
Linode Nextgen: The Network - stefantalpalaru
http://blog.linode.com/2013/03/07/linode-nextgen-the-network/
======
pavs
I never quite understood the love for premium vps like linode (also remember
slicehost?). If you check out lowendbox vps, their top-rated providers almost
always beats linode (and alike) in almost all category you can think of.

Its nice that they are now increasing the bandwidth cap, but it was on the low
side to begin with. My takeaway from this is that "linode finally joins
everyone else in network speed and bandwidth."

Don't get me wrong, I have used linode in the past and enjoyed them very much
and never had any problems, and support was top notch. but their offering is
not very impressive at all.

Edit: wow, thats a lot of hostility... didn't realize linode reached fandom
status. I guess I should keep my opinions to myself then?

~~~
cheald
Support matters. When your neighbor is being DDOSed and you're offline as
collateral damage, active support is the difference between happy customers
and angry customer losses.

For hobby boxes, yeah, sure, use whatever is the most cost-efficient.

~~~
taligent
Linode is great during stable periods but when there is an outage or DDOS they
are completely absent. I was sick to death of waiting whilst my Fremont
instances were down due to power issues and receiving no response from support
tickets.

And based on their security incidents Linode is absolutely in the hobby box
category as well. At least Amazon is PCI DSS compliant.

~~~
ceejayoz
> I was sick to death of waiting whilst my Fremont instances were down due to
> power issues and receiving no response from support tickets.

Do you want their engineers bringing up the datacenter or answering up a bunch
of e-mails with "we're working on bringing up the datacenter"?

~~~
biot
For a company providing critical computing resources, during an incident there
should be one person responsible for managing incident response. It actually
shouldn't be an engineer; the person's job should be to bug engineers as
little as possible but provide periodic updates in a central location (a site
of the form <https://status.example.com>) which is available to all customers.

------
windexh8er
I'm actually most unimpressed with the vendor selection. So now Linode has
Cisco overhead in their premium tier of hardware. Not good from a costing
perspective. The Cisco Nexus line is hardly next generation when it comes to
R&S product.

Linode is in a position to seriously consider SDN and they shoot themselves in
the foot with one of the most stagnant companies as it applies to new and
innovative product for pushing packets. I'd have been far more impressed with
Juniper in the hot seat here. At least they're more cost competitive. You can
get a full non-blocking 10Gb L3 switch (480Gb backplane) for less than $20k
fully loaded up with 10Gb SRs out of their EX line if you're looking to play
it safe in 'standard' networking.

The good part about software is there's far less vendor bias. This just smells
of a Cisco blowhard touting the wonders of a fully vendor locked network. And
software people seem to be less informed of the reality that is how the
current norm of the networking realm works.

Good luck to them. I've put in plenty of ASR and Nexus gear in the past few
years. They'll need it.

~~~
dangrossman
Were they wrong when they said the Cisco product was the only one that could
handle their routing requirements?

~~~
caf
I can see how you read it that way, but that's not what they said. They said
that the Cisco Nexus 7000 is the only _Cisco device_ that could handle their
routing requirements.

~~~
dangrossman
My mistake :)

------
mrb
I have a hard time trusting Linode after the major March 2012 security
incident where an attacker compromised an internal system that let him gain
access to any Linode Manager accounts:
[http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-
incident.h...](http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-
incident.html) and basically had access to _all customers servers_!

I have a hard time trusting them because they specifically gave very little
information. I would have expected a followup with a better response, like
Google or Facebook do when they get compromised: "the attacker used exploit X
on this developer's workstation, therefore we are doing Y to prevent this from
happening again".

They can work on increasing performance all they want, but if I do not have
basic trust in the security of their infrastructure, this does not matter. I
expect top-notch security especially from a "premium" VPS provider!

~~~
seany
This type of thing is my primary complaint about linode. Their transparency on
things that make them look even slightly bad is basically non existent.

