
Linode Simplifies Plans, Reveals CPU Priority - jterenzio
https://www.linode.com/
======
graue
It wasn't immediately clear to me what changed. Here's the old homepage:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110713211922/http://www.linode....](http://web.archive.org/web/20110713211922/http://www.linode.com/index.cfm)

It appears Linode removed the 768 and 1536 plans, renamed the 1024/2048/4096
plans to 1GB/2GB/4GB, and added an 8GB plan. They also added a row in the
table showing CPU priority. The 512 plan is unchanged, as are specs and prices
for the other three remaining plans.

~~~
shuzchen
They didn't actually add an 8GB plan, they've always had larger plans, just
too many to display on the landing page. If you went into pricing or tried to
signup, the larger plans were always available. Since they scrubbed some plans
I guess there's room for the 8GB on the landing page now.

------
MichaelGG
I am consistently surprised how many VM hosts refuse to tell you what your CPU
guarantees are. EC2 at least gives you a general equivalence to a specific
hardware. Rackspace refuses to go into detail. Others I've spoken to will only
commit to saying "core", without specifying what the reference hardware is.
And even then, actually making sure you've got a _commit_ of that CPU is a
whole other issue. I think EC2's compute units are a commit, though.

Linode's "priority" seems like ex-Slicehost's way of saying "hey bigger
machines get a higher proportion"... nothing really useful for figuring out
exactly what you're buying.

And you can't ever really figure out what you have: things could be severely
over-committed, and you'll never know until you get starved. So you can't just
benchmark your way out of it.

~~~
seats
I cofounded slicehost and spent a lot of time at Rackspace thinking about this
exact problem relative to Rackspace Cloud Servers.

The _real_ issue is hardware skew. We like to buy/sell and build on cloud as
if it is a pure utility where every unit is equivalent, but every year
processors change, go EOL, etc. As a provider you have to make a call about
how much of that complexity you expose to the end customer. Some customers
want complete transparency, which I understand, but the downside of that is
hundreds of variations of pricing options and complications around managing
heterogeneity (e.g. how do you represent simply how much available capacity
there is when you effectively have 300 variations of the same 'size'
instance).

Of all the component parts of compute, CPU is the one that changes the
quickest. Disk capacity is easy to model, disk throughput has changed much at
all (minus the introduction of SSD), memory is pretty stable (minus some
increases in databus rates). All in for the typical instance in a multi-tenant
virtual environment, the same today as in 2006, the two most vaguely defined
attributes are cpu and i/o. With the increasing use of 10gigE as well as SSD,
hopefully we finally push through the i/o piece. Not sure what it will take to
get us there for a clean way to model and describe 'standard cpu' as a
provider.

Also, if anyone has specific questions about Slicehost cpu priority handling
circa 2006-2008 or Rackspace Cloud Servers cpu pre OpenStack, just ask and
I'll be happy to answer.

~~~
MichaelGG
Create some sort of composite performance profile, then give me CPU
information in terms of that. EC2 sorta does this[1], and although it's far
from precise, at least it gives us a rough guideline and is at least an actual
statement on what we're going to get.

The other issue, which I don't see Rackspace (or Slicehost or many others)
addressing is the actual _commit_. It's fine to say "you get 2 cores", but
then not tell me if those are reserved or if they might be sometimes
overcommitted. This is a larger issue, because it means things might work
fine... until they don't.

(I tried one provider out, and things worked swell in all our tests, but
rarely in production, the entire VM would get paused for a few hundred ms ore
more; something that wouldn't happen if there was a non-over-commitment
guarantee. Right?)

1: "One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz
2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor."

~~~
davidw
It'd be cool if someone did a random survey system that launches instances on
various providers, does some benchmarking, and then reports the results. It'd
have to be anonymous, so that the providers don't feed it "nice" hardware.

