

Why we moved to Linode - julien
http://blog.superfeedr.com/linode/

======
heyitsnick
I just want to add one alternative voice; I've been a slicehost user for about
2 years and I've couldn't be a happier customer. It's the first time I've used
a VPS like this so I can't comment on how their service compares
price/speed/functionality-wise with Linode et al., but I can say that:

\- My sites haven't once gone down.

\- I have found the whole interface and management backend very intuitive.

\- Their articles are fantastic. I went from pretty much knowing nothing about
servers or linux to running 6 sites on my slice, with email server, FTP,
securing it with iptables, django installed, installing postgres with remote
access, etc etc, all through their articles.

\- The support is exemplary. Last week I accidently made a double payment (my
stupid fault). I emailed them, a human responded within 40 seconds saying it
had been forwarded to the billing department; 90 seconds later the billing
department emailed me saying they had reversed the transaction.

(edit: formatting)

~~~
latch
I have nothing against slicehost, but a key point in the OP was price. Ever
since their June RAM bump, they (on paper) offer a much better value.

Its also worth pointing out that of the various benchmarks I've seen (a
handful on blogs and there are some pretty key threads on webhostingtalk.com),
Linode typically comes out on or near the top.

On top of that, you add their participation to things like Rails Rumble and
their data center choice (just missing Asia), and it all makes a compelling
argument.

~~~
davidw
Even before the Linode memory upgrade, Linode was more competitive for many
uses because they offered 32 bit systems, whereas Slicehost only has memory-
hungry 64 bit systems:

<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode>

After the ram upgrade, Linode is a _clear_ winner. I just hope they don't
screw up the good service as they gain customers.

~~~
epochwolf
> whereas Slicehost only has memory-hungry 64 bit systems

[http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2010/3/1/32-bit-images-
now...](http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2010/3/1/32-bit-images-now-
available)

~~~
davidw
Good catch, I didn't realize that. Before writing my article and switching to
Linode, I politely asked if that was going to happen any time soon, but they
said no, and the rest is history. It took them, it looks like, over a year to
add that functionality.

------
petercooper
I was rocking with some dedicated servers from SoftLayer (who are awesome) but
"downsized" to Linode about 18 months ago. I discovered VPSes weren't as slow
or crippled as I imagined and I now serve much the same stuff for a fraction
of the cost. Win win.

~~~
FooBarWidget
Linode is awesome and great for small- to mid-range server needs. Even an EC2
small instance is overkill (both in computing resources and in price) for many
websites.

However if you do need lots of resources then the cost effectiveness of VPSes
- or any virtualized system for that matter - goes down the drain quickly. For
high-traffic websites nothing compares to good old dedicated servers. The
pricing difference between a dedicated server and EC2/Linode/etc can be as
much as 5x for the same resources.

Linode is also a bad choice if you need a lot of disk space, and with "a lot"
I mean >100 GB. Expanding disk space on Linode is very expensive, an order of
magnitude more than EBS.

~~~
rbranson
How is the pricing difference for a dedicated server and EC2 5 times? Maybe if
you only look at the physical hardware cost, but often that is the smaller
component. You are comparing a capital asset with both fixed and variable cost
components to a fixed-cost per-hour lease of resource.

~~~
FooBarWidget
If you really need to lease resources by the hour then by all means, go with
virtualized servers. But for one of the web apps I'm building I know that
there's a high chance that I'll need to keep the servers around for at least a
year. The prices on e.g. hetzner.de (I'm not a customer, I just read about it
on HN) totally blows EC2 Reserved Instances out of the water.

I don't know why you consider dedicated servers capital assets. Maybe if
you're colocating your own servers, but I plan on renting dedicated servers
that a hosting company provides. They'll be responsible for replacing the
hardware if it fails.

Turns out that renting a dedicated server and colocating your own costs
approximately the same, assuming that the hardware never fails. If the
hardware does fail then renting a dedicated is cheaper.

~~~
petercooper
"Renting" also has tax benefits in some jurisdictions since you can write off
the full rent instead of depreciation over time.

------
shazow
I've had a very similar experience with Rackspacecloud (makes sense since
they're the same company as Slicehost now): Incredibly slow control panel,
features sometimes work and sometimes don't, useless tech support (took 5 days
to point our server to our domain because someone else had it pointed first
for some reason, despite whois being obviously ours).

Meanwhile, I've been using Linode for my personal projects and it's night and
day. The control panel is incredibly faster and easier to use, the prices and
specs are better, and the community/documentation is noticeably more
intelligent and better-equipped.

------
tlack
My ping times from my server to Facebook's graph servers went from 40ms at my
expensive ThePlanet servers to 2ms at Linode Fresno. I'm really, really happy
with Linode, though the prices for bandwidth, disk and ram are ridiculously
high. Best option is probably something like 10tb from ThePlanet for bulk
assets and Linode for the front end.

