11th Linode Birthday, $10 Linode plan

[sergiotapia]

Compared to DigitalOcean:

                  RAM - Processor - HD       - Transfer
    Linode        1GB - 1 Core    - 24GB SSD - 2TB
    DigitalOcean  1GB - 1 Core    - 30GB SSD - 2TB

Very compelling pricing, I may actually migrate a pet project of mine to Linode because they have a more robust support system.

Now all they need to do is accept Paypal payments because I live in a third world country and do not own an international credit card.

[riquito]

I suspect that the two SSD are on different levels. Linode has higher standards.

I don't know if the following benchmarks are real, but if it is we're talking about really different hardware (780 Mb/s vs 250 Mb/s)

http://serverbear.com/2424-linode-2gb-ssd-linode http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean

Maybe someone with both accounts can do a quick benchmark to verify or deny this data.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

I also appreciate the fact that Linode hasn't deprecated Arch Linux images like DO has. DO also seems to be pretty bad at listening to users.

[ekar45]

I live in a 3rd world country too; but they accept my local card (mastercard)

[bluthru]

Is there a meaningful difference in CPUs?

[geerlingguy]

This is great news; I have, for the past few years, been moving all my lower-end VPSes from Linode to Digital Ocean. I recently told a Linode rep at DrupalCon that I would start moving servers back as soon as they had a lower-cost plan, and it looks like Linode has delivered.

Very few of my servers need more than 1 GB RAM, and the CPU and SSDs perform similarly across DO and Linode (for my purposes). I'll still be using a bunch of 512MB Digital Ocean servers for utility purposes, but I'm hoping that these Linode VPSes will continue the trend of being slightly faster/more stable than low-end VPSes from Digital Ocean and other lower-end/inexpensive hosts.

Since I now use Ansible for all my infrastructure management (and Ansible integrates easily with Linode[1] and Digital Ocean[2]), it's trivially easy to move individual servers between providers. This is not only nice to assist with using the best price-performance combo, regardless of provider, but also so I can move production infrastructure from provider to provider and benchmark them against each other more easily.

[1] http://docs.ansible.com/linode_module.html

[2] http://docs.ansible.com/digital_ocean_module.html

[jsherer]

I concur. I use Ansible for my deployments on Digital Ocean. It would be trivial to move over to Linode because of Ansible's flexibility (which is actually something I consider every time DO has network issues). Hopefully this competition helps both services step up their game.

[tedchs]

For the folks using Digital Ocean, have you considered Ramnode? $18 per year for their ultra-tiny plan, "OpenVZ SSD VPS (SVZ v2) - Atlanta - 128MB SVZ". I kinda love a company that constantly posts a 25% discount code on their own homepage. :)

[endijs]

https://twitter.com/linode/status/478548938010939392 for 10$ promo code if you want to try out. DigitalOcean very often gives out credits for testing, first time I see Linode doing that.

[sergiotapia]

Unfortunately, they only take credit cards, and not only that - I need to type in my non-existant card details in order to try out their free $10/month.

[kalmi10]

It seems that one still has to enter credit card details and preload at least 5$.

[ausjke]

Have been a satisfied customer with Linode for 7 years. Now I can move my testing site to this new $10/m plan.

Meanwhile I'm slightly concerned about the future quality from Linode, as low-priced $10 plan will certainly get lots of customers, but it may also bring down quality from Linode. Popularity normally plays against quality, I hope I am wrong.

[agwa]

I share your popularity vs quality concerns. I've been a customer for 9 years and I've noticed two areas where I believe quality has declined in the last ~2 years as a result of their increased popularity:

1. Their support, while still fast, has turned into script-reading drones and I've often been frustrated when trying to deal with more complex issues. They seem to assume everyone is stupid, which I think is a consequence of having many customers.

2. DoS attacks against other customers have gone way up, causing datacenter-wide network outages. I think this is a consequence of having too many non-professional customers who attract the wrong kind of attention. Creating a $10/month plan will certainly not help with this.

Linode has been a great company and they deserve to enjoy the fruits of their success, but it is definitely disappointing as a long-time customer to see quality decline as they grow in popularity.

[xienze]

> Meanwhile I'm slightly concerned about the future quality from Linode, as low-priced $10 plan will certainly get lots of customers

They've had a $10 plan for a looong time. It's just recently that they got rid of it, and now it's back.

[edwinyzh]

I have just submitted a ticket to ask Linode about downgrading from my current $20 plan, since I host PHP websites only, and I use Ubuntu 32bit, and I don't want to take risks to switch the kernel to 64bit in order to take advantage of their recent free hardware upgrades:https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-...

I don't see any reasons they'll not let me downgrade, since there is no reason to pay $20 and use the $10 spec, right? I'll keep you posted about it.

[mcescalante]

Does anybody have a good comparison or story of why Linode is "more reliable" than DO? I've read the simple "Digital Ocean vs. Linode" stuff posted here, but it never offers any quantitative insight as to why people find Linode more reliable. Anecdotes encouraged :)

[skylan_q]

I was considering getting a vps with them (since DO is dropping support for arch) but $20/month seemed like too much of a commitment for some hobby work. Now I'm sold. :)

[yogo]

I wasn't aware of this but found https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-will-h...

One of my big reasons for having a few DO instances was the price + having Arch--many of the cheap providers don't provide Arch images. This new Linode plan will be a good option for the lower-end needs.

[zapt02]

Linode is taking up the fight with DigitalOcean! With Linodes great reputation I'm sure a lot of people on DO will be trying their service in the coming weeks.

[fideloper]

As a consumer I should enjoy the "race to the bottom" of hosting pricing, but as one who wants to make my own *aaS apps, it's sort of troubling!

[erikano]

I have a VPS with DigitalOcean and for some reason, logging in over SSH takes disturbingly long. I may decide to switch over to Linode with these new prices.

[guylhem]

Use promo code LINODE10 and you'll get $10 off - ie one free month! You'll be charged $5 on your credit card, but your account will then show a $15 credit.

Feel free to use my referral code 9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7494470 or link https://www.linode.com/?r=9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7... so that I benefit from it too :-)

[guylhem]

I'm new to linode. What is their outgoing bandwidth policy?

I mean, is it possible to automatically set up a throttle, to avoid charges when going over 2TB? (or do I have to fiddle with iptables to find a way to do that).

Also, do you know if it's possible to get a /48 IPv6?

On https://library.linode.com/networking/ipv6 they only mention /56

I'd hate to run a HE tunnelbroker just because they don't support that :-/ (I love HE.net and tunnelbroker.net, but it would just be wasteful)

EDIT: /48 make running multiple VPNs very easy - that's lazy, but IPv6 are not scarce resources!

EDIT2: just got an answer - they can't do /48 :-(

[RKearney]

What use case do you have for requiring a /48 on one server? That's 65536 /64s.

[tedchs]

I filed a ticket for a /48 and their support set it up for me. I didn't use it heavily but it worked very well; I basically made my own personal tunnel broker. :) A /56 still gives you (64-56)^2 = 64 /64's, and I wouldn't think you'd want to run more than 64 tunnels through one box anyway.

[SudoAlex]

You can get a /56 - which should still be sufficient for most users needs.

[subbu]

How does this compare to Hetzner's servers? Lets say http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq12

[gtaylor]

The only correct answer is: benchmark according to your specific application's needs, since your demands may be different than mine or someone else's.

For more general benchmarks, this is handy: http://serverbear.com/

But really, spin them up and test for the things that your usage case most needs. My stuff doesn't hit the disk at all, so the fact that Hetzner doesn't (at a glance) appear to be SSD-backed wouldn't bother me, but might not be OK for someone else's usage case.

[vcherubini]

And there goes my DO plan. This is what Linode was missing, and I'm so happy it's here. Thanks, Linode!

[blisterpeanuts]

Really, this is excellent news. I just deleted my $20/month Linode last week, because I only got it to do some proof-of-concept stuff at work. But the $10 price point will probably persuade me to start it up again, and I can always upgrade later if I start needing the premium resources.

[misterbwong]

What does everyone use these low-end plans for? Seeing the interest in this thread has gotten me curious.

[blisterpeanuts]

Proof-of-concept project for work -- ported a Weblogic Java web app from work server to JBoss on Linode -- worked beautifully.

I closed my account a few days ago when I realized I hadn't touched it in a couple of months, but the $10 will probably lure me back. It's nice having an extra vps or two for testing/backups etc.

[spurofthemoment]

VPSes with 1 GB of RAM are more than enough to host a couple of web apps (depending on traffic of course) with Python, PHP, or similar setups. When Linode started out, their bottom offering was actually 512 MB if I remember correctly, and SliceHost (later Rackspace Cloud) had 256 MB offerings.

[Kudos]

A staging environment replicating on one box what runs on four in production. It's only using 650MB of the 1GB RAM so the 2GB box it was on was more than required.

[Grimm665]

Personally I run a Ventrilo server on a free-tier AWS. Better than paying for a lifetime server with only 5 slots, considering mine is unlimited, free for the first year, and probably under $5 a month after that (plus it's always good to know I have an always-available Linux server outside my LAN for various reasons, so that makes the $5 a month worth it when the free plan ends).

[phaedryx]

A minecraft server so that my kids can play with a couple of their friends.

[ohashi]

I spin up a lot of these low end instances for testing and small projects.

[feralmoan]

database replication, elasticsearch, log repositories, headless workers...

[godDLL]

CloudLix $10 1.5GB - 1 Core - 50GB SSD - 100Mbps 'unmetered' http://www.cloudlix.com/nuolaida;1bb1f52aa5 (thank you).

[ahmett]

Note, DigitalOcean has a $5 plan, and works quite fine for my case where I host tons of small traffic websites and background tasks.

[efuquen]

Agreed. Funny timing as I was just checking back to look at Linode pricing yesterday after having made the switch to DO over a year ago and was amazed they're cheapest plan was $20. Good to see they've lowered it further but even that $5 difference is a big deal if you're using a lot of vms and simply don't need the extra memory from a $10 a month plan. They need to at least reach parity, otherwise there really isn't any incentive for me to switch to pay $5 more a month per VM that I know doesn't need the extra resources.

[nickporter]

I've been using linode for +3 years now, and it's been great. Top notch support, and they have Gentoo images!

[thecosas]

Just downgraded to this. Half the price of the $20/m plan. Never really needed all they were giving me. Woo hoo!

[scorpioxy]

Very nice. I can't seem to find it anymore on the site; is the discount on yearly prepayment still valid?

[kbar13]

for all new customer accounts, no. You can still get the discount if you're still on the legacy prepaid billing accounts.

[jebblue]

You just need to hunt for it a bit, https://library.linode.com/prepaid-billing

Edit: I don't know who downvoted me, moderators fix please?