The problem is how to make money at it.

~~~
lbotos
I think that is what these guys are going for:

<http://serverbear.com/>

~~~
seats
I've never heard of any of those companies. I'd be careful going with someone
that you don't know a single other person who uses. Social proof matters for
service businesses like hosting, because point in time performance is such a
weak indicator of overall experience.

~~~
bones6
Since you're being quite candid, how did Slicehost make it in the beginning?
How do any hosting companies achieve the social proof? Every hosting company
has to be hosting some people otherwise they likely wouldn't exist. But maybe
there's just that many customers in the world so that you haven't heard of a
particular company because their customers are spread out?

Please don't take that as confrontational, I would just like to hear your
opinion since you really are the authority here.

~~~
seats
In general starting from zero you'll find some customers somehow, even just
randomly and then you have to be awesome for them and build from there. The
level of churn and flux at the low end of hosting is actually pretty high. You
could put up little more than an unbounce page and probably get signups with
credit cards at a trickle volume.

For us at Slicehost, we had an amazingly fortuitous start, due in equal parts
to strategy and luck. We saw pretty clearly that rails was picking up steam
really quickly and the hosting options were pretty shitty (shared hosting at
the time didn't support the versions of ruby and rails people needed not to
mention the memory hungriness of the framework and dedicated was still fairly
pricey with 100-200/month being dirt cheap).

So we picked a really ripe initial niche market to spend time making ourselves
visible in, which we did in forums, chat rooms, etc. The luck came in that we
got some pretty vocal early customers who all had a great experience and
evangelized us. That was lucky because either of those factors could have
easily gone the other way. They could have been quiet customers or we could
have had early blips in service (we had plenty of later blips, we just had a
nice patch of initial smooth sailing).

------
dotBen
Linode keeps instances homogeneous, so only the same type/size of instance
exists on a given bare-metal machine.

Unless that's changed, that would mean that all instances running on a given
machine share the same CPU Priority, there will just be fewer instances
demanding service from the CPU(s) the larger the plan you have.

...so wondering if that's what CPU Priority means, or if Linode is about to
mix instance sizes on same hardware?

~~~
salman89
Great question. If only the same type/size exists on a machine, then these
priority numbers are just a rough measure of relative CPU power (between
plans).

------
kyrra
Linode forum discussion on this topic (that I could find):
[http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9544](http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9544)

And maybe I'm just ignorant on the topic, but what exactly does CPU priority
do here? I understand basic linux process priority (like the 'nice' command),
but how exactly does CPU priority behave on linode. Searching through their
docs, I couldn't find anything.

EDIT: to maybe answer my own question, maybe this is the Xen credit schedule?
<http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Credit_Scheduler>

~~~
agwa
2x CPU priority may simply mean that you're sharing the host with 1/2 as many
other guests (and each guest is guaranteed at least its equal share of the
CPU). They've stated publicly in the past that larger Linodes share the host
with proportionally fewer other guests.

------
mashmac2
What do they mean by CPU Priority?

I'm assuming that meant access to part of a processor, but how does that work
with 4 CPU and 16x priority? (I'm working on the assumption that 1x priority
~= 1 core.) Of course, my assumption is probably wrong - just curious how this
affects the load on a given server and how the VPS interacts with other VPS's
on that node.

~~~
wmf
It's probably arbitrary units, so 16x just means 16 times more than 1x. I
suspect that 1x is something like 1/8 or 1/4 of a core.

~~~
supersaiyan
But the server configuration of 16x is different then 1x, they wouldn't be
hosted on the same server; I still don't understand what the priority is
relative to

~~~
wmf
For example, if 1x means 32 VMs per server and 16x means 2 VMs per server
(assuming fair sharing), then the labeling is proportional to the minimum
performance you can expect.

------
songgao
Am I the only one here who thinks that for personal use, owning a server in
house is a better choice than using a hosted VPS or server?

It's quite easy to get a decent micro HP server (even with SSD storage) within
$1000, which would cost $150.00 - $300.00 a month for a equivalent plan on
Linode. Suppose you upgrade your server every two years, the monthly cost of
the server is less than $50. You get dedicated CPU time and I/O, permissions
to managing everything.

Internet bandwidth might be a problem. But let's put ourselves in the 2 or 3
years future. What if you already have Gigabit Internet like Google Fiber for
$70/mo?

And you get other benefits for owning a server in your house. Since it's
connected to your home LAN, it can be used to help build a smart home, control
smart sensors/cameras, or serve as a media server.

Am I missing something here?

