I looked at DigitalOcean's offerings and read through their forums several months ago when I was thinking about moving from a (pathetically underutilized) US$20/month Linode instance to a US$5/month DO droplet, but there were several red flags:
• Complaints about DO shutting down instances and locking accounts until people FAX'd in a copy of their driver's license, passport, etc. (If a user isn't breaking the law or violating the ToS, why does DO need identification? If a user is breaking the law or violating the ToS, then terminate their account!)
• Having to stop accepting signups in their Amsterdam location for a while because they ran out of IPv4 space but didn't support IPv6. (A message from August 2012 says, "we hope to have something in the works by Q4 2012 or Q1 2013." As far as I can tell, they still don't support IPv6 in any of their locations.)
• Not supporting the booting of custom kernels. (They've been stalling on this at least as long as IPv6 support.)
• Botching their Ubuntu image and having everyone's Ubuntu droplets sharing the same ssh host keys unless the user explicitly generated new ones. (Probably an honest mistake, but that's sloppy, especially considering they're effectively forcing users to use their distro images.)
The recent kerfluffle about not always wiping data after a user's disk image is destroyed would've also been a gigantic red flag (that had been doused in kerosene and lit on fire before being run up the flagpole) if it had happened a few months earlier.
To be fair, Linode's security/privacy record is far from spotless — they've been super evasive about breaches, and their handling of a data leak bug/vuln I reported didn't leave me with a super-awesome feeling — but my gut feeling is that Linode sucks just enough less to justify the US$15/month extra. That could easily change, though, but I imagine it would turn into "both suck, screw it, I'll suffer with an EC2 t1.micro instance."
From my perspective for DO which I host email, web and my SVN on. I'd be happy to roll out production apps on it as well (in fact I'm doing that today).
* No verification required for me. Perhaps this is a step when paying by paypal? I've been asked many times for more info when using that. If they pulled this on me, my backup MX will handle email until I get to sort it.
* AMS1 was unfortunate. I signed up when it wasn't available and I'm in Europe. I moved my machine to AMS2 when that came up (after their first day of scary high load). I had my host in NYC2 to start with and it was perfectly usable from London, UK over SSH. I couldn't tell the difference between it and my server in the house.
* Custom kernels. This is one of two gripes for me. I really want FreeBSD but failing that I want the latest Debian kernel. Keeping an eye on this one. I've got ufw/iptables up front which I have my fingers crossed will protect from any network level issues, logwatch, fail2ban etc to monitor casual attempts and patches are tracked.
* SSH key generation: I always regen my SSH keys anyway if I didn't see it happen so this would have been a non issue for me. This is crypto paranoia on my part (and well justified).
* Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it. Why would you not tick it?
To be fair, for $5/month it's not bad. Having played with shared hosting for 17 years, managed massive colo custom deployments and paid through the nose for other hosting, it's the best compromise so far.
I looked at Linode but the bottom end was slightly too expensive and I'd rather have SSDs behind it as IO contention on VPSs is usually rather high so that got ruled out.
I tried an Amazon EC2 micro instance and it was horribly slow so they didn't get my cash.
i run a SaaS on digital ocean, and i can confirm that all instances in a given datacenter may spontaniously reboot (and no record of this in the service status)
also performance on any given VM may be 5x difference than another vm in the dc. (at least at the $5 tier).
and yes, though there are technically 5 DC's to pick from, quite often there are less than 5 available when you want to provision a server. a few times I've seen only 1 DC available.
That said, if you understand and can tolerate this "sloppyness" then digital ocean is a great system. I am perfectly happy with their service right now.
EDIT: clarifying details, my SaaS has been going for about 6 months, and currently runs 25 digital ocean instances across all 5 of their DC's, so I think i have a pretty good sample size.
For reference, I've been using Linode for almost 5 years now ("Your account has been active since March 11, 2009", Jersey colo).
