
Linode NextGen: RAM Upgrade - TheSwordsman
http://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrade/
======
whalesalad
Linode is hard to beat these days. I've been a customer for a few years and
adore the shit out of them.

Digital Ocean has become quite a competitor (and I have a box with them now
for a staging environment) but the fact that they do not provide a
private/internal network between your boxes is something that I can't live
without. I like to keep app servers and db servers isolated from the real
world by one box in front of all of them ... which is not something you can
currently do with Digital Ocean.

I love Heroku's platform and think they've done some amazing things for our
industry, but I don't agree with any of their recent PR moves. Linode, on the
other hand, has never stirred up drama or bullshit since I have started
working with them. They're straight shooters and this gives me a great deal of
confidence.

I had a personally hair raising experience this weekend trying to migrate a
smaller server that kept swapping over to a larger one without too much
downtime. I was able to do this pretty painlessly but man I wish I would have
waited just a few days for this!

~~~
voidlogic
At $20/mo Digital Ocean offers twice as much memory, 1 TB more transfer and
and 4 GB less disk (put it is SSD...)

Digital Oceans lack of "private" network is silly, if you really need it,
setup a encrypted tunnel yourself, I would not trust anything else anyway.
Also I highly doubt that if your DO DB and App server talk the traffic leaves
the datacenter, but you could test this.

~~~
shuzchen
But their network is horrible. I moved my irc client/mumble server to DO when
they were first announced on HN, and the intermittent lag made it impossible
to even chat (mtr confirming multiple times that the issue was on DO's end).
If I can't even irc from their servers it doesn't matter what price they
charge.

~~~
james4k
Hmm, so far I haven't experienced anything like this. /me crosses fingers.

How long ago was this?

~~~
shuzchen
I think all in all I spent almost a month on DO, and I believe I left under 2
weeks ago. I have a friend that's still on DO (he likes the low price and
needs the RAM to compile rust) and in his experience the network issues are
still around but not as bad. Either they've improved things or droves of
people like me tried it for a month and ditched.

------
acabal
This is great, but it would be nice to have a plan < 1GB for < $20/month. I
love Linode, I've been using it for years, and the pricing is great in
general. But it'd be really nice to be able to spin up a $10/month, 512MB
server for a new personal blog or other project.

$20/month is prohibitively expensive for one-off side project hosting and
there's lots of utility to be had from a cheap low-RAM, low-CPU server. I'd
buy 10!

~~~
TillE
Use one decent server for all your side projects. $20/month is not very much,
unless it's just sitting there doing nothing.

Alternatively, Hetzner will give you a 512MB VM for about $10.34/month.

~~~
acabal
That's what I do now, but it's a pain to serve multiple HTTPS sites and an
extra pain (practically impossible with default HTTPS in browsers nowadays) to
serve mixed HTTP/HTTPS. I'd much prefer sandboxed Linodes for all my little
projects, but if I bought a Linode at $20/month for each of them I'd be poor
pretty fast :)

~~~
yid
Not sure why you say that, why not just support SNI-based browsers (i.e., NOT
IE) to allow multiple TLS connections? And what does the difficulty of mixed
HTTP/HTTPS have to do with the server?

SNI: [http://www.digicert.com/ssl-support/apache-multiple-ssl-
cert...](http://www.digicert.com/ssl-support/apache-multiple-ssl-certificates-
using-sni.htm)

~~~
acabal
In Apache, one server can serve both HTTP and HTTPS (and multiple HTTPS with
SNI). The problem occurs when you have both on the server with name-based
virtual hosts and you request the HTTPS version of the HTTP site. If Apache
can't find an HTTPS virtual host for the requested domain (because it doesn't
exist, the site we're asking for only has an HTTP version), it will _default_
to serving the first HTTPS site it finds instead. This means your domain will
serve the wrong site and probably show an SSL warning to boot because the
domains don't match.

Normally this isn't a problem, except that some browsers nowadays default to
requesting the HTTPS version _first_. That means if you're serving an HTTP
site and an unrelated HTTPS site, and a user accesses the HTTP site via an
HTTPS connection, there's a good chance you'll end up serving the unrelated
HTTPS site plus an SSL warning instead, because that's how Apache does things.

~~~
harshreality
The problem is that you have not enabled a ssl version of that vhost.

How is that Apache HTTPD's problem? Nginx would do the same thing. When you
don't define a ssl version of site.com for ip:443, you get whatever the
default cert/vhost is for that ip:443. What would you have a webserver do
differently?

