
Digital Ocean vs. Linode - schneidmaster
http://blog.schneidmaster.com/digital-ocean-vs-linode/
======
rwg
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."

~~~
thirdsight
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.

~~~
icebraining
_Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it.
Why would you not tick it?_

And it's actually ticked by default in the GUI, just not in the API (which is
dumb, yes).

~~~
thirdsight
Cant say I actually use the API myself but its the job of the consumer of the
API to read and understand it properly and test as well :)

~~~
DrJ
and one could also say that it's the job of the producer of the API to set
safe and secure defaults for an API :)

~~~
thirdsight
Or provide no defaults therefore solving both problems.

------
tbranyen
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.

~~~
codygman
With the way that Linode recently handled the hack which exposed customer CC's
and data[1], I would find it hard to have any peace of mind with them.

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](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756)
2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097)

~~~
pjbrunet
"With the way that Linode recently handled the hack which exposed customer
CC's and data[1], I would find it hard to have any peace of mind with them."

I hear this repeated over and over but did you just read the headline and draw
your own conclusion? From all the articles I read, the hacker _maybe_ got some
worthless encrypted cc data. I don't think anyone lost sleep over this and
kudos to Linode for encrypting user data. Also the breach had nothing to do
with the individual VPS accounts.

Around that same time Amazon had the most epic multi-day outage in history and
their storage servers were leaking user data. By comparison, the Linode hack
wasn't a big deal, IMO.

PS: As far as Linode holding back information, were you a Linode cusotomer
last year or are you just repeating rumors? Your Slashdot article was posted
April 15th. Linode announced the "security incident" on the 12th
[https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/12/security-notice-linode-
ma...](https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/12/security-notice-linode-manager-
password-reset/) also [https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-
update/](https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/) I did
not get the impression they were holding back information.

~~~
codygman
You can judge which you think is worse, but the facts are that Linode got
hacked and hid it for as long as possible.

I don't care what the hackers got per se, just that Linode was so opaque.
However, the opaqueness in light of credit cards being stolen (encrypted or
not (can most likely be decrypted anyway)) is even worse imo.

------
VLM
I'm not sure what any of this means.

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
> I'm not sure what any of this means.

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.

~~~
VLM
OK my apologies that is a fair complaint.

He's compare and contrasting two services for ... who? While claiming it
somehow explains why he switched services.

I can't figure out who he's tailored the writing toward. Its not focused, just
a list of random things which most readers would consider irrelevant, although
each reader would probably disagree on which individual points are irrelevant.

As far as I know it is all factually correct, just audience and analysis free.
It could be a good example of data vs information vs knowledge in that its a
good example of dense comparative factually correct data yet provides no
information and no knowledge. Not necessarily bad, just a peculiar way to
explain why he switched services. I would expect an article explaining a
business decision to have at least some analysis and some applied
knowledge/wisdom.

If I had to rewrite his article it would look like this. First, I think he's a
starving student who spins up and down a lot of test systems for learning
purposes, so thats going to be listed as his goal. Could be wrong of course,
but I'll take this theory and run with it. So I'd start explaining what he's
trying to do and whats important to meet that goal (see above). Then gather
data, and toss the irrelevant stuff (who cares how many GB per $ in the
assumed situation, who cares what CSS framework they selected in this
situation, it can't possibly impact his particular goal). Then analyze how the
data applies to his goal and how the data pieces interact with each other.
Finally some knowledge/wisdom to rank and prioritize his analysis for his
situation, like a starving student needs $15/month savings a lot more than
long term reliability track record etc. Which leads to the conclusion that in
his individual circumstance, it made sense for him to move.

~~~
schneidmaster
My intention was to compare and contrast two services for developers who have
a handful of personal projects, small-to-medium-sized public projects, and/or
development needs. AKA, people like me. I seriously doubt any business manager
is reading the blog of a random college student for server advice.

I host a handful of things. My personal site, my blog, my Gitlab; Git Reports
([http://gitreports.com/);](http://gitreports.com/\);) a couple of medium-
sized websites for organizations related to my university; and (currently) a
couple of staging apps for some freelancing. I feel like my use cases are
fairly common in that regard, although I suppose I could be wrong.

