
Linode turns 8; Disk space +25% - gmac
http://blog.linode.com/2011/06/16/linode-turns-8-disk-space-25/
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trustfundbaby
This is why I love Linode ... they do stuff like this, once a year or so and
its so fantastic ... they upgraded me from a 328MB linode to 512MB last year
for free ... now this ...

I wish more companies would follow suit. It inspires loyalty in very subtle
ways ... I was going to get a 512MB linode anyway, but with the money I saved,
I added their backup service for $4.95 a month ... I couldn't imagine going
anywhere else for my vps hosting.

However, my apartment complex has jacked up my rent on me, even though I've
lived there and paid my rent on time for 4 years now.

~~~
cosgroveb
It's not like you have a fixed-rate mortgage on that apartment. You don't
expect your landlord to let you rent at below-market rates do you?

I guess what I'm saying is if you want to lock in a low rent you need to
negotiate for a longer lease.

~~~
trustfundbaby
Linode has never reduced how much I pay for my vps either, so I don't
understand where you get the idea that I'm angling for them to lower my rent.

All I'm saying is that some token of appreciation would be great and lock in
my loyalty. I pay for a garage ... a free month of that maybe?

~~~
cosgroveb
You were complaining about them raising your rent (not about them not throwing
in things to please). The cost of everything goes up over time. Get over it.

Also your rent over the last four years _was_ lowered by a little thing called
inflation.

~~~
trustfundbaby
The cost of everything goes up over time.

\--------------------------

Except server costs and bandwidth, apparently ;)

~~~
mey
Or house prices (oh wait that has direct relevance to rental unit costs)

~~~
yummyfajitas
Rental prices didn't go up much during the bubble, and they are not coming
down much while it is bursting.

No reason they should - after all, price to buy incorporates the speculative
value of a house while price to rent does not.

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citricsquid
I absolutely love Linode. I made the HORRIBLE mistake of using vps.net for
over a year (from September 09 to September 10) and it was honestly the worst
hosting experience of my life (and I keep an eye on them, still as bad as
ever) so when I switched to Linode I was expecting more of the same, in over 8
months I have never had a problem, I've submitted 1 support ticket and that
was because I needed help enabling backups (the host machine was disallowing
it) and that was resolved in 5 minutes.

Linodes pricing isn't the cheapest but it's well worth it. I have 6 servers
with them at the moment.

~~~
cosgroveb
They were super helpful with an iptables question I had (I locked myself out
of the server as well as took down several services I had running). I honestly
expected them to say "you signed up for a VPS you should know this... it's not
covered by our support."

~~~
code_duck
When I asked Linode support my 1 question ever in 2 years of business, the
person really outdid himself in contacting me - followup, additional tips,
checkups, etc. Really nice.

For the iptables issue, did you try connecting to the server from lish? Same
as with slicehost, when you're locked out the Ajax console can provide you
with a shell on your server. Linode has lish too, though, which is an SSH
connection to your server's host system. Connecting through there bypasses
your iptables setup.

~~~
cosgroveb
Yes, I used lish. The iptables answer they helped me with allowed me to
restore ssh after I got in with lish.

~~~
code_duck
Oh, I see. Guiding you to lish _and_ through fixing iptables sounds like great
service.

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paraschopra
Congrats on the anniversary. To provide a balanced perspective on this thread,
let me share our experience. We (Visual Website Optimizer) are hosted on
Linode since beginning but have experienced degradation of service lately
particularly around network availability. There is at least one minor outage
every month in their Newark data center (planning around network outage is
much harder). While their support is responsive, these regular outages affect
our business in a very significant manner. Every time we contact them, their
staff just says these outages _happen_ and unavoidable and I cannot believe
they are okay with it.

Maybe it is to do with their increased customer base, but earlier these
outages were much less frequent and we enjoyed the service.

We own 25+ servers with them and have lately given thought of moving to some
other provider. It's their responsive customer service and the pain of
migrating everything that has kept us sticking to Linode.

~~~
nkassis
How regular and how long? They don't provide 100% uptime guarantee. A few
hours a month of downtime is what 99.99% uptime. That's not bad at all.

I personally haven't had issues with the network in the Dallas DC.

~~~
rmah
There are 30*24 = 720 hours a month. If a "few hours" is 2 hours, then that is
718/720 = 99.72% uptime. This means 0.28% downtime vs 0.01% downtime. IOW,
almost 30x worse than a 99.99% uptime promise (if that's even what Linode
promises).

Math FTW!

~~~
nkassis
ok.... seems like I can't enter numbers into irb ;p you are right 99.99% would
be about an hour a year.

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CoffeeDregs
I've been using Linode for about 4 years now for dev and [small] production
servers. They're such a joy to use. I agree that I could probably get VPSs
cheaper somewhere else, but ... meh. And, though I rarely need support,
Linode's support is second to none and it's a real help with something's going
wrong. More than anything, I'm happy to pay a bit extra to support quality
products and services.

So, joining the chorus: happy birthday!

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _I agree that I could probably get VPSs cheaper somewhere else..._

A couple of people have brought this up in this thread, and all I can think
each time is that they must not place any value on their time or hassle when
it comes to dealing with the cheaper providers.

~~~
mestudent
It depends on what your using the vps for, I have a vps with prgmr and it
really isn't that much of a hassle, even starting fresh with debian is a 5
minute or less process with the centos recovery.

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samuarl
I'm extremely happy with my Linode VPS. Never had any problems and the
performance seems great.

Getting a VPS was my first real foray into Linux and I've learnt so much since
I started by just messing around. The Linode library has also been a great
source of help.