------
citricsquid
I moved to Linode recently from vps.net, nothing major just a few personal
sites, but so far Linode have been great. If you're ever tempted to, _don't_
go with vps.net.

~~~
WillyF
I've had a great experience with VPS.net so far. Why do you say that?

~~~
citricsquid
I signed up in September 2009 and I'm still _technically_ a customer but I
won't be once renewal rolls around.

The problems are numerous, the management are great, they really care (Nick,
Terry etc) _but_ the product and support team are pitiful. I assume as you're
a customer you've got access to the customer forum? Take a look at the
problems people face. vps.net is great when it works, but the second something
goes wrong I've found myself nothing but screwed and personally how the system
and team handle when things go wrong is what matters most.

"Self healing with automatic failover" is a joke. I've had 2 periods of 10
hour+ downtime on tiny servers, I've also had numerous "small" downtimes that
lasted between 30 minutes and 2 hours. The reasons for these range from
technicians making mistakes ("replaced ram incorrectly") to the technology
just not being able to cope.

I _wish_ I could stick with vps.net, their flexibility isn't beaten by anyone
but the stability and support is incredibly poor. If I were to totally ignore
any times my server has been rebooted because of me (so assume 1 year = 1 year
of uptime) the longest my server(s -- I used to run multiple with them) have
been online is 90 days. They can't go 90 days without a problem, where
problems range from 30 minutes to 10 hours.

The last straw for me was my server being inaccessible for almost 90 minutes,
the reason? I had been nullrouted and that isn't the bad part... I submitted a
support ticket explaining that my server was down (I originally logged in to
the control panel after I couldn't get in via SSH and saw many disk errors) I
got a canned "reboot plz" response, I sent a reply saying that didn't work, he
replied "I can connect from here!" so I replied "Well I can't!" and included a
link that showed it wasn't just me (<http://i.imgur.com/NtXi9.jpg>) then his
next reply "oh, it appears you've been nullrouted!" (this was an hour after I
first submitted my ticket) so I reply asking when it'll be back, they ignore
me and then 15 minutes later it's accessible again and the ticket was
closed...

...it doesn't end there. I head over to the customer forum and ask if anyone
else is experiencing the same, surprise surprise another customer says "hey
I'm experiencing the same!" so we compare IPs, he's on the same (subnet?) IP
part as me, xx.xx.xx. __(where __is our specific parts and xx is the same) so
he then submits a support ticket about it. So specific to this incident:
Support are not told when blocks are put in place, support don't proceed to
contact all the other customers with the same problem when it _is_ resolved
and they don't offer any sort of "sorry" explanation. So either support
doesn't have the facility to check for incidents specific to a client (why
not?) or they just don't bother.

Anyway yes, that's just one incident but it was the final straw. vps.net have
always been good on the customer relations side with Nick always talking to
customers, but the product is poor (have a SAN die and then enjoy the wait
time while it "self heals") and the support is just as bad. I'd love to pass
issues off as one time, or things that will get better, but after an entire
year of seeing it remain poor I'm finally moving on and it isn't just me, the
customer forum is full of issues.

oh and don't even get me started on their inability to communicate, you'd
think a product aimed at people with _important_ things would have people
monitoring the network and hardware, but apparently not, because it often
takes _at least_ 30 minutes for them to notify people of issues in progress
via status.vps.net (which FYI a bunch of customers had to hammer them to get
online, which they still don't publicise).

[http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-
forum...](http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum-
private/3471-what-happen-to-slc-c) < A group of clients down, Managing
Director says he's going to "look into it" and confirms there is an issue. He
has to _look into it_? Don't they, you know, monitor? The problem? Licensing
issue, a licensing issue took down hundreds of servers for over 4 hours? It's
a joke. [http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-
forum...](http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum-
private/2929-vps-stuck-consuming-30-nodes-and-not-responding)
[http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-
forum...](http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum-
private/3437-whats-your-current-uptime-on-vps-net-and-the-longest)

Summary: Unstable/unreliable product, poor support, good customer relations,
terrible issue awareness. Broken promises.

Edit: I didn't realise how long this had become, apologies. I'm just very
frustrated that I've stuck with them for so long (I was considering leaving
after 3 months of nothing but pain) and they _still_ suck.

Edit edit: I figured an example of the horrible support where it caused
substantial downtime would be good. Back story: Server went down, checked the
client forums and many others had the same problems, after an hour Nick (MD)
said via Twitter that anyone still down should contact support, so I'd
_already_ been down for an hour:

09:34 EDT Submit ticket, say that my server is still down and this ticket is
as instructed via Twitter.

09:38 EDT Reply from support, "Will check this and update as soon as
possible".

10:07 EDT I replied asking where my update is, explain that I've now been down
for 2 hours.

10:39 EDT I finally get a reply saying that my server is queued for being
brought online

11:46 EDT Server still down I ask what's going on...

13:36 EDT Still no reply, server still down.

19:40 EDT Finally a reply from the MD (Nick) saying that my server is now back
online.