I haven't considered switching to a cheaper service like Digital Ocean, because Linode offers peace of mind and excellent customer retention. There is something special about dialing a number and getting a real person who knows how to configure DNS and troubleshoot your international propagation and provide real assistance and empathize without sounding like they are feeding you canned BS.
I've never rebooted my Linode, except for their free upgrades. Recently I've purchased their backup service, which saved my ass when I decided to upgrade my Arch Linux install and butchered a package conflict which resulted in effectively destroying my box. I was able to quickly spin up a new install of Arch, mount my previous server, and copy over configurations. The LISH console has also saved my ass as well... too many times; I'm not a server admin!
I feel very much in control of the remote box and that is primarily why I will always recommend. However, they had one hiccup during my time with them, where they leaked sensitive information and withheld accountability for a while. It was frustrating, because I gave them benefit of the doubt, but secretly agreed that it was sketchy. If anyone reads this who works there, staying quiet matters negatively towards your credibility.
If its some kind of business perspective then I don't know why anyone cares about monthly fees equaling 10 minutes of developer salary or 20 minutes of developer salary, or why any businessman would care which CSS framework his sysadmin occasionally uses. On the other hand an extremely long term proven track record of reliability and responsiveness to problems is kinda important.
Or is it written for bitcoin miners trying to get the most CPU cycles per dollar, or private dropbox clone who needs as many GB per $ as possible, or a developer who spins up test environments on a regular basis but doesn't know how to use puppet, or a vanity VPS where you spin up an instance in 2008 or whatever and just keep "apt-get upgrade"ing Debian since then or ...
As a disclaimer I am a happy very long term linode subscriber. I admit I laughed out loud at the suggestion that I switch because DO uses a different CSS framework.
Stop being obtuse. He listed a number of points he finds in their favor: hourly billing, less expensive, SSD performance, and a clean, easy to use interface. He even argued your point that Linode has a long track record of reliability.
This "sentence," however, is one of the most incomprehensible things I've ever read:
> Or is it written for bitcoin miners trying to get the most CPU cycles per dollar, or private dropbox clone who needs as many GB per $ as possible, or a developer who spins up test environments on a regular basis but doesn't know how to use puppet, or a vanity VPS where you spin up an instance in 2008 or whatever and just keep "apt-get upgrade"ing Debian since then or ...
As a disclaimer, I'm an AWS user, and I've had an eye on DO for personal projects for a while now. This article articulates every reason why.
I've been with Linode for the past seven years and their service is rock-solid. CPU matters more to me than disk I/O for this sort of thing, so it's a no-brainer to go with Linode and their extra cores. Their machines really haul. Doing sysadmin work on DigitalOcean machines feels painfully slow, probably because it's mostly CPU-bound.
The price comparison seems somewhat dependent on use-case and which part of the pricing tier you're at.
RAM: DO gives 2x as much RAM at each price point
CPU: Unclear. Linode gives you 8 cores across the board, but fewer "priority" ones. Probably needs benchmarking to be a sensible comparison.
Disk: Linode gives between 1.2x and 2.4x as much storage at each price point
Transfer: DO gives more transfer at the low end, but Linode ramps it up faster. DO gives more transfer at $20, they tie at $40, and Linode gives more at $80+.
I agree with the author that Digital Ocean is generally cheaper for my use-cases as well, but there are some where it isn't. For example, if you want 8GB RAM + 16TB transfer (to pick a configuration favorable to Linode), that's $160/mo at Linode but $300/mo at DO. On the other hand, if you need more transfer only occasionally, DO can be cheaper because it somewhat makes up for less included bandwidth with much cheaper overage rates ($20/TB vs. $100/TB at Linode).
That's very true. All of my sites/apps are relatively low-traffic so I was only really thinking about the bottom couple of tiers. Also, I write primarily in Rails and Node with Passenger so RAM is more important to me than other specs.
Linode upgrades are easier. The whole deal at Linode is more evolved.
This is from Digital Ocean:
FastResize is limited to the resources available on the physical hypervisor that your server is on. If there are no resources available, no sizes will be listed on the FastResize Page.
(Linode automates all these steps...)