------
endianswap
This is one of the reasons why I am happy to support Linode with my business:
they seem to care about doing things the right way and keeping people happy.
I've got a simple 512 Linode server that I use infrequently (I like having a
Linux box available in the "cloud" to SSH to from home/work) and yet I've
always been treated as a "real" customer. I know it's sad that I'm impressed
by it, but grandfathering in customers like this just by default, and always
having great support turnaround times (within a couple hours at basically any
time of the day) makes me like the Linode guys a ton. This sort of stuff is
the reason why I don't really care if there's a cheaper alternative; I know
what I'm paying for and I'm very happy with what I'm getting.

------
nemesisj
We run our company using Linode as one of our primary providers. We're very,
very happy with their uptimes, control panel, and particularly their support.
It's a testament to their professionalism that they've been going about these
pretty major changes without experiencing any downtime. I'd highly recommend
them.

~~~
pw7
Great to hear that, I switched from heroku to linode a couple of days ago and
couldn't be happier. I haven't had to contact the support yet because the
documentation is so excellent.

------
gingerlime
Linode is definitely one of the best VPS providers. They don't market it as
'fanatical', but their support is simply incredible. I like AWS too, but the
lack of support (unless you pay loads) keeps me with Linode.

Nextgen sounds cool. Extra bandwidth is great. I also hope they add more RAM
and provide some kind of a storage pool to store images/snapshots/virtual-
disks between different linodes (similar to cloudfiles or EBS).

~~~
zaius
Their support is quick, but they only solve the problem if it's easy.

My linode IP ended up on an email block list because of someone else on the
subnet. I was on vacation so I wanted a quick solution and I asked for an
extra IP for a week. They wouldn't do for any amount of money. I had to set up
an extra server and redirect connections instead.

~~~
gingerlime
I can't comment on your particular case, but it sounds odd that they didn't
help out. Certainly not my experience with their support so far (and I've been
with Linode for probably 4 or 5 years now and used their support on many
occasions)

However, it's so easy to fire-up another linode, shut down the host, move the
disk image to the new linode, assign it and turn it on. You get a new IP, and
can get rid of the old one. And all this via their web interface and with no
need for support...

~~~
zaius
I needed to keep the old IP during changeover so that DNS had time to update.

Not bashing linode, because I think they do a fine job - I have two servers
with a year and a half of uptime. But I don't think the support is a valid
reason for them charging more than their competitors.

------
shimon_e
Find this interesting? OVH is already upgrading routers to 100gbps and 500gbps
versions.

<http://www.infinera.com/j7/servlet/NewsItem?newsItemID=336>

~~~
giulianob
Their servers seem extremely cheap. Are you basically getting what you pay for
with their service or do they have solid uptime and solid support?

~~~
dangrossman
The cheap 'servers' aren't servers -- they're desktop parts in a rack. Desktop
hardware fails more often, and non-ECC RAM will experience multiple bit flips
per year on average. That's fine for a dev/staging server, but not a good
thing on a production server with paying customers.

~~~
shimon_e
Their real servers are quiet cheap and beefy.

Drooling @ <http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/eg_64g_ssd.xml>

------
agwa
Does anyone know if Linode has investors? I've never been able to find mention
of any, and the fact that they've been in this for the long haul (since 2003)
and are now expanding after seeing massive growth in the last two years[1]
makes me think they're bootstrapped. If that's true it would be seriously
awesome. They were started by a single founder too!

[1] [http://blog.linode.com/2012/08/28/linode-
makes-2012-inc-500-...](http://blog.linode.com/2012/08/28/linode-
makes-2012-inc-500-list/)

------
gtaylor
Wow, this is quite a jump. Great to see Linode continue to lower costs and
improve quality.

It's also important to note that if the billing system stays the same, each
instance you purchase increments your account-wide bandwidth pool. For
example, if a Linode 512 has 2 TB worth of data and you have two of them, you
end up with 4 TB for all Linodes on your account. It's not bound to the
individual Linodes.

------
Matsta
Instead of getting a $20 VPS, why doesn't anyone consider a full dedicated for
$12?

<http://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml>

I realise that people have mixed feelings about OVH, but I've yet to have a
problem and 100% uptime. Plus I can max out 100 mbps on the server pretty
easily.

Another 2 providers that probably have a better reputation than Linode are
BuyVM and RamNode: <http://buyvm.net/> <http://ramnode.com/>

A 512mb is less than half price there and they use SSD's.

But the main thing I'm seeing now for commercial sites, is why don't you use
Jekyll and host your site on a CDN like Cloud Files or CloudFront? I'm
suprised how cheap it is now to use a full on CDN to host your site. While
it's not for everyone, most business sites are just a landing page and a
wordpress blog, which would be much more resource efficient if it was hosted
on a CDN, plus your pretty much guaranteed 100% uptime.

So for under $20 you can get a SSD VPS and your site hosted on Akamai's CDN or
just a $20 box from Linode :/

------
spitfire
Neat. But it's really the hardware size that's the restricting feature of
linode. In particular: Memory.

