every restaurant I've ever been to, but that doesn't mean that they'll give me a truckload of them in one visit.
To me it's a little different than a local ISP advertising "unlimited internet" or wireless carrier advertising "unlimited data" and then putting artificial caps and throttles on it. That's typically a home's only data pipe or a mobile device is on a long contract.
But there's much more competition for virtual servers and we all know our server infrastructures can be migrated to a different provider at the drop of a hat. Oh wait. :-)
This is probably a reasonable assumption coming from the world of ISP "all-you-can-eat" packages where they're saying "unlimited" but in reality it's not, because unlimited starts affecting other customer so it's "unlimited (T&C's apply)"
This is a completely different scenario though:
* Transferring stuff to linode isn't generally an end in and of itself. There are far fewer use cases for it. At the end fo the day you probably need to get data back out of it.
* The vast majority of cloud hosting and hosting providers in general's bandwidth is outbound. People download from the web. These hosting companies provide a lot of the web's main infrastructure. You're probably looking at a ratio of 20:1 or 30:1 here.
* Linode doesn't pay for uploads and downloads with it's carriers / ISPs. It pays for circuits capable of synchronous upload and download speeds. Using the ratios above, if they, for example, have 300Mbps of traffic outbound, then they have a lot of spare inbound capacity.
* Abuse here is difficult. Downloading movies, music etc. are consumed at home. It's difficult to imagine so many usage scenarios where huge data volumes would be consumed so easily on a linode server without having to be downloaded again. Maybe someone can come up with some creative suggestions here though? :)
* Bandwidth allocation and contention is very different within a hosting providers access network than an ISPs access network. ISP last miles, local DSLAMs, AP's etc. are huge points of contention. Inside the data center, I imagine most hosting providers "last mile" are 100Mb or Gig/E here straight to the servers with gig or 10gig/e uplinks from access switches.
The basic crux really is though, they have shedloads of free inbound bandwidth and why not give it away for another USP.
I think we had this discussion before about EC2. As long as Linode's total inbound is less than total outbound (which is very likely due to their focus on hosting rather than backup), it is free to them and thus they can make it free to their customers. Also, customers who upload a lot of data tend to store or process it, which Linode can make money on.
Is there a way to take advantage of it though? They charge for both out bound traffic and storage. So unless your just pumping data in to a remote /dev/null they are going to make it up eventually either because you are storing it or because you are pushing it back out. I guess it would make a pretty nice back up server though, only pay for bandwidth when you need to restore.
The preferred terminology is "unmetered" which typically means that you're sharing something like a 100Mbps pipe with other users and you accept the inherent bandwidth and latency issues that comes with that kind of setup.
If you want guaranteed bandwidth that costs extra and will definitely be metered, either for a fixed pipe size or per GB.
We'll let you use a lot for free, until you use too much, at which point we'll either (A) Rate Limit you
They throttle already. I had an app on Linode that required large uploads (around 1MB) but had to move to a different provider because of the throttling. The throttling kicks in during a single upload.
That said I would choose Linode in an instant for different apps that didn't require uploads because my experience with them was excellent and their network appears fast (possibly because of the throttling).
I think they can stand behind this claim. The largest plan they sell comes with 800GB of storage. Your OS installation will probably take 10GB and you're effectively left with 790GB to store your data in.
Unless you're uploading and deleting 790GB each and every day I don't see why they can't afford it. Considering that the most people will buy Linode 512 (20GB of storage including the OS) the numbers we are talking about are rather small.
This must be in response to Rackspace Cloud offering free incoming data due to their forced migration of Slicehost's customers.
Rackspace Cloud has a bit of a different audience to Slicehost's existing customers (I'm one of them).
If I were in Linode's position, I'd be offering migration coupons to existing Slicehost customers as an incentive to move to them instead. It's an opportunity wide open.
The way Slicehost has been communicating with their customers recently regarding the forced migration has been enough incentive. It's almost like Rackspace don't want the business the way they've been conducting themselves.
