
Slicehost vs Linode - davidw
http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
======
jharrison
I'm also using both vendors with a couple VPSes at each.

I've had one outage with Slicehost when they needed to replace a drive in one
of my servers. I wasn't even aware that there was a problem prior which shows
how proactive they were. The outage was short and on schedule and everything
came back up, as expected.

I've had excellent experiences with tech support in both organizations. Both
are very responsive.

Both have pretty strong user communities with Slicehost having a bit of an
edge on documentation, if you aren't already comfortable with your own admin.
Both have active IRC channels.

Honestly, for me they're almost a coin flip. When I get ready to acquire a new
VPS I see what each is offering at the time and go with the biggest bang for
my buck. The article is helpful, even if unscientific, at determining the
efficiency of the bang.

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mrbad101
Please note, I was reading on Slicehost's forums/blog the other day, and you
can install a 32 bit OS.

Here is a link that should help:

[http://wiki.slicehost.com/doku.php?id=installing_an_arbitrar...](http://wiki.slicehost.com/doku.php?id=installing_an_arbitrary_linux_distro_on_your_slice)

So its not completely out of the question.

Hope this helps steer some people back to SH side.

~~~
ntoshev
It doesn't make sense to base your production system on a hack of your
provider's platform. 64bit OS was the reason I ditched Slicehost too, although
I knew about this hack.

~~~
listic
A hack? To the best of my knowledge, both providers allow users to install
arbitrary Linux distributions. It's not against any rules, so I wouldn't
consider this a hack.

~~~
ntoshev
It is not part of their recommended way to do things. They do not provide
support and they may close this opportunity at any time, even involuntarily.

------
ken
I'm curious to see what the 64-bit memory-tax is for various
languages/runtimes.

I took a quick glance at the Language Shootout to see if I could find any
patterns, but at least for the few I checked, it's all over the place. For
example, on the "n-body" problem, both Ruby and SBCL grow 31% on x86-64. But
Ruby on "pidigits" grows only 2%, while SBCL on that problem adds a whopping
111%. On "spectral-norm", Ruby grows 61%, while SBCL grows 31%.

So this appears to be a place where moving to 64-bit is completely unknown,
and you have to test for your specific application. It might double your
memory usage with no change in speed, or (if you're running pidigits.rb) it
might double your speed with almost no change in memory usage.

~~~
icky
The SBCL thing makes me wonder if there are any modern lisps that can be
restricted to a 4GB (32-bit) address space, while still using 64-bit values
and registers...

Then, cons cells would take up only one machine word.

~~~
sethg
If everything you point to is aligned on an eight-byte boundary, and if you
don't use type tags, then a 32-bit pointer can point to anything in a 35-bit
address space. So you can get up to 32 GB.

~~~
icky
"16384 PB ought to be enough for everybody!"

------
chadr
I've been using linode for the last 8 months and so far it has been a
wonderful low cost, high performance solution. My only complaint is that they
don't appear to offer any backup solutions. I an under the assumption that
I'll be rebuilding my linode disk image from scratch if the physical server is
involved in a fire, corrupts my disk image, etc. It would be nice if I could
do the equivalent of take a snapshot, encrypt it, and upload it to s3.

------
j2d2
I can't speak for slicehost, but I have used linode for a little while now and
it's been completely painless. I haven't had any disasters (perhaps that alone
is telling) so I can't speak about riding the river either.

Linode has help on IRC for anything that isn't straight-forward too. Easy.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
FWIW, Slicehost also has both IRC and AJAX chat support channels, plus an 800
number for escalating omg-people-are-dying level of support requests.

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jonknee
With Slicehost now being owned by Rackspace, they are more likely to stick
around for a while which is nice if you're into that sort of thing. But they
are both fantastic, can't go wrong.

~~~
jm4
Linode has been around a pretty long time now- I've been a customer for least
a couple years. I think they're well past the point where we need to be
worried if they're still going to be around next year.

~~~
aikiai
The next couple years are likely not going to be the last couple years,
especially for small businesses.