~~~
jacques_chester
> Am I missing something here?

You are missing a lot of things.

1\. Linode et al buy top-end hardware. It is, generally, going to be more
reliable.

2\. Linode et al have redundancy in multiple parts of their system. Redundant
power, redundant networking, redundant disks, redundancy all over the damn
place. A server sitting in a hallway closet does not have these advantages.

3\. Finally, you assume that your time is worthless; as in having a $0/hr
value.

I charge a lot more than $0/hr for my time. If, in actual fact, I could
successfully farm out my little Wordpress blog network to a reliable host who
charged _a lot more_ than Linode, I would do so in a heartbeat because it
makes financial and hair-pulling sense.

I farm out the management of physical servers to Linode for the same reason. I
am nearly 32, my time is expensive, my patience is short and my interest in
hardware has long since abated because _I have other shit to do_. Linode is a
_bargain_ from my POV.

------
swalberg
I'm actually disappointed. I liked the 768 package, it was big enough that you
could run a fair amount of stuff [0], and cost only $30/month. I was planning
on buying a new one over my Christmas holidays and moving my stuff over so I
could get onto a newer CentOS. CPU has never been a problem, so this new
priority is meaningless to me.

For my needs, $30/mo was about as much as I'd spend on a server to host mine
and a few friend's blogs, some photos, and some remote services. $40 is too
much for me and the lower plan just doesn't have enough RAM to be interesting.

So now my options are 1) find somewhere else, or 2) backup my data and rebuild
the box in place.

0 - I manage a few Linode 768s including my own. 768 was a great size for a
few small blogs and a low traffic Rails site, or a larger traffic blog.

~~~
pygatea
Another potential option is using a Linode 512 with "extra" RAM (see the
Extras tab in the Linode Manager).

Additionally, I've always found the Linode support folks to be fairly
accommodating, so maybe it's worth asking if they can still provision 768s.

~~~
swalberg
Yea, some people suggested that in the forums. It doesn't end up being the
full 768 (which is not the end of the world) but you also lose the extra HDD
and bandwidth so you're actually paying more at that point.

------
contingencies
I recently evaluated some cloud providers. There were differences of 10x
latency for a bunch of basic (unix filesystem plus some bash script) level
operations between EC2 and Rackspace. The Rackspace people failed to take
complaints seriously, so we took our business elsewhere.

EC2 is good but their spin-up time is crap.

Though same-kernel is obviously a security reduction, the speed is far better:
I for one can't wait to see more LXC and other lightweight virt stuff being
made available with real cgroup-level guarantees.

~~~
wmf
_...differences of 10x latency ... between EC2 and Rackspace..._

Was that PV vs. HVM by any chance?

------
larrys
Anyone care to share their experience with linode.com vs.
<http://prgmr.com/xen/> ?

(We setup a few vps's with rackspace and have been happy so far.)

~~~
cowsaysoink
They are kind of different beasts. Linode can spin servers up and down rather
quickly and you can deploy different OS's all through the online menu.

Prgmr you buy a machine send an ssh key they set it up and send you the bill.
Then you get a login console at xxxxxx.prgmr.com and login and setup a user or
deploy your own OS using centos recovery. But you can't create and destroy
servers like linode or aws or rackspace.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I've had a couple prgmr VPSes for about a year and I'll say this: I've never
had any interruptions, they are always fast when sshed into, and make good web
servers. The only problem, and its kind of a big one, is that support sucks.
Reseting your ssh key (which I stupidly have needed to do a couple of times)
takes about 3 days. You send them an email and they respond... eventually. But
you get what you pay for and its hard to ask for much service when you're
paying those low prices. For the price, the servers themselves are awesome.