I've got a slicehost machine out there, and their communication with the cutover to rackspace has been awful. I'm still not sure if it's going to be mostly transparent, needs dns coordination, or if I'm going to have to rebuild my vm on the cloudwhatever. To be fair, it's not a common configuration (debian lenny/32bit,384mb), but everything I see just makes me think that it's going to be more of a pain than I want to have to deal with.
Linode looks good, are there any red flags to worry about?
Seriously, this forced march from Slicehost to Rackspace Cloud has been an absolute trainwreck and I've been meaning to move all my services away to Linode as soon as I can find the time. Maybe during this long weekend.
I don't see what's so hard about unlimited meaning unlimited. Australia has the right idea here. If you advertise no limits, and then attempt to enforce limits, you rightfully deserve the smackdown you'd get.
Moral of the story: Don't say you can provide something you can't.
This is great! I've been using my Linode as a VPN for when I'm working in coffee shops, so I'm very happy that half of my traffic is not counted any longer.
I know a place that does unlimited bandwidth. You're limited to 10Mbit/sec throughput though, so your theoretical maximum usage per month is only a little over 3TB.
I've been using Linode for over a year, and I must say their service is the best I've seen. Their customer support is also off the charts brilliant. I think this is truly wonderful.
I think the more important news for many is that the overage for outbound traffic is the save price as pre-paid plan, so you could lower your plan (e.g. going from Linode 1024 with 400GB to Linode 512 with 200GB). Serving static pages shouldn't cost much memory and processing power anyway.
We recently moved to Linode from AWS (after the recent AWScalypse)
However, the problem we currently face with linode is that the Disk spaces are puny and "attaching" additional storage is very costly as compared to AWS. There is no reduced pricing for Yearly contract either.
Love their sub-minute support times. Can't beat dat!
Prepaying for a year saves you 10%, prepaying for 2 years saves 15. If you already have an account, just open a ticket and you'll have the discount in minutes.
My understanding is that Linodes aren't really "for" storage. IIRC it's often more cost-effective to just upgrade to a larger Linode than to add additional storage.
I'd recommend storing bulk data on S3, but as you said, you're wary of AWS :)
EC2 has had some issues in the past, but did those issues affect S3?
Even if you're on linode, you might find sending large binaries to S3 is a cost-efficient way to increase your storage size. Plus, you have a built in CDN when you need it.
[+] [-] ghshephard|14 years ago|reply
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it's inaccurate of Linode to suggest they can provide unlimited free inbound data.
The statement "This means you can upload an unlimited amount of data to your Linode without having to pay for any of the incoming data transfer." will not stand for all of their customers - the vast majority, yes, but don't create a business on the belief that you can do unlimited uploads into your linode VPS at full speed. You won't be able to in the long run.
I would have preferred they provide wildly generous inbound allocations (First 5 Terabytes inbound is free, or something like that) than make a claim they can't stand behind.
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|14 years ago|reply
I think reasonableness is a big part of claims like this. Would a reasonable person expect to be able to download the internet into Linode? I don't think so, even though they're saying that it's unlimited.
If someone can think of a better way to tell most customers "don't worry about resources" without annoying a select few, I'm all ears.
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
Paper napkins are free at every restaurant I've ever been to, but that doesn't mean that they'll give me a truckload of them in one visit.
To me it's a little different than a local ISP advertising "unlimited internet" or wireless carrier advertising "unlimited data" and then putting artificial caps and throttles on it. That's typically a home's only data pipe or a mobile device is on a long contract.
But there's much more competition for virtual servers and we all know our server infrastructures can be migrated to a different provider at the drop of a hat. Oh wait. :-)
[+] [-] philjr|14 years ago|reply
This is a completely different scenario though:
* Transferring stuff to linode isn't generally an end in and of itself. There are far fewer use cases for it. At the end fo the day you probably need to get data back out of it.