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Maro
I've been a linode customer for a year, and it's pretty cool. My only wish at
this point would be for them to offer hosting at a european datacenter.

~~~
jrnkntl
I'm also searching for a reliable and not too expensive VPS-host based in
Europe. Seems like dedicated servers are cheaper here than a decent VPS.

~~~
rossriley
I don't use them any more as I've moved to Slicehost, but Rimuhosting have
servers in London and their pricing and service are very good, if a little
pricier than Slicehost/Linode

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jeremychase-2
Slicehost has a pitiful per slice bandwidth cap of 10mbit. Linode's is 35mbit.

~~~
axod
I hit this limit and slicehost upped it on my slice, I'm not sure if this is
typical or not, but they were very quick to increase the limit for me.

~~~
jeremychase-2
That is interesting; I asked about increasing it on my personal slice and
Slicehost refused. I decided to move to Linode as a result.

The company I work for also has several slices at Slicehost and, from what I
understand, Slicehost wouldn't increase the limit on that account either.(I am
not the point of contact so I can't say definitively in this case)

------
jaytee_clone
I use Tektonic.

<http://www.tektonic.net/vps.php>

I haven't done any performance comparison. (since I don't use other hosting
services.)

But as far as raw resources per dollar, Tektonic has both Slicehost and Linode
beaten.

~~~
mdasen
Tektonic looks nice, but:

* Their 90-day money back guarantee only applies if they have failed to meet industry standards for performance and reliability. So, if you just don't like the service, you're out of luck.

* Their 90-day money back guarantee actually doesn't give you your money back! They give you a pro-rated refund of your charges for that month. So, even if you can argue to them that they are slow and unreliable, you'll still only get a refund of your unused portion.

<http://www.tektonic.net/tos.php#money>

* Click on the Virtuozzo link: <http://www.tektonic.net/vps.php#features> I always wanted a Lorem ipsum!

Maybe they are really good, but their public presentation leaves a little to
be desired. I'm ok if someone doesn't want to offer a money-back guarantee.
However, why word something so poorly? A pro-rated refund is not a money-back
guarantee.

Going into their order system, they're definitely cheap - they divided their
costs by 100! So, that $53 level becomes $0.53! It just seems like they don't
have their act together. It could just be that they put all their effort into
the product itself and didn't pay attention to the other details, but it isn't
a great way to run a business.

~~~
smanek
The price isn't a mistake: "CURRENT SPECIAL: 99% off the first month on
Virtual Private Server and Dynamic Dedicated Server VPS accounts! Discount
automatically applied at checkout. The next 80 orders will receive this
discount."

------
FraaJad
I have used both. Gor my usage pattern (low) they have both proved to be
excellent.

However, I would a ++ for Linode because they seem to offer more RAM/$ on
paper. And their online control panel is a bit more sophisticated than
Slicehost's.

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sethg
I've been using Linode for a while and I've been generally happy with it.
There were some glitches when they started doing xen hosting, where one of my
filesystems would suddenly drop into read-only mode and only a reboot would
fix it, but that hasn't happened in months.

I used to use OpenHosting (openvps.com), and I have no complaints about their
pricing or service, but (a) they use CentOS exclusively, and (b) they use
Linux-VServer rather than Xen or another better-known virtualization system.
If you can work within those constraints I would recommend looking into them.

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rapind
If he was running ruby enterprise and passenger for these comparison's then
the results may be skewed. My understanding is that you get about a 30% memory
usage reduction with ruby enterprise, but that's only on 32bit images... so he
wouldn't get that benefit on a the stock 64bit slicehost install.

~~~
davidw
I wasn't. Plain old Ruby on both systems, for the time being.

------
ig1
I went through this comparission recently and didn't find much between them. I
ended up going with Slicehost due to their excellent collection of articles
(the last time I setup up a prod linux server from scratch was about 6 years
ago, so I was a bit rusty and the articles proved invalulable).

------
lsc
huh. both use xen... you'd think you'd be able to put a 32-bit image on there
(unless they are using some ancient version of Xen) 32 on 64 seems to work
pretty well on Xen 3.3.

this reminds me, I need to start providing some 32-bit images.