If this is the case, you will need to take the slower method of snapshot & redeployment which is not limited to the same hypervisor:
1) create a snapshot of your server
2) delete your server to release the IP
3) immediately after the delete is finished, create a new droplet (choose the same datacentre) "select images" section switch to "my images" select your snapshot
About to do this tonight, fingers crossed!
Droplets look cheap but maybe they're competitive when you look at the number of cores. Seems to me a 4G Linode is faster than a 4G Droplet. But not 2x faster, IMO. A 4G Linode costs 2x the 4G Droplet. Digital Ocean feels like a better deal so far, but I need to upgrade to the 8G Droplet before I can really say for sure--the 4G Droplet isn't quite fast enough.
As far as SSD, can your user tell the difference between a cache file that takes .001s vs .0001s? Probably not. For many of us, I think the more critical question is: How much does SSD improve MySQL performance?
> As far as SSD, can your user tell the difference between a cache file that takes .001s vs .0001s? Probably not. For many of us, I think the more critical question is: How much does SSD improve MySQL performance?
Doesn't MySQL store cache in ram, so wouldnt more ram/$ be better?
I'm not sure what the author is trying to say regarding billing. Both Linode and Digital Ocean bill monthly, and both only charge you for the part of the month that your VPS exists for. He seems to be implying that if you have a Linode VPS for one day you'll be billed for a month of it.
With Linode, if you sign up for a month and then cancel after a day, you get a prorated Linode credit. If you spin up five basic Linodes and delete them all after a day, you get nearly $100 back in Linode credit but you still get charged for $100. With DO, you get charged for only what you use. If you spin up a droplet and then delete it after a day, you only get charged for like $0.17. To my broke college student self, anyway, that's a preferable business model.
The DO API kind of feels like a hackathon project that never got finished. That said, it's a terrific start and perfectly functional... just not polished.
DO is young but they come from the same team that built other hosting services -- which is why I find it odd that they've made a few of the same mistakes a lot of hosting providers make (re: security). I think we can give them a pass on that too since they're so relatively new.
Linode is great but I definitely see DO winning out over the next few years.
As for the people who work there? I'm sure they're reading this, and I don't mean to offend, but I think a lot of them need to take a look at the way they've handled a few of their recent security issues and the tone their responses have had. It didn't come across as 100% professional to me.
I use both for different purposes. It should be noted that Digital Ocean machines seem a lot slower. As a real world example, rake assets:precompile on my linode takes about a minute, whereas on a similarly specced digital ocean box it takes over 10 minutes. YMMV of course, but I was very disappointed by real world DO performance and only use it for lightweight stuff – it's great as a cheap VPN host for example.
I recently looked at both Linode and Digital Ocean to do some production roll out of a few sites that I had on Heroku. After looking at them I went with OVH and a dedicated server. I can put KVM on the dedicated server and get essentially the same interface I get at either one of those sites and I pay $40/Month for an 8 core 24GB server with 2TB of storage. Yes i know there are benefits to using a real "cloud" provider over just getting a dedicated server, but if my setup needs that kind of redundancy I can set it up ( multiple servers, different providers and Route53 ) People are paying a premium for something they will likely never use.
Companies that deliberately withhold key information from their users during security incidents don't deserve to be hosting other people's services. In fact they really shouldn't be in business. Transparency is that paramount. And Linode has done it not once but twice. I will never forget learning that my entire Production Linode stack could have been hacked through a Reddit post rather than from the company itself.
Really? There was a security issue revealed just a week or two ago about DigitalOcean, where they don't scrub accounts so you leak all your data. Read the thread over at Github and see how dismissive DigitalOcean representatives are of the whole issue. According to them, a security hole is an intended feature which you can opt out of. Pretty disgraceful if you ask me.
He's switching to a provider with well known security and reliability issues who are pro-censorship?
You get what you pay for.
Disclosure: I use linode as well as other providers. Completely happy with linode, not a second of downtime in close to a year, great performance (including disk) and even a far nicer management interface than the screenshot in the link (why do people like not being given choice? Is it some ADHD thing?...).
Both are good providers and the only comparison point that wasn't covered in the article was support, and speed of support. I have to give it to Linode because as far as I can remember every support ticket I filed got some kind of a response in 5 minutes.
Another thing to compare them on is DDOS protection and mitigation. I don't have enough data to compare both, in fact nothing on DO's side but I know that getting null routed on Linode is not a very good experience. You don't get much info from them and it's one of those helpless situations I guess. Does anyone else have experiences with either?
Yes Linode's support is perfect, they are up 24/7 which is important because big changes need to happen while most users are asleep. It's crazy to take down a big site during peak hours. Usually it's EARLY morning when I need the most help, in that middle-of-the-night lull when traffic is low. Just opened some tickets (hours ago) and DigitalOcean is not nearly as responsive as Linode. That's something to consider before moving!
I still dont get DO and Linode Model. Apart from starting a small instance, once you move pass the $100 mark per instance you are much much better off with a dedicated server. With OVH you could even start with $60 or $80.
That is why i am always looking for a Hybrid, a company that offers dedicated model while providing Cloud / VPS hosting. However i have yet to see a single company that does it with a price competitive option. SingleHop offers that but at a relatively expensive price. Hivelocity does very good dedicated but their Cloud / VPS sparknode gets no love.
LimeStone Network and Incero are bothing testing their Cloud. While OVH still have absolutely no idea what it is doing although they think they do.
Back to DO vs Linode
I am still skeptic of DO. After all their problems with VM Data Left over, Backup, Data Loss etc. I still think they are more of a Beta services compare to Linode, which is rock solid. Apart from the hacking issue Linode had.
Linode offer much better CPU performance then DO at all level. And with SSD (cache?) they should be competitive with IO in 2014 Q1. The thing that i dont understand is Linode decide to have SSD + HDD solution, where 500GB HDD + 500GB SSD works together. I dont get how this solution is better then just 500GB SSD alone.
Linode are also much better with Bandwidth and Network. This could be just that DO have growth problem where their user base exceed their DC bandwidth. But in general Linode's Network are much better tuned.
Support is also better at Linode.
So basically Linode is better, but more expensive. I remember Linode does offer daily price based where they charge their client a full Mouth price and then refund it to their account on a per day basis.
once you move pass the $100 mark per instance you are much much better off with a dedicated server. With OVH you could even start with $60 or $80.
I sorta agree although I think the barrier is somewhat higher than $100/month.
One of the biggest wins with a service like Linode is that if hardware fails, you often don't even need to know about it. And if your server were to fail, they'd either get you running again from your image pretty quickly or you could at least spin up a new VPS from your backup.
With a dedicated server, no matter how cheap, getting back up and running again can take a while even in the best of situations unless you're running hot spares or are already load balancing. It takes time to commission new boxes even at the best of the dedi providers and usually you'd just wait for hardware fix/replacement which can take hours.
I've been using Linode for production machines for about 4 years now and have been very happy with them. The security issues were a concern but appear to be the exception rather than the rule.
I've been using DO recently because I was given some free credit - mainly for testing Ansible. Their pricing is very aggressive and they do have that new fresh out of the box feeling.
I haven't used anything from them in production yet though so can't do a full comparison. Negatives for DO are they don't support private networking in all of their datacenters, they also don't pool bandwidth (as far as I'm aware) between all of your instances, I haven't seen any references to permanent/fixed IP addresses in the DO control panel - they seem to be dynamically assigned on each droplet spin up.
I haven't used DO support but Linode support has always been fast and accurate for me. For me, at the moment, DO isn't offering anything more than Linode so moving sites doesn't make sense in my case (disk IO isn't an issue for me at present).
OP: Great writeup, thanks for that. I was wondering.. if price wasn't a part of the equation (I know it is, but humor me), would you still have migrated?
I look at the offerings in general and despite the fact that I've used neither, but am going to, it does look like Linode offers slightly 'more', albeit for a substantially higher cost?
It really depends on your use case. I run my personal website, my blog, and a couple of other websites that get decent but not spectacular traffic (think a few K visits a month tops). I think that made Digital Ocean a pretty good choice for me because I take advantage of better (IMO) management tools, better third-party apps, etc. However, if you're running some seriously high-load stuff, Linode has some enterprise-level features that DO lacks, like load balancing. Linode also seems to have somewhat more technically competent support from what I've read; I've never had to use either company's support though.
I created a ridiculous support ticket (with lowest priority) about how annoying their youtube ads are. Got response within two hours that they were disabled for my IP. It's a small and silly issue, but I was surprised that they even responded, not to mention they fixed my "problem".
I've hosted about 5 wordpress sites with DO -- I found that their own support is great for more technical issues regarding their part of the back-end. The IRC channel is filled with great people who are willing to help out. Without that channel, I'd say that their support is lacking.
I've been using Linode for years. I signed up when they offered free $100 credit. After my free year of Amazon AWS ran out, I went to Linode "until the $100 credit runs out". I ended up staying until this day.
I've been meaning to switch to DigitalOcean because it's twice as cheap but it's too much hassle to switch all domains, etc. so I've stuck with Linode.
I've never had to deal with Linode support which I guess is a good thing. DigitalOcean support is also great.
My credit card was stolen from Linode (I only ever used it to pay for Linode and Amazon). Luckily it was blocked by my bank automatically. Because of this, I will never call Linode rock-solid, secure or trusted.
[+] [-] rwg|12 years ago|reply
• Complaints about DO shutting down instances and locking accounts until people FAX'd in a copy of their driver's license, passport, etc. (If a user isn't breaking the law or violating the ToS, why does DO need identification? If a user is breaking the law or violating the ToS, then terminate their account!)
• Having to stop accepting signups in their Amsterdam location for a while because they ran out of IPv4 space but didn't support IPv6. (A message from August 2012 says, "we hope to have something in the works by Q4 2012 or Q1 2013." As far as I can tell, they still don't support IPv6 in any of their locations.)
• Not supporting the booting of custom kernels. (They've been stalling on this at least as long as IPv6 support.)
• Botching their Ubuntu image and having everyone's Ubuntu droplets sharing the same ssh host keys unless the user explicitly generated new ones. (Probably an honest mistake, but that's sloppy, especially considering they're effectively forcing users to use their distro images.)
The recent kerfluffle about not always wiping data after a user's disk image is destroyed would've also been a gigantic red flag (that had been doused in kerosene and lit on fire before being run up the flagpole) if it had happened a few months earlier.
To be fair, Linode's security/privacy record is far from spotless — they've been super evasive about breaches, and their handling of a data leak bug/vuln I reported didn't leave me with a super-awesome feeling — but my gut feeling is that Linode sucks just enough less to justify the US$15/month extra. That could easily change, though, but I imagine it would turn into "both suck, screw it, I'll suffer with an EC2 t1.micro instance."
[+] [-] thirdsight|12 years ago|reply
* No verification required for me. Perhaps this is a step when paying by paypal? I've been asked many times for more info when using that. If they pulled this on me, my backup MX will handle email until I get to sort it.
* AMS1 was unfortunate. I signed up when it wasn't available and I'm in Europe. I moved my machine to AMS2 when that came up (after their first day of scary high load). I had my host in NYC2 to start with and it was perfectly usable from London, UK over SSH. I couldn't tell the difference between it and my server in the house.
* Custom kernels. This is one of two gripes for me. I really want FreeBSD but failing that I want the latest Debian kernel. Keeping an eye on this one. I've got ufw/iptables up front which I have my fingers crossed will protect from any network level issues, logwatch, fail2ban etc to monitor casual attempts and patches are tracked.
* SSH key generation: I always regen my SSH keys anyway if I didn't see it happen so this would have been a non issue for me. This is crypto paranoia on my part (and well justified).
* Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it. Why would you not tick it?
To be fair, for $5/month it's not bad. Having played with shared hosting for 17 years, managed massive colo custom deployments and paid through the nose for other hosting, it's the best compromise so far.
I looked at Linode but the bottom end was slightly too expensive and I'd rather have SSDs behind it as IO contention on VPSs is usually rather high so that got ruled out.
I tried an Amazon EC2 micro instance and it was horribly slow so they didn't get my cash.
[+] [-] orthecreedence|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novaleaf|12 years ago|reply
also performance on any given VM may be 5x difference than another vm in the dc. (at least at the $5 tier).
and yes, though there are technically 5 DC's to pick from, quite often there are less than 5 available when you want to provision a server. a few times I've seen only 1 DC available.
That said, if you understand and can tolerate this "sloppyness" then digital ocean is a great system. I am perfectly happy with their service right now.
EDIT: clarifying details, my SaaS has been going for about 6 months, and currently runs 25 digital ocean instances across all 5 of their DC's, so I think i have a pretty good sample size.
[+] [-] tbranyen|12 years ago|reply
I haven't considered switching to a cheaper service like Digital Ocean, because Linode offers peace of mind and excellent customer retention. There is something special about dialing a number and getting a real person who knows how to configure DNS and troubleshoot your international propagation and provide real assistance and empathize without sounding like they are feeding you canned BS.
I've never rebooted my Linode, except for their free upgrades. Recently I've purchased their backup service, which saved my ass when I decided to upgrade my Arch Linux install and butchered a package conflict which resulted in effectively destroying my box. I was able to quickly spin up a new install of Arch, mount my previous server, and copy over configurations. The LISH console has also saved my ass as well... too many times; I'm not a server admin!
I feel very much in control of the remote box and that is primarily why I will always recommend. However, they had one hiccup during my time with them, where they leaked sensitive information and withheld accountability for a while. It was frustrating, because I gave them benefit of the doubt, but secretly agreed that it was sketchy. If anyone reads this who works there, staying quiet matters negatively towards your credibility.
[+] [-] codygman|12 years ago|reply
I don't know if DO would fare any better, and they have issues[2] of their own though.
Evaluating the two, DO makes me less uncomfortable and costs less.
1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
If its some kind of business perspective then I don't know why anyone cares about monthly fees equaling 10 minutes of developer salary or 20 minutes of developer salary, or why any businessman would care which CSS framework his sysadmin occasionally uses. On the other hand an extremely long term proven track record of reliability and responsiveness to problems is kinda important.
Or is it written for bitcoin miners trying to get the most CPU cycles per dollar, or private dropbox clone who needs as many GB per $ as possible, or a developer who spins up test environments on a regular basis but doesn't know how to use puppet, or a vanity VPS where you spin up an instance in 2008 or whatever and just keep "apt-get upgrade"ing Debian since then or ...
As a disclaimer I am a happy very long term linode subscriber. I admit I laughed out loud at the suggestion that I switch because DO uses a different CSS framework.
[+] [-] d23|12 years ago|reply
Stop being obtuse. He listed a number of points he finds in their favor: hourly billing, less expensive, SSD performance, and a clean, easy to use interface. He even argued your point that Linode has a long track record of reliability.
This "sentence," however, is one of the most incomprehensible things I've ever read:
> Or is it written for bitcoin miners trying to get the most CPU cycles per dollar, or private dropbox clone who needs as many GB per $ as possible, or a developer who spins up test environments on a regular basis but doesn't know how to use puppet, or a vanity VPS where you spin up an instance in 2008 or whatever and just keep "apt-get upgrade"ing Debian since then or ...
As a disclaimer, I'm an AWS user, and I've had an eye on DO for personal projects for a while now. This article articulates every reason why.
[+] [-] oinksoft|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|12 years ago|reply
RAM: DO gives 2x as much RAM at each price point
CPU: Unclear. Linode gives you 8 cores across the board, but fewer "priority" ones. Probably needs benchmarking to be a sensible comparison.
Disk: Linode gives between 1.2x and 2.4x as much storage at each price point
Transfer: DO gives more transfer at the low end, but Linode ramps it up faster. DO gives more transfer at $20, they tie at $40, and Linode gives more at $80+.
I agree with the author that Digital Ocean is generally cheaper for my use-cases as well, but there are some where it isn't. For example, if you want 8GB RAM + 16TB transfer (to pick a configuration favorable to Linode), that's $160/mo at Linode but $300/mo at DO. On the other hand, if you need more transfer only occasionally, DO can be cheaper because it somewhat makes up for less included bandwidth with much cheaper overage rates ($20/TB vs. $100/TB at Linode).
[+] [-] Jonanin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezequiel-garzon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schneidmaster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjbrunet|12 years ago|reply
This is from Digital Ocean:
FastResize is limited to the resources available on the physical hypervisor that your server is on. If there are no resources available, no sizes will be listed on the FastResize Page.
(Linode automates all these steps...)
If this is the case, you will need to take the slower method of snapshot & redeployment which is not limited to the same hypervisor:
1) create a snapshot of your server 2) delete your server to release the IP 3) immediately after the delete is finished, create a new droplet (choose the same datacentre) "select images" section switch to "my images" select your snapshot
About to do this tonight, fingers crossed!
Droplets look cheap but maybe they're competitive when you look at the number of cores. Seems to me a 4G Linode is faster than a 4G Droplet. But not 2x faster, IMO. A 4G Linode costs 2x the 4G Droplet. Digital Ocean feels like a better deal so far, but I need to upgrade to the 8G Droplet before I can really say for sure--the 4G Droplet isn't quite fast enough.
As far as SSD, can your user tell the difference between a cache file that takes .001s vs .0001s? Probably not. For many of us, I think the more critical question is: How much does SSD improve MySQL performance?
[+] [-] rschmitty|12 years ago|reply
Doesn't MySQL store cache in ram, so wouldnt more ram/$ be better?
[+] [-] danellis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schneidmaster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ranman|12 years ago|reply
DO is young but they come from the same team that built other hosting services -- which is why I find it odd that they've made a few of the same mistakes a lot of hosting providers make (re: security). I think we can give them a pass on that too since they're so relatively new.
Linode is great but I definitely see DO winning out over the next few years.
As for the people who work there? I'm sure they're reading this, and I don't mean to offend, but I think a lot of them need to take a look at the way they've handled a few of their recent security issues and the tone their responses have had. It didn't come across as 100% professional to me.
Happy to cite claims on request.
[+] [-] schneidmaster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jebblue|12 years ago|reply
Not for my money, Linode rocks.
[+] [-] spellboots|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkhenry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qoo|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] threeseed|12 years ago|reply
Companies that deliberately withhold key information from their users during security incidents don't deserve to be hosting other people's services. In fact they really shouldn't be in business. Transparency is that paramount. And Linode has done it not once but twice. I will never forget learning that my entire Production Linode stack could have been hacked through a Reddit post rather than from the company itself.
[+] [-] yapcguy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueskin_|12 years ago|reply
You get what you pay for.
Disclosure: I use linode as well as other providers. Completely happy with linode, not a second of downtime in close to a year, great performance (including disk) and even a far nicer management interface than the screenshot in the link (why do people like not being given choice? Is it some ADHD thing?...).
[+] [-] yogo|12 years ago|reply
Another thing to compare them on is DDOS protection and mitigation. I don't have enough data to compare both, in fact nothing on DO's side but I know that getting null routed on Linode is not a very good experience. You don't get much info from them and it's one of those helpless situations I guess. Does anyone else have experiences with either?
[+] [-] pjbrunet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|12 years ago|reply
That is why i am always looking for a Hybrid, a company that offers dedicated model while providing Cloud / VPS hosting. However i have yet to see a single company that does it with a price competitive option. SingleHop offers that but at a relatively expensive price. Hivelocity does very good dedicated but their Cloud / VPS sparknode gets no love. LimeStone Network and Incero are bothing testing their Cloud. While OVH still have absolutely no idea what it is doing although they think they do.