~~~
acabal
I didn't say it was Apache's problem. For various reasons one project does not
have HTTPS at all, and I understand how the web server handles things and the
reasons why. My point was that a cheaper option from Linode would let me spin
up a new VPS to host that small side project, instead of cramming it on a
server that also hosts HTTPS; but $20/month for a not-for-profit side project
just to edge around new browser defaults is steep for some of us.

Sure there are other options but I'd rather not have accounts all over the
place, and I like Linode.

~~~
grey-area
_Sure there are other options but I'd rather not have accounts all over the
place, and I like Linode._

Linode's problem with $10 accounts is not with customers like you who are
paying them decent money otherwise - it's with customers who would sign up for
$10, break things and expect $50 a month worth of support on an ongoing basis.

Most customers looking for a cheap VPS (to learn on, to experiment etc) are
not going to be profitable unless you provide virtually no support, so by
slicing off that part of the market they can offer a uniform level of service
without compromising their profitability.

~~~
justinhj
Heroku is able to provide as many free low use dynos as you want and that's a
managed system with presumably more support cost.

------
trustfundbaby
This is long overdue, I've been a linode customer for almost 5 years and I
moved to Digital Ocean just yesterday, because their offering was just too
compelling to pass up.

Looks like their (Digital Ocean's) pricing shook linode's cages a little bit,
and that's a good thing.

~~~
Vieira
I too tried moving to DigitalOcean because their offering seemed very
compelling. Turned out to be a huge mistake.

After waiting some weeks for Arch to be re-released I finally booted an Arch
image. Not a week had passed and some kernel upgrade had already made the
system unavailable (no network on vm). I forced nothing, just ran sudo pacman
-Syu as I always did on Linode.

Support didn't care. For days I tried responding to the ticket that I opened,
talking to them on the irc, via mail. Nothing. I tried to request help to at
least recover the files. Nope, nothing they can do.

I did not understand the true value of good support. Now I do. Back to Linode.

~~~
mateuszf
Well, Arch is not that good for a server because of this reason. I love it as
a developer for a desktop system, but for server I'd definitely use Debian.

~~~
yogo
How is this Arch's fault? The user did the same thing he/she normally does on
Linode. This is a case where the Linode ops really understand Arch and
everything just works (the 'linux' package isn't installed on the image) but
the provide the latest kernels. On DO I also originally ran into this issue
but support never gave a clear reason as to why, from digging around it
appears to be with the 8139cp/too kernel modules (they don't load). It seems
like some kind of version issue but I haven't had the time to play around with
this more.

------
petercooper
An interesting side to this is they seem to be keeping various hidden/old
levels going even with the upgrade. I went to upgrade a Linode 768 (no longer
available) and it said it'd upgrade to a Linode 1536. But I don't need that
much RAM.. so I might first downgrade to a Linode 512 then "upgrade" to a 1024
for free.. ;-) Update: Seems I can't, but I can upgrade direct to a 1024.

Random observation: The Linode 1024 is now the same price as prgmr.com's
equivalent.

~~~
endijs
I was in the same situation. Downgraded few days ago to 512MB and now will get
1GB.

------
euroclydon
If you have a linode512 plan with backup, they will automatically upgrade your
backup from the backup512 version to backup1024, which is $10/month, where the
old was $5/month.

I'm sure it's a good deal all around, but it seems like a slight of hand to
me: Linode, now with more RAM, AND more expansive backups for the same disk
space.

~~~
geden
I've just checked with linode - the backup price is shifting too, so the cost
will not increase. They have not updated their FAQ yet.

\--------------- Hello,

The backup prices are shifting just as the RAM prices shifted, so Linode 1GB
backups are now $5, Linode 2GB is $10, and so on.

I hope this clears things up. Please let us know if we can be of further
assistance.

Regards, Jonathan \--------------

------
agwa
"with the exception of Fremont which may take another week or two – we’ll be
explaining more on Fremont in another post."

Interesting... the Fremont data center had some pretty serious issues a couple
years ago, and though it has been better since then the bad memories remain. I
wonder if they're finally switching to a different data center vendor.

~~~
cheald
The Fremont issues have mostly been due to HE, AFAIK. That wouldn't really
affect RAM upgrades, would it?

~~~
agwa
No, but if they're going to imminently switch to a new data center vendor they
wouldn't bother rolling out the new hardware at their old data center, would
they?