* The vast majority of cloud hosting and hosting providers in general's bandwidth is outbound. People download from the web. These hosting companies provide a lot of the web's main infrastructure. You're probably looking at a ratio of 20:1 or 30:1 here.
* Linode doesn't pay for uploads and downloads with it's carriers / ISPs. It pays for circuits capable of synchronous upload and download speeds. Using the ratios above, if they, for example, have 300Mbps of traffic outbound, then they have a lot of spare inbound capacity.
* Abuse here is difficult. Downloading movies, music etc. are consumed at home. It's difficult to imagine so many usage scenarios where huge data volumes would be consumed so easily on a linode server without having to be downloaded again. Maybe someone can come up with some creative suggestions here though? :)
* Bandwidth allocation and contention is very different within a hosting providers access network than an ISPs access network. ISP last miles, local DSLAMs, AP's etc. are huge points of contention. Inside the data center, I imagine most hosting providers "last mile" are 100Mb or Gig/E here straight to the servers with gig or 10gig/e uplinks from access switches.
The basic crux really is though, they have shedloads of free inbound bandwidth and why not give it away for another USP.
[+] [-] wmf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonemetal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biot|14 years ago|reply
If you want guaranteed bandwidth that costs extra and will definitely be metered, either for a fixed pipe size or per GB.
[+] [-] papaf|14 years ago|reply
They throttle already. I had an app on Linode that required large uploads (around 1MB) but had to move to a different provider because of the throttling. The throttling kicks in during a single upload.
That said I would choose Linode in an instant for different apps that didn't require uploads because my experience with them was excellent and their network appears fast (possibly because of the throttling).
[+] [-] sasha-dv|14 years ago|reply
I think they can stand behind this claim. The largest plan they sell comes with 800GB of storage. Your OS installation will probably take 10GB and you're effectively left with 790GB to store your data in.
Unless you're uploading and deleting 790GB each and every day I don't see why they can't afford it. Considering that the most people will buy Linode 512 (20GB of storage including the OS) the numbers we are talking about are rather small.
[+] [-] tomjen3|14 years ago|reply
Because unless it is very large, chances are that it will not be able to banckrupt Linode.
On the other hand, they pretty much sealed the deal about where I will host my next project.
[+] [-] ryan-allen|14 years ago|reply
Rackspace Cloud has a bit of a different audience to Slicehost's existing customers (I'm one of them).
If I were in Linode's position, I'd be offering migration coupons to existing Slicehost customers as an incentive to move to them instead. It's an opportunity wide open.
The way Slicehost has been communicating with their customers recently regarding the forced migration has been enough incentive. It's almost like Rackspace don't want the business the way they've been conducting themselves.
[+] [-] wiredfool|14 years ago|reply
Linode looks good, are there any red flags to worry about?
[+] [-] ben1040|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karunamon|14 years ago|reply
Moral of the story: Don't say you can provide something you can't.
[+] [-] losvedir|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krrose27|14 years ago|reply
Oooh yeah. AWS did back in July. http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/06/30/aws-ann...
[+] [-] tkhoven|14 years ago|reply
In particular: Under the Rackspace Cloud program you will not have to pay for incoming bandwidth.
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|14 years ago|reply
How much throughput does a Linode server get?
[+] [-] Briney|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riobard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheald|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chintan|14 years ago|reply
However, the problem we currently face with linode is that the Disk spaces are puny and "attaching" additional storage is very costly as compared to AWS. There is no reduced pricing for Yearly contract either.
Love their sub-minute support times. Can't beat dat!
[+] [-] mlacitation|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnxn|14 years ago|reply
I'd recommend storing bulk data on S3, but as you said, you're wary of AWS :)
[+] [-] stoph|14 years ago|reply
Even if you're on linode, you might find sending large binaries to S3 is a cost-efficient way to increase your storage size. Plus, you have a built in CDN when you need it.
[+] [-] rhizome|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jdelsman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsycho|14 years ago|reply
:)
[+] [-] api|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tszming|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply