Why do I pay Linode $20/month instead of paying DO $5/month(1)?
Because Linode treats their servers like kittens (upgrades, addons/options, support), and DO treats their servers like cattle. There's nothing wrong with the cattle model of managing servers. But I'm not using Chef or Puppet, I just have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few services. And Linode treats that one solitary server better than any other VPS host in the world.
(1) I do have one DO box as a simple secondary DNS server, for provider redundancy
I don't see that distinction at all. Both Linode and DO provide persistent local storage. Both let you resize your server. And now, they're competitive on price; Linode even has hourly billing. Granted, DO has lower-end plans than Linode. But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.
>I just have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few services. And Linode treats that one solitary server better than any other VPS host in the world.
I use DO for this and have used many others in the past and I have never had any problems with DO...
Not exactly a fair comparison, you'd want to compare similar plans, 2GB Linode VPS and 2GB DigitalOcean VPS are both $20/month. Some benchmarks between the two posted at https://blog.centminmod.com/346. Linode fast disk i/o than DO but DO faster cpu than Linode :)
Just a side node, I occasionally use SSH tunneling to get through the evil local government Internet censoring, so I have a linode a DO (just sever months), and linode's SSH tunneling is much much more fast and stable.
I moved from Linode to Digital Ocean because of the price and I've noticed no change in level of service. And the support, which I've used several times at both has always been incredibly quick, accurate and useful.
I was however happy to have a viable alternative to Linode. I found their handling of the two hacking incidents to be completely disrespectful to me as a customer.
Unfortunately, DO vs. Linode, DO is the only one that can provide me a "reasonably fast box" [cpu, ssd] for $5/month, so I'm cattle, but cheap... :) [pingdom shows 5min worth of outage in the past week (a 99.96% uptime) which may or may not be OK depending on your money vs. uptime pain threshold :) ]
i'm a happy DO user (30 droplets at the moment) and I agree with your cattle analogy. I am not surprised to see multiple droplets spontaneously rebooting on occasion (even when system maintenance has not been announced)
however, I have no experience with Linode so I can not say if they are "kittens" as you say.
Awesome News. Competition really pushes companies to please their customers. Ever since Digital Ocean became the new hip, Linode has been pushing harder. My experience with them has been mixed. Forgiving their previous mishaps and the feeling that the level of Customer Service has gone down, they have been decent year long. I wouldn't mind recommending them.
[Edit: Removed the bit about DigitalOcean Plans. If you have Ghostery running, it apparently takes out the html block listing different plans]
This seems pretty fantastic, I am excited to upgrade and think the SSD storage is going to be really helpful for improving the performance of my applications hosted there.
That said, I am not an expert on CPU virtualization but I did notice that the new plans are differently phrased than the old ones here. The old plans all talked about 8 CPU cores with various 1x, 2x priority levels (https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrad... for examples), while the new plans all talk about 1, 2, etc. core counts.
Could anyone with more expertise here tell me whether this is a sneaky reduction in CPU power for the lower tiered plans, or just a simpler way of saying the same thing as the old plans?
Somebody asked this on the blog post, here was the reply from Linode:
If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all.
We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc.
cpu counts dont mean much in terms of performance. but from a strict performance standpoint, their E5 2680's are amongst the tops in the industry (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html). i'm pretty sure DO's is somewhere around 1/10th the performance of Linode's in terms of CPU power. you are getting a really good deal here w/ Linode, I dont think any cloud providers are at this level right now.
It looks like Linode are still leaving the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market to DO. Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.
As someone who has used both Linode and "low end box" services, both have their place. Two observations:
1) I feel like Linode offers a level of support that the others don't offer. There are lower end providers that do offer good support, but it's not as consistently good as Linode. Were they to start offering cheaper $5 or $10 a month plans, they would be challenged when it comes to continuing to offer that level of support.
2) Observationally, it seems to me that Linode customers on average tend to be more serious about their usage than those who are looking for a <$5/month VPS. Go to the IRC channels for each company and see who hangs out there. That said, this should only matter to you if you are concerned about who your neighbours may be on a VM host, if you plan on being part of the IRC community, or if you are concerned about how reputable your IP address looks given what block it belongs to.
And I would imagine that is very much by design. DO's model is to scale as much as possible -- they want to be all over the place and they have the funding to make those sorts of changes.
As a more established provider, Linode has to decide if adding more customers would be worth the incremental support costs. Given Linode's reputation for support, adding a bunch of LEB customers who aren't likely to renew at the same rates as people who pay more money - and are also likely to have more support requests - competing with that market doesn't make a ton of sense.
Plus, whether fair or not, having a minimum pricing point makes a service seem more premium -- more "ready for serious business." Now, obviously we've all been with expensive hosts that have terrible performance -- but you'd be surprised how many non-technical decision makers will choose a higher-priced offering over a lower-priced offering, on the supposition that "more expensive = better."
Yeah, my current Linode I've been running since it was a 512MB instance. I definitely don't need 2GB, I'd rather pay a bit less per month than get the upgrade. I don't think they need to go down to $5/month, but a $10/month plan similar to DO's would be very useful.
> Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.
I have a feeling it's a bit of customer service / risk mitigation. Obviously there are numerous exceptions but the sort of people that execute a lot of fraud, DDOS'ing, or simply amateurs playing around are also the sort of people that'll use DO before Linode. I imagine there's a heavy cost associated with hosting those users relative to ones happy to pay $20/mo instead.
How big is that market, really? I keep a small VPS around for whatever (I like Hetzner), and I'm sure lots of nerds are the same. But for any usage that's even a little bit serious, $20/month is peanuts.
There's a bit of getting what you pay for. That said, Rackspace are in the same sort of market tier as Linode, and in my experience of both Linode are just ridiculously better. I would heartily recommend Linode to anyone.
They don't have SSD, but SSD doesn't do everything, I prefer more ram.
EDIT: If some of you don't know OVH, it's because its new in America, but its not some cheap company, it's a European company that is very successful there. And just recently created a datacenter in North America. (I used to live in France, and have known them for some years).
Benchmarking using wrk the smallest linode (1024 now 2048) serving a page from an untuned Rails application using nginx/passenger getting almost no other traffic. Hard to compare of course given the various other factors, but produced slightly lower performance after the upgrade. Serving a page from nginx directly (no Rails) had no appreciable difference in performance, I guess the Rails web serving is more vCPU bound?
Before Upgrade:
Running 30s test @ http://...
5 threads and 20 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 308.91ms 135.01ms 985.82ms 80.00%
Req/Sec 14.15 4.61 24.00 66.36%
2206 requests in 30.00s, 28.51MB read
Requests/sec: 73.53
Transfer/sec: 0.95MB
After Upgrade:
Running 30s test @ http://..
5 threads and 20 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 321.74ms 102.45ms 957.74ms 87.32%
Req/Sec 12.02 2.18 17.00 80.75%
1858 requests in 30.01s, 24.03MB read
Requests/sec: 61.92
Transfer/sec: 819.98KB
It depends on the task. If your Rails app hits the database a lot, memory availability and disk speed will matter a lot, which favors the new Linode style. If your app just does one small query per page and then gets on with its work, then probably CPU is your most important thing (since most of your time will be spent on app logic, runtime housekeeping and rendering templates).
Yeah, you went from 8 vCPU Cores to 2 vCPU Cores on that plan as part of the upgrade. It seems the processor upgrade makes up for that decrease a little bit, but it is a decrease.
About a week ago, I wrote a comment in another Linode-related thread asking how the new usage patterns that hourly billing encourages might affect CPU contention. At the time, I received 11 upvotes but no replies. Apparently, quite a few people were interested in my question but had no useful conjectures to share.
Now it's obvious what Linode's answer to that question is: Lower "burstable" CPU for lower plans.
The $20 plan used to be able to burst to 8 cores for short periods, but now it only has access to 2 vcores. The "guaranteed" processing power is probably higher with the newer CPUs, but at the expense of short-term burst performance.
Another minor detail that I find interesting is that the transfer cap for the $20 plan has been increased to 3TB, whereas the $40 plan still gets 4TB. Apart from the transfer cap plateau-ing at the extreme high end, this is the first time that Linode has broken its 11-year-old policy of "pay X times as much money, get X times as much RAM/disk/transfer".
Most interesting part in this great upgrade is that they went from 8CPU setup to 2CPU setup.
But yeah - 2x more RAM, SSDs will guarantee that I'm not going to switch anytime soon.
Sadly I need to wait a week until this will be available in London.
Linode's recent upgrades are awesome, but people are very quick to forget the period where they were being hacked left and right and didn't communicate with their customers until a defensive blog post weeks after the fact. No matter how good the servers may be, Linode should be a non-starter for anybody who cares about the security of their droplet; and, if you don't, why would you pay Linode's premium fee?
CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz
Number of cores: 8
CPU frequency: 2266.788 MHz
Total amount of RAM: 988 MB
Total amount of swap: 255 MB
System uptime: 8 days, 12:03,
I/O speed: 69.9 MB/s
Bzip 25MB: 8.96s
Download 100MB file: 47.2MB/s
After
------
CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz
Number of cores: 2
CPU frequency: 2800.086 MHz
Total amount of RAM: 1993 MB
Total amount of swap: 255 MB
System uptime: 2 min,
I/O speed: 638 MB/s
Bzip 25MB: 5.10s
Download 100MB file: 146MB/s
Rackspace cloud customer here… These Linode upgrades are very tempting to entice me to switch.
I get I might not be their target market (small business with about $1000/month on IaaS spending) but there are a couple things preventing me from doing so:
1) $10/month size suitable for a dev instance.
2) Some kind of scalable file storage solution with CDN integration – like RS CloudFiles/Akamai or AWS S3/Cloudfront or block storage to attach to an individual server.
I guess you get what you pay for… infrastructure components and flexibility AWS > RS > Linode > DO which roughly matches the price point.
I stopped being a customer since migrating to DO but my needs were really small
But I think their strategy of keeping the price and increasing capabilities are good. Between $5 and $20 is a "big" difference for one person (still, it's a day's lunch), for a company it's nothing.
However, I would definitely go to Linode for CPU/IO intensive tasks. Amazon sucks at these (more benchmarks between the providers are of course welcome)
Holy crap this is awesome. Good job guys at Linode. I said I would switch if the prices dropped about 25% because RAM was pricey.... So now I have to switch.
So now they match DigitalOcean prices but offer slightly more SSD space for each plan. I wonder what DO answer to this would be. They haven't changed their pricing for quite a while.
Sometimes i just wish the pricing system would get better as you go larger.
What is the difference between the 16GB - 96GB Plan and a dedicated server? And why would i pay 3x the price? The advantage of those who offer Cloud / VPS and Dedicated Servers Hosting company is they can mix and match depending usage. If you are actually building an any sort of infrastructure with Linode those large box are extremely expensive.
So this makes Lindode practically on par with DO's $20 plan. Up till now $20 plan at DO was better now its just the choice of the brand.
But here is one thing that DO provides and I think Linode too should, you get the choice to spin up a $5 instance anytime in your account for any small project or a test instance which you cannot on Linode.
[+] [-] madsushi|12 years ago|reply
Because Linode treats their servers like kittens (upgrades, addons/options, support), and DO treats their servers like cattle. There's nothing wrong with the cattle model of managing servers. But I'm not using Chef or Puppet, I just have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few services. And Linode treats that one solitary server better than any other VPS host in the world.
(1) I do have one DO box as a simple secondary DNS server, for provider redundancy
[+] [-] mwcampbell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidlogic|12 years ago|reply
I use DO for this and have used many others in the past and I have never had any problems with DO...
[+] [-] vbtechguy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwinyzh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|12 years ago|reply
I was however happy to have a viable alternative to Linode. I found their handling of the two hacking incidents to be completely disrespectful to me as a customer.
[+] [-] rogerdpack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arb99|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novaleaf|12 years ago|reply
however, I have no experience with Linode so I can not say if they are "kittens" as you say.
[+] [-] kyrra|12 years ago|reply
Old cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz
CPUs compared: http://ark.intel.com/compare/75277,40201
[+] [-] growt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kawsper|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nivla|12 years ago|reply
[Edit: Removed the bit about DigitalOcean Plans. If you have Ghostery running, it apparently takes out the html block listing different plans]
[+] [-] svmegatron|12 years ago|reply
I'd really like to know the results of the test.
[+] [-] mimiflynn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cshenoy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] relaxatorium|12 years ago|reply
That said, I am not an expert on CPU virtualization but I did notice that the new plans are differently phrased than the old ones here. The old plans all talked about 8 CPU cores with various 1x, 2x priority levels (https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrad... for examples), while the new plans all talk about 1, 2, etc. core counts.
Could anyone with more expertise here tell me whether this is a sneaky reduction in CPU power for the lower tiered plans, or just a simpler way of saying the same thing as the old plans?
[+] [-] Jake232|12 years ago|reply
If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all.
We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc.
[+] [-] jaequery|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjknight|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandon272|12 years ago|reply
1) I feel like Linode offers a level of support that the others don't offer. There are lower end providers that do offer good support, but it's not as consistently good as Linode. Were they to start offering cheaper $5 or $10 a month plans, they would be challenged when it comes to continuing to offer that level of support.
2) Observationally, it seems to me that Linode customers on average tend to be more serious about their usage than those who are looking for a <$5/month VPS. Go to the IRC channels for each company and see who hangs out there. That said, this should only matter to you if you are concerned about who your neighbours may be on a VM host, if you plan on being part of the IRC community, or if you are concerned about how reputable your IP address looks given what block it belongs to.
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|12 years ago|reply
As a more established provider, Linode has to decide if adding more customers would be worth the incremental support costs. Given Linode's reputation for support, adding a bunch of LEB customers who aren't likely to renew at the same rates as people who pay more money - and are also likely to have more support requests - competing with that market doesn't make a ton of sense.
Plus, whether fair or not, having a minimum pricing point makes a service seem more premium -- more "ready for serious business." Now, obviously we've all been with expensive hosts that have terrible performance -- but you'd be surprised how many non-technical decision makers will choose a higher-priced offering over a lower-priced offering, on the supposition that "more expensive = better."
[+] [-] kylec|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidlogic|12 years ago|reply
Yes, this, the $10 plan is DO's most popular.
[+] [-] meritt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TillE|12 years ago|reply
How big is that market, really? I keep a small VPS around for whatever (I like Hetzner), and I'm sure lots of nerds are the same. But for any usage that's even a little bit serious, $20/month is peanuts.
[+] [-] davidgerard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcone|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_ancient|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EC1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __xtrimsky|12 years ago|reply
for $7 you get: 2 cores 2GB RAM
for 10$ you get: 3 cores 4GB RAM
They don't have SSD, but SSD doesn't do everything, I prefer more ram.
EDIT: If some of you don't know OVH, it's because its new in America, but its not some cheap company, it's a European company that is very successful there. And just recently created a datacenter in North America. (I used to live in France, and have known them for some years).
[+] [-] giulianob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kh_hk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hadoukenio|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conorh|12 years ago|reply
Before Upgrade:
After Upgrade:[+] [-] chc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmelbye|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kijin|12 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564764
Now it's obvious what Linode's answer to that question is: Lower "burstable" CPU for lower plans.
The $20 plan used to be able to burst to 8 cores for short periods, but now it only has access to 2 vcores. The "guaranteed" processing power is probably higher with the newer CPUs, but at the expense of short-term burst performance.
Another minor detail that I find interesting is that the transfer cap for the $20 plan has been increased to 3TB, whereas the $40 plan still gets 4TB. Apart from the transfer cap plateau-ing at the extreme high end, this is the first time that Linode has broken its 11-year-old policy of "pay X times as much money, get X times as much RAM/disk/transfer".
[+] [-] endijs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavanky|12 years ago|reply
[1]: Amazon charges $2 an hour thats about $1500 a month.
[+] [-] nilved|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihowlatthemoon|12 years ago|reply
Before
-------
After------
Test: https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench[+] [-] munger|12 years ago|reply
I get I might not be their target market (small business with about $1000/month on IaaS spending) but there are a couple things preventing me from doing so: 1) $10/month size suitable for a dev instance. 2) Some kind of scalable file storage solution with CDN integration – like RS CloudFiles/Akamai or AWS S3/Cloudfront or block storage to attach to an individual server.
I guess you get what you pay for… infrastructure components and flexibility AWS > RS > Linode > DO which roughly matches the price point.
[+] [-] raverbashing|12 years ago|reply
I stopped being a customer since migrating to DO but my needs were really small
But I think their strategy of keeping the price and increasing capabilities are good. Between $5 and $20 is a "big" difference for one person (still, it's a day's lunch), for a company it's nothing.
However, I would definitely go to Linode for CPU/IO intensive tasks. Amazon sucks at these (more benchmarks between the providers are of course welcome)
[+] [-] giulianob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harrystone|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] extesy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|12 years ago|reply
What is the difference between the 16GB - 96GB Plan and a dedicated server? And why would i pay 3x the price? The advantage of those who offer Cloud / VPS and Dedicated Servers Hosting company is they can mix and match depending usage. If you are actually building an any sort of infrastructure with Linode those large box are extremely expensive.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vidyesh|12 years ago|reply
But here is one thing that DO provides and I think Linode too should, you get the choice to spin up a $5 instance anytime in your account for any small project or a test instance which you cannot on Linode.