So I attempted to explain why I found DO to be much more useful for my use
cases. I'm not exactly starving but I am a college student so price is
important to me. The things I run aren't entirely inconsequential so specs and
uptime are also important to me. Like I said in another comment, being able to
easily spin up fresh environments is convenient especially for staging. I
found the management features convenient and easy-to-use. I'm not sure why
thinking that a better interface is a good thing is an invalid opinion.

If you're saying that I should have included more context about my use cases,
I suppose that's fair. Other than that, though, I'm not exactly sure what your
complaint is.

~~~
VLM
Well, you made it to HN, so you're getting much wider coverage than your
typical random blog. Expect a wider range of viewers.

Some persuasive essay goals...

write for a specific preferably defined audience. Original post needed what
you have in the reply above, your context of use cases.

write to explain why one particular idea is valid. no problemo laser on
target.

rational arguments vs emotional. Well there's a time and place for both but
you made the right choice.

Straight line of development? Stayed on the track, check.

Anticipate possible objections and deal with them directly, well ...

~~~
avree
I downvoted you, as you are not actually responding to any points in the
discussion (either raised by schneidmasteror d23), but you are coming across
as condescending and pedantic.

It's also very hard to understand your writing style.

------
oinksoft
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.

------
_delirium
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).

~~~
Jonanin
Linode may give more storage capacity, but DO's disks are all SSDs - so you
get a much higher throughput, which can be as/more important.

~~~
orthecreedence
Do you know of any third-party benchmarks? I haven't personally tried DO so I
can't speak to the disk throughput, but I'd be interested to see how they
compare with Linode.

~~~
tim333
I remeber reading this: [http://www.cosninix.com/wp/2013/06/amazon-aws-
ec2-linode-dig...](http://www.cosninix.com/wp/2013/06/amazon-aws-ec2-linode-
digitalocean-cloudserver-showdown/)

that tested what you got for $20 and found Linode faster. Personally I use DO
and have not tried Linode as I only need the $5 thing.

------
pjbrunet
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?

~~~
rschmitty
> 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?

~~~
cookiecaper
Most database servers will use RAM as aggressively as possible (limits defined
in the configuration files), so yes, more RAM is preferable. However, it's
difficult to get a large amount of RAM at an affordable price when it comes to
VPS. There's a little saying that's like, "Don't think of an SSD as expensive
disk; think of it as cheap RAM." I think that's a good rule that serves well,
more or less, if you orient your systems to behave that way.

------
danellis
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.

~~~
schneidmaster
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.

~~~
danellis
So DO doesn't charge you up front?

~~~
schneidmaster
Nope, they don't. They keep a running total of how much server you've "used"
(like, I've currently used $2.95 for the last few days of several droplets)
and bill you at the end of the month.

------
ranman
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.

Happy to cite claims on request.

~~~
schneidmaster
Curious- what features have you found to be missing in the API? I've never
developed with it but nothing popped out to me at first blush.

~~~
ranman
everything is an HTTP GET endpoint, for one.

It looks like they've added things since I last looked because I don't
remember the ssh_keys and domains stuff being there. I'll revise my comment
accordingly.

------
spellboots
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.

------
dkhenry
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.

------
threeseed
Linode is a disgraceful company IMHO.

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
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.

~~~
ceejayoz
That just means both providers are disgraceful in their handling of such
issues, not that Linode should get a pass.

------
blueskin_
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?...).

------
yogo
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?

~~~
pjbrunet
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!

------
ksec
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.

~~~
petercooper
_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.

------
aspratley
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).

------
sekasi
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?

~~~
schneidmaster
Glad you liked it :)

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.

------
stevewillows
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.

------
MattBearman
I actually use both Linode and Digital Ocean:

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
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.

------
sparkzilla
I just moved from AWS to OD last week. Very happy so far. AWS was slow and
expensive, but has some handy features that DO should implement, the main one
being RDS (dedicated database instances).

Also, I miss is backups and on-the-fly snapshots. I looked all over DO's site
and eventually had to write a support ticket to find out how to activate the
backup section in the dashboard. It turns out they had removed this option.
Bring it back! I could consider moving to Linode just to get backups.