So as you can see, between "Your server is now queued to come online" and the
MD replying, I got nothing, all the while my server was down. It's laughably
bad, especially because this is one of the many terrible instances with
support I've had.

------
sean_b
I recently built a project (<http://www.coatapp.com> \- A simple weather
forecast application with clothing suggestions) on Linode and couldn't be
happier. The disk speeds are very impressive, and super useful for apps that
deal with large amounts of data that gets updated frequently (i.e. weather
data).

This previously posted benchmark shows some of the difference between Linode
and a few other providers (from 2009): <http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-
performance-comparison>

~~~
omgsean
Cool project, would be really nice to have celsius support though.

~~~
sean_b
Ok, I'll look into that too. The app only offers weather forecasts for the
continental US so I originally assumed most folks were interested in
fahrenheit, but I can see the appeal of celsius :).

------
Eil
I'm very happy with my ARP Networks VPS. Their prices are very competitive,
but it's definitely not a "managed" solution. They support just about any
Linux distro as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Once your VM is spun up, you just
log in and go. Support seems to be email only, but I've never had a second of
downtime in the 9 months or so I've been there.

My only gripe is that web-based management of the VPS is almost non-existent.
Basically power on/off and reboot are all you get. I'd like to see bandwidth,
disk I/O, CPU utilization, and so on. They have a text-based management
interface with a few more options, including VNC console over SSH. I suppose
the end result is that you basically get a low-end colo server experience at a
VPS price. (Which is fine if you're like me and that's what you want.)

I also want to tip my hat to Liquid Web's cloud offering, Storm. (I'm biased
because I helped build it.) Their prices are certainly not on the low end but
the support team beats the snot out of any other hosting provider, period.

------
StavrosK
I wish I could move to Linode from Slicehost, I have a slice with my
personal/hobby sites on it but it's too expensive (I could have a Linode twice
the size for that price). All my new servers are Linode, of course (including
historious, which is breezing along).

Their London datacenter is the fastest I've seen, even faster than some
dedicated servers I've used.

------
AlexMax
I've got fond memories of Linode, as it was the first VPS I tried out. Having
an always-on Linux box turned out to be a lot handier than I had anticipated,
and these days I can't imagine being without a shell _somewhere_.

That said, I ran into a curious problem when attempting to run servers for a
doom source port, where performance would be quite choppy at times. I never
really figured out what was going on either, as their support just told me
that the box my VPS was on was fine and they couldn't see anything wrong with
it. I finally moved to a cheap Atom dedicated server which seemed to fix
things, and now I'm evaluating a VPS hosted by interserver.net (prognosis is
troubling, it uses OpenVZ and I seem to keep getting dgramrcvbuf failures
under heavy server usage), but I'll always suggest Linode to people looking
for a good VPS host.

------
code_duck
I moved from Slicehost to Linode, mainly for performance reasons. The pricing
difference encouraged me to wait no longer.

One of my sites was having serious performance issues on Slicehost, which
seemed to be due to low disk i/o. I was cleaning the database, optimizing,
etc. and stressing out about it, wondering what to change. After moving to
Linode I haven't had the slightest hint of a performance issue.

------
ionfish
I'm in the middle of making the same move. My motivations were price (a 512
slice costs half as much on Linode) and locality (Linode have a London data
centre; Slicehost don't). So far I've been very impressed.

------
whakojacko
"Linode offers some kind of customization so you can make machines with more
RAM, or more bandwidth if you need to." Any details on how this works?

~~~
petercooper
Once you have a node you can upgrade the specs a little. Short of transferring
to an entirely new node, you can boost your bandwidth, get some extra RAM, and
add some disk space, within limits without changing what host machine you're
on due to the slack they have.

Separate to that, Linode also appear to support significantly larger packages
than their pricing table indicates. Once you're in the system, there are
references to things like "Linode 16384" accounts, etc.

~~~
whakojacko
Ah, I see in the "Extras" page. The pricing seems dumb though-they want $20/mo
extra for 360mb of ram, but for an additional $20/mo I might as well update my
512 to a linode 1024 and get an additional 512mb of ram, as well as more cpu
power/disk/bandwidth.

~~~
wwortiz
I think that is exactly the point, if you look at all of the extras
(bandwidth,disk,ram) the pricing all comes out to when you reach the amount
for each (bandwidth, disk, or ram) upgraded server it is the same for both
extras or upgraded server.

~~~
bdonlan
There's only so much resources on each physical host - when you hit the
resource usage of an additional Linode, you've effectively used up the space
that could have gone to another customer. So you have to pay their rent as
well.

Although this really doesn't make that much sense for bandwidth... but when
you look at the raw price for bandwidth it's not all that bad anyway.

------
galactus
Linode indeed has great support,from my experience

------
geoffc
linode for dev, test and launch and then dedicated hardware at 100tb.com or
the like when needed.

------
DiabloD3
I would have went with RapidXen instead of Linode. Better service, and the guy
who owns it is a pretty well known FOSS coder.

