
Introducing Hourly Billing - kyrra
https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/09/introducing-hourly-billing/
======
kijin
I've been wondering about this since they first started beta testing the
hourly billing option. Here are my questions:

1) Would hourly billing attract a different kind of usage pattern than what
Linodes have so far been used for?

2) Will this hurt performance for other customers?

The reason I'm curious about this is that even the cheapest Linode comes with
a lot of CPU power, especially compared to EC2. But the CPU is not dedicated,
in fact it's massively oversold. This is great for people who occasionally
need to use 8 cores but stay relatively idle most of the time. Guess what, if
you keep a server online for months, it's going to be idle a lof of the time.

Hourly billing, on the other hand, encourages people to fire up an instance,
compute whatever they need to compute as quickly as possible, and shut down
the instance as soon as they're done. In fact, that's exactly how I use EC2's
high-CPU instances. Everything is scripted to ensure the most efficient use of
resources throughout the lifetime of the instance, because every hour costs
money. Why use 50% CPU for two hours when you can use 100% CPU for one hour
for half the cost?

This kind of usage pattern, if widespread among customers, can lead to higher
overall CPU usage on the host node (as well as of other scarce resources such
as I/O), because fewer instances will sit idle. With EC2 this is not a problem
AFAIK because the CPUs are dedicated to my instance. But Linode's CPUs are
shared.

For a "traditional" Linode customer, the implication is that there will be
busier neighbors. Officially, of course, you would never get less resources
than a fair share of the host node. But it has usually been the case that, in
Linode, you get a lot more resources most of the time. If people can no longer
rely on this unofficial assumption, there could be trouble ahead for Linode.

------
madsushi
I like that they configured the 'cap' to be the normal monthly price. It's a
smart move that ensures that hourly customers AND monthly customers are
getting treated fairly.

~~~
chc
Yep — Digital Ocean does it the same way. It's great to see good ideas
spreading.

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orthecreedence
YESSS This is awesome news. Linode is my favorite VPS host, and now it's going
to be so much more viable for quickly testing things, and also for quick
scaling up.

This is doubly good news because Linode instances are well-geared towards CPU
work (having 8 cores by default), so if you use a queue-based architecture for
background processing, you can now spin up 10 instances to process a bunch of
work, and take them down a few hours later when the rush is over.

I especially love the monthly cap, so people who just want a server don't pay
unpredictable amounts every month.

Thanks, Linode.

~~~
walden42
I'll need to choose a cloud host soon for an online service that will require
great uptime, and Linode is one of my top choices. The reviews, uptime, and
prices are great, including management services. The ONLY thing that's keeping
me on the fence is lack of SSD's, as there will be a ton of I/O on the
relational database. I read that they're beta testing SSD servers, so I hope
they come out soon.

~~~
gmac
Bear in mind that Linode's SAS arrays apparently already outperform Digital
Ocean's (presumably somewhat crappy) SSD setup, so this may or may not be a
silver bullet.

I have a Postgres-based service on a Linode — it works fine in my (mainly
read-based) use case, but I do pay for quite a lot of RAM in order to get
enough caching.

~~~
walden42
Do you have a source for this? I just did a quick google search, and although
they're somewhat comparable, DO outperformed Linode. And the tests were for
read-only, not writes. I'd wager that writes are much faster on an SSD.

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gamegoblin
Good on them. Competition between Digital Ocean and Linode for the customers
that often sporadically use machines will just be great.

Though, FWIW, still sticking with DO for the 5$/mo.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
Yeah it is a good move to compete, but I still think the customer base might
be a bit different.

I still think of Linode as more of a "real" type hosting environment, in the
time I used them I didn't didn't notice any difference from actual bare metal
servers. If I didn't know better that's what I would think they were.

DO, to me is much more of a "toy" and experimenting type of service. I have
tried hosting things on "droplets" and had strange issues, dropping, outages
etc. Not frequent of course, but over say a week or two of uptime. I'm ok with
it because it's $5 and what else would you expect? But I wouldn't think of
hosting any real sites on droplets personally.

It's just my opinion and many people I've talked to have had the same
experiences. Both are great services for different applications.

~~~
threeseed
Linode is the toy here.

They have a long history of hiding information from customers during security
incidents and outages.

No one running a proper site would be crazy enough to host on Linode.