On AWS I could take a snapshot without rebooting. On Do it says it can take up
to an hour, which seems a long time.

~~~
schneidmaster
You can take a backup on DO without rebooting. Just costs more per month. Cf
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/digitalocean...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/digitalocean-
backups-and-snapshots-explained)

------
zerop
I would like to see the virtual private cloud concept in linode. Like the VPC
in EC2, linode must do that. Putting every machine bare open with public ip
address is scary, VPC is needed in Linode.

------
sdesol
I personally use Digital Ocean and I always recommend them to others but I
also include the warning "Don't assume your snapshots are safe". Over the
course of a year, two snapshots of mine had became unusable due to some SAN
related issue. It's a $5/month service so I don't make a big deal about this.

As a safety precaution, I always replicate snapshots that I care about to all
their regions before I destroy a droplet. And I always tell others to do the
same.

~~~
pjbrunet
Thanks for the tip. I'm concerned about this. Hopefully I can reuse a snapshot
(to upgrade to bigger Droplet) without destroying the original Droplet--
because if the snapshot doesn't work for some reason, I want to be able to
fall back on the original working Droplet. This was so much easier on Linode.

~~~
schneidmaster
You can resize a droplet without destroying it. (Not sure if I'm understanding
your comment correctly.)

~~~
pjbrunet
You might be thinking of the "fast resize" which isn't an option if your
hypervisor is full.

------
WatchDog
I had some issues with my DO droplet, where the filesystem would randomly
become read only. This happened three times. The response from their support
was just to reboot it.

------
asimov42
Is there any serious competitor at Digital Ocean's prices?

~~~
dangrossman
If there's not, that'd be a red flag to me. It's amazing how long a hosting
company can keep up appearances before simply vanishing; a couple do every
year if you follow WebHostingTalk. The last time I chose a hosting company
based on price, probably around 10 years ago now, everything was glorious
(hardware/network/reliability/support) up until the moment the server dropped
off the internet. Then it slowly came out that the company wasn't actually
making any money while undercutting everyone else, and was several months
behind in their power bills with the data center. The DC finally gave up and
simply turned off their racks. Customers like myself were just screwed -- we
never got even temporary access to recover data, and the company had no money
to go after in court.

~~~
ChrisGammell
Oof, I know that song and dance. I was swapping to a new VPS twice a year
after chasing deals on WHT.

I ended up at DO on a recommendation and have been happy since. The Linode
stuff was recommended as well, but if I'm being honest it intimidated me (not
as much as Rackspace/AWS). I learned a lot from those experiences and would
feel better on a lot of other servers now...but the biggest thing I learned is
at the very least find a company that a lot of people are talking about, as
that means you won't be a lone voice trying to get support 3 days later.

------
gremlinsinc
I know I've heard horror stories from DO, and linode gave me a year of hosting
to support my education-based startup, so linode FTW imho. They got/won my
support so far.. unless/until they do some major blunder, but the IRC support
has been pretty astounding too..though I wish they were on Freenode instead of
OTC---very annoying getting on another server just for linode support when
like EVERY major technical chatroom is on freenode lol

------
sdogruyol
Wait until you see the real "support" from DO.

~~~
darklrd
Yeah, I really love the ticket based support provided by Linode. They reply
within two minutes every-time! :)

------
thealphanerd
The authors post reminded me that I had not upgrade my linode from 24GB to
48GB and I went ahead and did it. Then I realized that I had originally been
in the ssd beta. I messaged support to find out the beta had recently closed,
but the support agent did say this.

[http://imgur.com/HBLQVZ4](http://imgur.com/HBLQVZ4)

------
benatkin
I can't consider either of these because of the security issues they had and
they ways in which they handle them.

------
gabemart
With DO, is there anywhere in their GUI to see how much transfer your droplet
has used in the current billing cycle?

I realize that you can do this on the user end, but I neglected to when I set
up my droplet, and I feel like if they're willing to charge you for overages,
they should provide some method of bandwidth monitoring.

~~~
schneidmaster
There actually isn't. In hindsight, I probably should've mentioned that in my
article; that is a major thing that I found missing. However, according to a
few forum posts anyway, they're not actually billing for excess bandwidth at
the moment.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-t...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/bandwidth-
transfer)

~~~
gabemart
Good to know, thanks!

------
kyrra
For me, I have a few reasons I am staying with linode. The one not listed in
this article is location. Linode had more data centers and has one that is
half the ping to than any DO server. This is really only an issue for gaming
related stuff I do with my server where ping matters.