I'm switching to Azure because their prices are reasonable and you get the
full management experience.

------
andmarios
The change (removal of some plans) is a couple weeks old.

About CPU priority, Linode never kept it a secret. For the small VPS (512MB
RAM), you get a guaranteed 1/20 of a 4 core XEON processor and it scales
linearly with each plan's RAM.

As explained on their FAQ, their machines have 8 cores each and house 40 512MB
VPS.

------
MattBearman
While I love Linode (It's my VPS host of choice) it's always bothered me they
don't do any kind of volume discount - ie: the cost of 8 GB is just 32 times
that of the 512 MB.

I was hoping this change would rectify that, wishful thinking I suppose.

~~~
ovi256
The CPU priority may be considered a volume discount.

------
twodayslate
Why would someone get a linode when they can get a dedicated server for $15?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838729>

~~~
JohnTheRipper
And why would they get a Linode when they can get a VPS from another provider
for much, much cheaper? They don't bring much to the table for the price that
a cheaper provider can't offer.

~~~
shuzchen
Features? Performance? A lot of people have benchmarked various cloud
providers and Linode consistently gets high marks on CPU and disk IO. That
particular $15/month dedicated gets you a single-core (!!!) Atom/Celeron
processor. Who knows what hard drive they put on there. At $15 a month for a
slot on the rack, I doubt it's any good.

For the longest time I lived on a single 512 linode, and ran 6 mid sized
Django sites, all with postgres and redis on the same machine. I knew how to
keep lean (taking advantage of varnish, nginx, uwsgi) and even used that
linode for a ongoing mumble server and irc. I've since got more Linodes (grew
with more sites) and split up the responsibilities, but I still remember
getting a lot of performance out of that one little instance.

Also, Linode brings other features to the table, like a great API, easy to use
dashboard, free nameserver, and availability in various geographic locations.
Granted, my opinion is biased - I'm a really happy customer there. But I have
had experience managing other machines on Slicehost (horrible experience) and
EC2 (decent enough, but doesn't make me smile).

~~~
JohnTheRipper
I have a BuyVM VPS, even with the filtered IP addon it's still under 1/2 the
cost of a Linode with inferior allocations of disk and bandwidth. According to
ServerBear, it has a (much) higher overall score, slightly worse average
network/unixbench performance, and MUCH better disk performance. It's a great
little VPS, and the only issues I've had were sub-par routing to some places
for a few months (fixed completely when they bought a new router for SJC — now
it maxes out my home line and does great in overall network performance). I've
had my VPS for almost 12 months now, and I would never go to Linode...

An API sounds cool, but I have no use for that. The control panel is
excellent, I have no reason to use Linode instead. BuyVM has free DNS (and 5GB
of free backup space), so no reason to use Linode over them. BuyVM has SJC and
Buffalo locations, sure, they could use more, but I don't need multiple
servers. I've stuffed quite a bit of stuff onto my VPS, and performance has
been amazing. They've even absorbed large DRDoS attacks for me with the
filtered IPs, and were willing to accommodate my unusual situation (the DRDoS
source slaves didn't realize the source IP was spoofed, and sent abuse reports
to my provider, which were useless as they were the ones attacking me) — after
explaining the situation to them, they agreed to ignore any further reports
from said network. I currently have three low end virtual servers for (a lot)
of things, and my favorite out of all of them is the BuyVM VPS. So, at least
in my case, I can see no possible reason I'd want to go with a provider that
is 2x the cost, has historic security issues, has been reported to be
unwilling to deal with any sort of DDoS attack whatsoever beyond a nullroute,
and offers inferior performance and resources.

I actually don't like the idea of getting a OVH budget dedi over a VPS for any
type of production site, it's just not as stable.