I recommend anyone who likes to spend hours perfectly configuring services
they will likely never use, because it's fun, should get one to hone their
terminal chops.

~~~
sixtofour
I would recommend the same thing for the same kind of people, but only _after_
you do it on a virtual machine (VirtualBox) on your local machine. It's a much
cheaper alternative (free), and you'll have a better idea what you want and
what to do when you move to Linode.

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dragonquest
Congrats to Linode, 8 years that's a long time. Which makes me wonder, was
Linode the earliest or one of the earliest VPS hosting provider? I'm guessing
in 2002 it wasn't that mature a market or was there already a few big players
hovering about by the time Linode stepped in?

~~~
codelust
They were one of the earlier ones, but not the earliest. If my memory serves
me right, a VPS as a viable option first gained publicity with
Johncompanies.com, who were one of the early sponsors on kuro5hin.org
following the famous DOS-attack on it. From the domain name registration it
would appear that Johncompanies have been around since 2001, while linode.com
was registered in 2003.

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nasmorn
What is so great about Linode that I would pay 3 times as much as on german
hoster
[http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-...](http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-
produktmatrix)

Sure the website is in german, traffic is not unlimited but I have used them
for more than a year now and service is totally fine.

Edit: Prices include VAT, so the 1024 comes out to 15 USD without taxes, which
is 12% more than a third, but still.

~~~
deno
Website is available in English. You should have no problem communicating in
English with their customer support, as well. Also, it's KVM based, in case
anyone is wondering.

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jusob
Well, my experience with Linode started well: good price, great interface,
etc. Until somebody unrelated to me sent spam containing a URL pointing to one
of my web sites. A recipient complained to Linode. Linode opened a ticket
around 2am. At 6am, they simply shutdown my VPS becasue I didn't answer the
ticket! I got the message a few hours later when I woke up.

I f you want to take any website hosted on Linode down, you know what to do...

~~~
tasaro
For the record, we do allow more than 4 hours to respond to this form of
abuse.

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thaumaturgy
Disk space was the _one_ thing that made Linode feel a bit cramped, for me.
Yay! Thanks, Linode.

Incidentally, for those looking for an easy way to free up a little extra disk
space on your VPS, look into localepurge. On Debian, it's a piece-of-cake
install, and it automatically removes unneeded language and locale files from
packages every time you run apt.

~~~
Macha
I'm using 2/16GB (2/20GB now I guess) on my Linode. RAM is always the pain
point for me.

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ww520
I have an account with Linode and loves their service; however, given the
competition from AWS and AppEngine, I don't know whether I should stay. Light
traffic static website can be run in AppEngine for free. AWS has some very
competitive pricing for VPS. Linode's yearly $240 fee is less and less
appealing.

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code_duck
I'm so satisfied with Linode. You can't beat the prices and performance, in my
experience.

Thanks guys!

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dreamdu5t
I love you Linode! Best host ever.

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yatsyk
happy birthday from satisfied customer!

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initself
Wow! The timing couldn't be better! I was regularly hitting 98% and 99% full,
having to purge files here and there. I was just about to increase my space.

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swlkr
linode you continue to rock my socks

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jimmyjim
Hrmm, 25%?

I purchased the Linode 512 package a while ago... and installed an Archlinux
image and had it use 100% of the storage capacity. Now, Linode's manager is
reporting that I have 80% full... (instead of 75%, as this post would have it)

~~~
w01fe
If you had x disk space before, now you have 1.25x. That means your current
usage is x / 1.25x = 0.8.

~~~
jimmyjim
Yep, that was a math fail by me. I realized shortly after posting that - but
not in time enough to remove the comment. Sorry.

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jules
Why are bigger linodes relatively more expensive?

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tnorthcutt
Except for the fact that the amount of transfer doesn't keep increasing past
2000GB after the 8GB plan, they're not. (If that's what you were referring to,
my apologies)

~~~
jules
There's that, and that 19.95*2 = 39.90. Sure, it's not much more expensive,
but why is one 1024 linode not cheaper than two 512 ones? Surely there is some
overhead in running 2 instances on one piece of hardware instead of one. Also,
do you get CPU proportional to the RAM? That is, if I get two 512 linodes do I
get more or less CPU than with one 1024 linode?

~~~
singlow
My understanding is that the 1024 server will be on hardware shared by half as
many VPSs as a 512. On both of them you get as much CPU as is available
proportioned to each VPS. But with the 1024, you have half as many competitors
for that CPU. You also have half as many competitors for IO. Disk space and
Ram are the only things that are handed out in fixed quantities.

~~~
jules
I see. In practice I'd expect the others on a node not to make full use of
CPU, so you're getting more CPU for the same money on a 512 (unless they
artificially limit it).

~~~
keidian
They don't limit it to any extent besides giving you access to 4 cores of the
host instead of all of them

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yuxt
thank you Linode, and happy birthday

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ajross
I like Linode and use them. But 25% is almost an insult. Storage is absurdly
expensive at Linode: literally 10x what Amazon charges for EBS stores (a
little less, as Linode storage is local and there are no usage charges).

I really wish they were more competitive. Right now I have a tiny instance
running my personal email, but everything else I do looks more attractive on
EC2 or Rackspace.

~~~
CoffeeDregs
Storage is expensive at Linode ($1/gb/month as compared to $0.10/gb/month on
AWS EBS), but you'll note that data transfer prices are comparable. Linode may
be pricing storage to discourage you from using Linode as a storage service.
If I were running a VPS-only shop with no real storage "product" and no desire
to get outside the niche-in-which-I'm-crushing-it, I might do the same.

~~~
StavrosK
I emailed them about that once, they said that those prices are intentionally
so expensive to encourage you to move to higher VM levels where there's less
contention on the server.

Upgrading your VM entirely is actually cheaper per GB than just getting more
space.