~~~
kattuviriyan
But they upgraded to the 8 core machines recently even in Fremont!

~~~
grahamedgecombe
The old L5520 processors they are using have 4 cores with hyperthreading, so
it appears as 8 to the OS - so they don't have to have changed the host
machines to present 8 cores to the VMs.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
He's referring to the recent move to the Sandy Bridge E5-2670 processor. All
linode customers have this, but it will require a reboot to activate it.

------
nlh
Does anyone have a suggestion/option for those of us with bigger disk space
needs? I love Linode and have been running a privately-hosted email server on
there for a while (yes, yes, I know, I know, Gmail, Gmail. I like running my
own server.). But my resource constraint these days is disk - not memory or
CPUs. Feels silly for me to get bigger a bigger instances just for the disk
space.

A while back I spoke to the Linode guys (I think it was at SXSW 2011) and they
said they were going to be releasing an EBS-like product "soon". But I guess
not that soon.

Perhaps I'm just not a good fit for Linode in this case? Any thoughts?

~~~
Wilya
Dedicated servers, even the cheap ones, tend to offer a ton a disk space. In
Europe, Ovh and Hetzner have entry-level offers with 2 or 3 TB at 50€, you
might find something in the same prices geographically closer to you.

Other than that, there are probably VPS providers who let you upgrade disk
space independantly from RAM (I'm using Europe based providers, so I probably
can't give you relevant names, unfortunately).

~~~
X-Istence
OVH has their offering in North America as well (located in Canada). $40 a
month for a Core i3 3.4 Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, 2 x 1 TB drives.

And it has been fantastic when it comes to speed and whatnot.

------
lalc
And here I just finally finished migrating to RamNode for this very reason a
week ago. Frick.

~~~
hackerboos
You still benefit from SSDs...

~~~
mantas
Linode claims their HDDs are faster than el-cheapo SSDs.. Still waiting for
migration to test myself though.

~~~
perryh2
That's interesting because cost is Linode's reason for not offering SSD.
Digital Ocean actually uses very expensive enterprise SSD in the servers. I'm
a current customer of Digital Ocean after being with Linode for over 2 years.

~~~
natevancouver
Where did you get this information?

When I looked at their site I didn’t see information about what kind of SSDs
they are using and, based on the price, assumed they are MLC (consumer grade).
I’d never want that on a server.

------
thegyppo
It was no surprise this was coming after the handouts at SXSW.

We did an interview with Linode last month about some of their new upgrades:
<http://blog.serverbear.com/interview/linode/>

You can also see some benchmark data from the new E5 CPU's here:

Dallas - <http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2013/04/07/FxVC0fV6q5GAMa1j> Fremont
- <http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2013/4/6/TX3w1Zx5dRK13MJi>

------
ambiate
"Your position is 1 out of 1 queued migrations in this Linode's datacenter." 8
minutes later, the system was copied and powered on. Also got a few upgrades
that had been delayed due to the necessity to reboot.

Linode is very painless, but as always, that convenience comes with a cost. I
am very sad that they do not allow for extra IPs anymore. I let my service
lapse one month and lost my extra IP.

(Don't forget to increase swap sizes, change configurations to deal with extra
memory, etc)

~~~
mantas
Really? I still see "add extra IPs" option for my Linode

~~~
yogo
Yep but it's not automatic. I believe they still require you to file a ticket
justifying why you need the extra IP address. I always found it weird needing
to jump through those hoops if you are only trying to add one additional IP
address (if you are adding a bunch then I can see) when you can create a new
node and have a new IP address instantly (obviously it would cost 20x more in
this case).

~~~
eli
That's coming from ARIN, not Linode. ARIN won't hand out more IP addresses
unless ISPs can show they are being effectively utilized. I've had to fill out
a form at Rackspace to justify additional IPs.

~~~
yogo
Oh, I guess the higher-ups had a bigger hand in this than I realized.

------
bluedino
I wonder if Slicehost would have followed suit if they weren't owned by
Rackspace now. Rackspace has never been about low prices, though.

~~~
iends
I'm on Rackspace and I might switch now.

~~~
bluedino
We probably would if we didn't use RackConnect between our cloud servers and
our managed DB server, which is @ Rackspace.

Their cloud server management tools are a joke compared to Linodes.

------
brendan_gill
Just as a warning to anyone else who clicks the upgrade button too quickly you
get entered straight into the queue and it doesn't look like there is anyway
to cancel after you've committed.

My curiosity got the better of me and would have preferred to have planned a
bit better for the downtime but am now 23 out of 28 in a queue and moving
pretty fast...