------
mp99e99
Since there are all VPS users here, what do you think is the best way to
market a VPS product.. or rather, how did you end up becoming a Linode
customer?

~~~
astrodust
The best way to market a VPS product is to make a better VPS product. Linode
offers a very good product, but it could be better. Their dashboard and
management utilities are better than most, but aren't especially _manager_
friendly and don't scale well to teams.

My ideal VPS provider would be somewhere between Heroku and Linode, offering
self-managed hosting when you want it, and fully-managed hosting where you
_need_ it.

------
Tichy
I've heard good things about Linode, but ultimately, why not get a dedicated
server for just a little more money? I pay 30€/month for mine with Hetzner,
yesterday there was another host with prices starting from 10€?

So what is the appeal of Linode? That you can upgrade to a faster server
quickly?

~~~
raverbashing
Some things may be a factor

\- If you hardware says goodbye, your server says goodbye as well. It needs to
be physically rebuilt. With Linode, maintenance time means your server shuts
down here and reboots somewhere else.

\- Can you reinstall your server, pick a new distro automatically?

\- Can you add more memory or more storage to your server with a click?

~~~
Tichy
I'm not much of an admin, but is it so much easier to transfer a virtual image
to another server than to transfer an installation from one server to another?

Presumably as long as the server your VM sits on has more memory than your VM,
you can increase memory easily. But the maximum might only be what a dedicated
server would have given you from the start?

Edit: I just checked, seems Hetzner has a server with 16GB RAM for 49€/month
(64$). The maximum Linode VM with 8GB sets you back 320€/month.

It seems the 49€ is the cheapest standard Hetzner server atm, but you can get
cheaper ones via their auctions. Of course then if you need more memory you
have to move server, not sure how complicated that really is...

~~~
rahoulb
Depending upon your provider, it can be trivial to transfer VMs from one host
to another. So if you want more resources than the physical host has
available, or there is a hardware failure you can be up and running again in
minutes (and at the company I used to work for, we automatically did the
transfer, so the customer didn't even need to get out of bed). Of course, you
pay for that, both in performance and cost, but that's the decision you have
to make.

Edit: overuse of the word "host"

------
FreeKill
I wonder how these new plans will affect existing users. My plan falls
directly between two of these simplified plans. The prices seem the same
still, so it would cost me $15 more a month to increase to closest new
package.

~~~
TheSwordsman
caker (the CEO) mentioned in IRC that current users will be able to resize in
to those plans for the times being, they just won't be able to add new Linodes
with those plans.

------
wtf242
This is disappointing. My Rails app gets just enough traffic that it uses
1.2-1.4 gigs of ram on average. The 1.5 gig plan was perfect for me and I've
used it without issues for years now.

------
cllns
Weird they haven't updated their blog with a post about this.

------
taligent
Have they updated their security and disclosure policies ? If not they can
remain in my "dodgy vendor who you can't trust" list.

For those that don't remember hackers managed to get root access to several
VPS via some Linode vulnerability. Didn't bother to let customers know. Didn't
bother to update their status/website. Didn't bother to tell anyone what
they've done to fix it. Compare that with CloudFlare:
[http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-attack-
apparen...](http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-attack-apparent-
google-app)

Linode continues to be a recurring example of how not to behave as a vendor.

~~~
whalesalad
Continues? I've been a happy Linode customer for a long time. Their boxes are
snappy. I rarely have issues, and when I do, they are pretty quick to respond
and help out. I've also had my fare share of free hosting thanks to their
referral platform.

Aside from the issue you mention, what else have they been doing wrong?

~~~
taligent
Congratulations. I was a happy Linode customer too until I had to find out
from Reddit that a major security hack had occurred and my VPS had potentially
been rooted. I don't recall every receiving an email from Linode about it.

And the fact is that every single day that passes without them updating their
security/disclosure policies and showing some commitment to transparency is
another day they will be classed as "untrustworthy".

------
mp99e99
Since there are all VPS users here, what do you think is the best way to
market a VPS product.. or rather, how did you end up becoming a Lin