Back to DO vs Linode I am still skeptic of DO. After all their problems with VM Data Left over, Backup, Data Loss etc. I still think they are more of a Beta services compare to Linode, which is rock solid. Apart from the hacking issue Linode had.
Linode offer much better CPU performance then DO at all level. And with SSD (cache?) they should be competitive with IO in 2014 Q1. The thing that i dont understand is Linode decide to have SSD + HDD solution, where 500GB HDD + 500GB SSD works together. I dont get how this solution is better then just 500GB SSD alone.
Linode are also much better with Bandwidth and Network. This could be just that DO have growth problem where their user base exceed their DC bandwidth. But in general Linode's Network are much better tuned.
Support is also better at Linode.
So basically Linode is better, but more expensive. I remember Linode does offer daily price based where they charge their client a full Mouth price and then refund it to their account on a per day basis.
[+] [-] petercooper|12 years ago|reply
I sorta agree although I think the barrier is somewhat higher than $100/month.
One of the biggest wins with a service like Linode is that if hardware fails, you often don't even need to know about it. And if your server were to fail, they'd either get you running again from your image pretty quickly or you could at least spin up a new VPS from your backup.
With a dedicated server, no matter how cheap, getting back up and running again can take a while even in the best of situations unless you're running hot spares or are already load balancing. It takes time to commission new boxes even at the best of the dedi providers and usually you'd just wait for hardware fix/replacement which can take hours.
[+] [-] aspratley|12 years ago|reply
I've been using DO recently because I was given some free credit - mainly for testing Ansible. Their pricing is very aggressive and they do have that new fresh out of the box feeling.
I haven't used anything from them in production yet though so can't do a full comparison. Negatives for DO are they don't support private networking in all of their datacenters, they also don't pool bandwidth (as far as I'm aware) between all of your instances, I haven't seen any references to permanent/fixed IP addresses in the DO control panel - they seem to be dynamically assigned on each droplet spin up.
I haven't used DO support but Linode support has always been fast and accurate for me. For me, at the moment, DO isn't offering anything more than Linode so moving sites doesn't make sense in my case (disk IO isn't an issue for me at present).
[+] [-] sekasi|12 years ago|reply
I look at the offerings in general and despite the fact that I've used neither, but am going to, it does look like Linode offers slightly 'more', albeit for a substantially higher cost?
[+] [-] schneidmaster|12 years ago|reply
It really depends on your use case. I run my personal website, my blog, and a couple of other websites that get decent but not spectacular traffic (think a few K visits a month tops). I think that made Digital Ocean a pretty good choice for me because I take advantage of better (IMO) management tools, better third-party apps, etc. However, if you're running some seriously high-load stuff, Linode has some enterprise-level features that DO lacks, like load balancing. Linode also seems to have somewhat more technically competent support from what I've read; I've never had to use either company's support though.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rplnt|12 years ago|reply
I created a ridiculous support ticket (with lowest priority) about how annoying their youtube ads are. Got response within two hours that they were disabled for my IP. It's a small and silly issue, but I was surprised that they even responded, not to mention they fixed my "problem".
[+] [-] stevewillows|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattBearman|12 years ago|reply
Linode is for more mission critical stuff where I need better uptime and tech support.
DO is for less important sites (blogs, family websites, etc)
Also, Linode don't just charge a flat fee for the month, they pro-rate costs based on when VPSs are created and destroyed in the billing cycle.
[+] [-] blameless|12 years ago|reply
I've been meaning to switch to DigitalOcean because it's twice as cheap but it's too much hassle to switch all domains, etc. so I've stuck with Linode.
I've never had to deal with Linode support which I guess is a good thing. DigitalOcean support is also great.
My credit card was stolen from Linode (I only ever used it to pay for Linode and Amazon). Luckily it was blocked by my bank automatically. Because of this, I will never call Linode rock-solid, secure or trusted.