~~~
TheSwordsman
might be able to remove you via ticket

------
kylec
I don't have immediate need for the new capacity, so I'm actually going to
wait a few weeks on upgrading. With any luck the early adopters (and probable
heavy users) will have all upgraded and I won't have to share a machine with
too many.

~~~
slig
That, fine control over when my linode will go down and let the early adopters
catch any quirks (Linode doesn't half ass stuff, but I have no hurry).

------
onk
I found it hard to compare VPS offerings and ended up making pizza instead:

[http://workforpizza.com/posts/2013-04-04-comparing-apples-
an...](http://workforpizza.com/posts/2013-04-04-comparing-apples-and-aws.html)

~~~
tacticus
See now all i got out of that is hunger and what looks like an awesome idea
for pizza.

------
czk
Awesome upgrade.

I did notice though after the migration (512->1024 Dallas) I'm now on a node
with the older CPUs (model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5630 @ 2.13GHz ) as
opposed to the E5-2670s mentioned in the blog March 18th.

~~~
danneu
I bought a 1024 in Dallas yesterday.

* You: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5630 @ 2.13GHz * Me: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L 0 @ 2.00GHz

(cat /proc/cpuinfo)

------
mp99e99
I work @ a competitor Atlantic.Net (www.atlantic.net/cloud - Free Trial
message me for extra free credits) but I think the market is segmenting
between Digital Ocean which is very aggressively priced, and Linode which is
trying to throw in more features and pack alot of value at a higher price
point.

Interestingly, the largest providers AWS + Rackspace provide no free
bandwidth, while Linode not only included it, but increased it significantly.
Will these providers push the bigger guys to start offering free bandwidth
which is a significant cost of the product [well, if its used].

~~~
drbawb
Your pricing actually looks _great_ for what I'm trying to do. With your
pricing model I'll have to keep an eye on my bandwidth, but it's pretty
competitively priced. ( I'd only run a Bulletin board and a Mumble server w/
~8 concurrent users. So I should easily be in "tens of GB.")

I'm currently running 2x512mb instances at Rackspace. (It's cheaper than
1x1024 instance, sadly, and I don't need the extra bandwidth/disk space, just
the RAM.)

I think I'm going to spin up a trial today. Though I tried to do the same w/
digital ocean and my CC is giving me nothing but headaches. Thanks for the
link!

------
ww520
Rounding from x9.95 to x0 is a welcome change. Less game playing.

~~~
fprotthetarball
I like it, but I wonder what happens with the prepaid ones. I paid for 2 years
to get the 15% discount...

~~~
TheSwordsman
Staff in their IRC channel indicated people will not be charged the new amount
until their next invoice date.

------
gionn
Ooops, my Linode keep crashing before kernel going live, newer Xen bug?
(Ubuntu 12.04 with stock kernel configured with pv-grub-x86_32).

Opened a ticket 6 minutes ago :o

~~~
dillona
In the past, they've flatly refused to support anything to do with pv-grub for
me.

It was highly disappointing. I hope you have a better experience.

~~~
gionn
Looks like it was an host misconfiguration, they fixed it after I've get in
touch with one of them on IRC.

------
abailin
"The upgrade is not mandatory, so if you’re not down with the 5 cent increase
you can keep your existing resources and pricing."

------
mamcx
Rigth now using heroku, and a new app I'm working will need a postgress
backend. Because heroku docs state that the use of many schemas cause
performance degradation I wonder if linode or other host could provide the
kind of reliable postgress host as heroku?

~~~
babuskov
If you're running any kind of intensive database I/O and your databases are
larger than RAM, then look for a dedicated server. It tried switching many VPS
offerings, but there are always bottlenecks when you share the disk I/O with
everyone else. For example, on one provider, I had problems that everyone is
placing some heavy cron jobs at midnight and completely kills the disk I/O for
10-15 minutes.

~~~
mamcx
Ok. But my main fear is about backups and DB maintenance. Heroku do it, but
wonder who else

------
endijs
London now available too. "You are in the Migration Queue! Your position is 4
out of 4 queued migrations in this Linode's datacenter."

~1min in queue and 5min to migrate 512MB to 1024MB.

However I'm still on old CPU. :/ Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz 8 cores
Memory 1001 MB real

~~~
astrodust
You did get 8 cores, which is what they promised.