~~~
jenscow
Do you have anything to support your claim?

~~~
stevekemp
It keeps getting brought up due to their repeated issues and lack of
transparency.

For example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541915](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541915)

~~~
jenscow
I mean, a single instance (perhaps one more) is hardly a "long history" or
"repeated issues".

~~~
stevekemp
Personally I wouldn't use them, and wouldn't recommend them. But I'm not here
to argue about it.

I took the time to search for five seconds because you wanted references, but
were somehow incapable of making your own research, or making up your own
mind.

If you search you will find repeated instances, and that means a long history,
with no changes after even a single security problem.

------
jtchang
The fact is linode is more expensive than Digital Ocean. I actually hope they
stay that way. Why?

My expectations are that they take that extra money and give me more
assurances. Pricing is screwy and I fully admit this just may be pricing
psychology.

For the extra amount I expect:

* Better support

* More stable network and disk I/O

* Feature decisions that favor stability over bleeding edge.

Every quarter I am looking at digital ocean and wondering if I need to move
our production boxes over. So far though Linode has me hooked. The extra
amount I save is not worth it. Digital ocean wins hard on price but they need
more than that to buy a customer. Just like the competition between Azure and
Amazon, Azure needs to do MORE than price match. Azure needs to go above and
beyond what I expect from Amazon.

~~~
dangero
Outside of the standard SSD drives, DO has not had any major data breaches
that I'm aware of. That's a pretty big one. At this point recommending Linode
to a company I work for seems borderline negligent considering their security
history.

~~~
kyrra
DO had the issue where you could delete a droplet without scrubbing the disk.
So the next person to create in that area could read the disk and recover any
data from it.

~~~
dangero
To me that doesn't seem comparable to clear text passwords being stolen at
all.

------
DigitalSea
Finally. For a while now I've been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) when I need
to spin up a quick testing server independent of my standard Linode hosting.
The capped pricing per month is a nice touch, exactly the way Digital Ocean do
it.

As a Linode customer this makes me very happy, especially knowing it should
hopefully garner the company a few more customers. A great company that
deserves the success they get.

~~~
bashcoder
When comparing to AWS, it's worth noting that both Linode and DO continue to
charge hourly fees for instances that have been stopped but not destroyed.

AWS does not do this. Stop an EC2 instance and you stop paying hourly instance
fees. Even if it hasn't been terminated.

There are small fees for maintaining EBS volumes if you are using them for
inactive instances, however.

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brianbc
Several points here: #1 what is consider hourly usage? services actually
running, or just having the VPS enabled even though there is no actual usage
account time in the hourly billing? #2 linode should really work in their UX,
site is not visually enticing, though hacker news isnt either :P

~~~
jenscow
I also wondered that. See [https://library.linode.com/billing-and-
payments#sph_if-my-li...](https://library.linode.com/billing-and-
payments#sph_if-my-linode-is-powered-off-will-i-be-billed)

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rrrazdan
How does a Linode instance stack up against an AWS instance in computing
power? I have something on AWS which pushes a c3.large instance to around 80
percent of CPU util. I am thinking of going with a different provider for that
server at least, if it makes sense cost wise.

~~~
SEJeff
Linode doesn't oversubscribe to the extent AWS does. This results in Linode
_consistently_ beating AWS in just about every benchmark due to it being more
consistent.

~~~
tgeek
AWS doesn't oversubscribe at all. This is a pretty baseless rumor.

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hackerboos
Does Linode have the ability to grow a VPS?

~~~
robertfw
You can resize a VPS quite easily, but it does involve anywhere between 15-30
minutes to complete.

~~~
Kudos
It takes way longer than that at larger sizes.

On one of my 4096 boxes there:

> You will experience downtime while your Linode is migrated. We estimate 144
> minutes to migrate your Linode, but that may vary based on host and network
> load.

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aalpbalkan
DigitalOcean is doing this since the beginnning.

~~~
funkyy
Thats the point. There was no widely recognized host before that could try to
challenge big "cloud" companies. Now since DO is around trying to steal the
market with pricing (and acceptable quality), Linode needs to step up their
game. All of sudden it turned out that they can give twice the resources,
hourly pricing and still make money. Hail to free market competition!

~~~
opendais
To be fair, Linode doubled some aspect of their plan [without raising prices]
every year before DO even existed.

~~~
jedicoffee
And has a history of upgrades since 2003.

[https://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/page/3/](https://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/page/3/)

------
benjaminwootton
2009 called - they want their pricing model back.

It's amazing that the industry has come so far that it now seems normal to be
able to spin up a server, have it available in a minute or so, then bring it
down when done with it and only pay by the minute or hour.