~~~
ariwilson
Just for reference in Los Angeles, I get a ping of 22ms to my Fremont, CA
Linode and 83ms to a New York, NY droplet. That's enough to be a substantial
difference for interactive use. Their SF datacenter doesn't seem to be
available for new droplet creation as of right now at least...

~~~
kyrra
I'm in the middle of the US, so Linode in Dallas offers much better ping times
(29ms). To both NYC and SF digitalocean datacenters, I get 67-70ms pings.
Honestly this is good enough for almost everything, but for teamspeak and game
servers, I like having the lowest latency possible.

To add, I did my ping time testing with digitalocean using their test
servers[0]. I also created my own droplets and saw the same latency/speeds.

[0] [http://speedtest-sfo1.digitalocean.com/](http://speedtest-
sfo1.digitalocean.com/)

------
erbo
I'm in the process of switching over to DO from another provider, where I'd
been paying more per month and getting vastly less (less disk space, less
transfer, shared server instance instead of a full VPS). I'm beginning to
wonder why I hadn't done this earlier.

------
invisiblea
I use both (Linode for five years, big sites, 100m+ pageviews), DO one year
(smaller and personal sites).

Both have been great, but Linode's support and response time to issues has
always been excellent.

------
JimmaDaRustla
If a bargain VPS is what you're looking for, check out RamNode with SB31
coupon code for lifetime 31% off.

Code comes from ServerBear, also a great site to find yourself a VPS that fits
your needs.

~~~
sergiotapia
RamNode is the BEE'S KNEES.

------
atmosx
Do Linode and DO offer backup in their low(er) plans?

I am happy with a European VPS provider (TransIP), costs about 12 EUR/mon
(with VAT and all) for 1G Ram, 1 Intel Xeon, 50 GB, 1.000GB traffic.

~~~
schneidmaster
Both offer backups for any plan. Digital Ocean charges an additional 20% of
the cost of the server (so, $1/mo for a $5/mo server)[0] and Linode charges
rates that add up to an additional 25% of the cost of the server[1].

[0]:
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/digitalocean...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/digitalocean-
backups-and-snapshots-explained) [1]:
[https://www.linode.com/backups/](https://www.linode.com/backups/)

------
sciurus
How do the linode and digital ocean API's compare?

~~~
schneidmaster
Linode lets you do pretty much the same set of stuff as Digital Ocean
([https://www.linode.com/api/](https://www.linode.com/api/)). IMO, Digital
Ocean's
([https://developers.digitalocean.com/](https://developers.digitalocean.com/))
is much nicer to work with. It doesn't have weird magic number error codes,
has much cleaner documentation, and has nicer response arrays. Which one is
better is kind of subjective, though.

------
homersapien
Wow...it is expensive to be trendy. My VPS with 2GB of RAM and 50GB of storage
is $40 a year, and I can do whatever the heck I want with it.

~~~
kyrra
Not a very helpful comment without a name or link to the company. I'd be
interested to see how long they have been around and what their support is
like.

------
Fizzadar
The way I see it:

Linode for production

Digital Ocean for staging

------
notastartup
I switched to linode because my credit cards got nuked it left me without an
option to pay anymore. Desperate, I started looking for VPS hosts that
accepted paypal and digital ocean luckily supported this.

I started using digital ocean and it's just too wonderful. I should've made
the switch a long time ago. linode is good too but digital ocean's droplets
are a joy and at half the cost and SSD, it just adds more. I also noticed that
the dns management was super simple with digital ocean, it recognizes gmail mx
records and adds the rest for you. these little subtle attention to details
provides a very pleasant experience. in the end, it was financial but user
interface that sold me and I'm here to stay with them.

the fact that you can take snapshots of droplets and clone them, and have an
api to spin up new ones and also shutdown ones that are idle is just too
awesome to ignore. not to mention quick ram upgrades and disks.

one of my droplets cost $5 but it shows the charge by hourly and if I shut it
down, I can save even more money. I know this is little pennies but I love the
fact that they give you control over this. It's almost like Amazon AWS but way
more friendlier and easier to understand.

------
mattkrea
Well for what it's worth if pricing is not a openly viewable section of your
website you've got a problem.

I went to DO because their pricing is clear and only then did I discover that
everything just works.

I have a few servers and could not even think of switching.

~~~
dangrossman
Both sites have their pricing on their front page.

~~~
mattkrea
Hm. That's a pretty serious derp for me then. "Under the fold" killed me. I
usually look for a "pricing" link.