~~~
endijs
Yes (3 weeks ago). However when they wrote post about new hardware it was
told, that new Linodes will start to land there after a week. It would be only
reasonable, that after 2 extra weeks and migration to get extra RAM, Linode
would land on new hardware. However it looks like it will take a while. I'm
not as much after more GHz from new CPUs, but rather than new hard drives
which should be faster than old ones. Will wait. :)

------
ausjke
Really great! Thanks Linode. I have been a Linode user for 3 years, got one
server crash which lost everything(that's before their backup), otherwise
great and reliable. I need the 1GB RAM for some Ruby stuff, which is, DDR-
hungry.

------
geekam
Does anyone know if others (e.g. Digital Ocean) follow the Safe Harbor like
Linode?

------
machbio
Just after the Linode Upgrade Blogpost is posted, we have people from all the
other VPS provider flocking the Hacker news to spread the message about "how
awesome they could be.."

Shall we stop and Concentrate on Linode now please..

------
mortenlarsen

      Your position is 160 out of 389 queued migrations in this Linode's datacenter.
    

I got mine to migrate ahead of the queue by accident. I just resized my disk,
and it started migrating after the resize.

------
andyhmltn
Yes! I've been considering switching to Linode for a few months now. Last
month I made the leap when they introduced 8 cores. RAM was the only thing I
found lacking for the price. This now completes it :-)

------
TheSwordsman
Newark and Atlanta are now able to be upgraded as per the blog.

------
splitrocket
Well Done Linode. As with most things, you get what you pay for, and I'm
willing to pay a bit of a premium for the rock solid (virtual) hardware and
awesome support.

------
mantas
Finally! Who said #3 isn't going to be RAM? :)

~~~
shuzchen
I did. Many times. But I'm glad to have been wrong!

------
Domenic_S
Freaking Freemont.

I can't wait to hear their "upcoming explanation", and I hope it's along the
lines of "we're nuking it from orbit".

~~~
eli
Assuming you can stomach a little scheduled downtime, isn't it pretty easy to
move a Linode to a different data center?

------
dmix
Hopefully this puts pressure on other VPS vendors such as prmgr (nod) to
upgrade their RAM offering.

------
t0mislav
Oh well, another machine reboot. :) Still, need to wait, "Your position is 272
out of 293" :D

------
sideproject
$0.05 more per month! Ludicrous! :) but alright, I'll just go along with the
upgrade.

------
TheSwordsman
Looks like London and Tokyo are now available! (as per the blog)

~~~
archgrove
The migration time seems to be largely dependent on how much disk space you're
actually using. In London, I'm getting a 43.75 MB/s rate on my primary disk.
It's using some kind of compression though, as an empty disk copied across
instantly; it's been about 10 minutes for a 10gig drive.

Edit: Ah, just misread the console. It's still "copying" my empty drives, at
the advertised rate. So dividing your disks by the 40ish MBps is a good
estimate of migration time.

------
rmanalan
Now they need to introduce lower priced option for 512M.

------
andmarios
Finally! Now I can move back to Linode. :D

------
dmishe
How is this comparing to EC2?

~~~
tomchuk
Comparing an m1.medium EC2 instance w/ 96GB EBS volume to a 4GB Linode
(ignoring the fact that you're probably getting at least 2x CPU with Linode),
you're looking at ~$100/mo for EC2 and $80/mo for Linode. If you take full
advantage of Linode's 8TB/mo of included transfer, AWS is going to cost you an
extra ~$1000 (assuming 100% outbound).

------
wesray
Linode continues to win.

------
leoplct
WAO!! THIS IS AWESOME!

------
ajjai
awesome upgrade..

------
stefantalpalaru
I wonder if they can skip the host migration after half of the linodes have
been migrated and let the people who are not in a hurry just reboot to double
the RAM.

~~~
agwa
Probably not, because the migration also gets you onto new Sandy Bridge hosts:

[http://blog.linode.com/2013/03/18/linode-nextgen-the-
hardwar...](http://blog.linode.com/2013/03/18/linode-nextgen-the-hardware/)

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Not in London. I'm still on the Xeon L5630 after the migration.

~~~
agwa
Argh, you may be right - I haven't migrated yet and I was just assuming based
on their previous blog post. Here's another report that this doesn't get you
onto Sandy Bridge:

[http://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-
upgrade...](http://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-
upgrade/#comment-414542)

Are they really going to make all their customers go through two migrations?
That would be disappointing.