~~~
jcdavis
Yea. I'm hoping as part of this nextgen upgrade they announce more RAM. SSDs
would of course be nice too, but more RAM is what I want the most

~~~
chx
For less than the price of a 4GB linode get a 32GB SSD server from OVH
<http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sp_32g_ssd.xml> or a multitude of
others [http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8302/99-e3-32-gb-
list-o...](http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8302/99-e3-32-gb-list-of-
providers) .

~~~
jjcm
How is the performance of OVH's network by the way? Anyone had any issues with
it? I'm paying ~80/mo right now for VPSs, and this offers way more horsepower
than what I have now. Any downsides to going this route? Also is there
anything comparable that's located on the west coast?

~~~
taneliv
I'm absolutely stoked about their low-end dedicated servers. I have 13€/mo and
18€/mo instances (located in France) and I'm in Finland. No issues whatsoever,
connectivity or uptime, and I use them to run both my personal and company
mail, and some web stuff. If you go over traffic quota (5TB / mo) they will
limit your speed to 10Mbit/s, not cut you off or bill extra (but you can
purchase extra quota). But I have no idea how good their support is because I
never needed it.

After initial setup you may want to change the grsec kernel to something else
(according to preferences, it's not bad), and by default they have root ssh
access to your box (key-based auth), which you may want to revoke.

Ovh has one data center in Canada, but that's in Quebec, not west coast.

~~~
muyuu
Yep. They're not just a small Johnny-come-lately shop either, they've been top
tier in Europe for a long time.

------
evanw
Edit: The post title has been changed, but tldr is that Linode is increasing
the monthly transfer limit quota 10x because they're upgrading their network
infrastructure.

\--

It's great that Linode is passing these improvements to their customers free
of charge. A while back they increased RAM allocated to all users without
increasing prices, which was a great surprise. Things like this make me happy
to host my multiple projects with them.

------
Expez
I have recently been thinking about moving to digitalocean, because they look
like excellent value. I haven't made the move yet because of inertia, and
Linode's customer service which is just mind-blowingly good. I suspect that in
a couple of days I won't be able to spot a single patch of greener grass on
the other side of the proverbial fence.

~~~
xur17
I really wish DigitalOcean provided more then one core on their plans with <
2gb of memory. Despite that, I am probably going to move to the 512mb plan in
the next year or so (once I get around to it). The backup feature is enough
incentive alone.

~~~
Matsta
Meh DigitalOcean is oversold. Each box has 128gb ram, so you are probably
going to be on a server with 100+ other VPS's.

Lots of people have been complaining about network speeds recently:

[http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8339/very-bad-
performan...](http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8339/very-bad-performance-
downloading-from-digital-ocean-vps-http/)

------
slig
That's great. If it was another provider doing this 10 fold increase, I'd
suspect they would fuck up and wouldn't be able to deliver. Linode earned my
trust and I can't recommend them enough.

~~~
taligent
Please. Major upgrades happen every single day among the various VPS
providers. And whilst it is notable it isn't particularly useful to most
Linode customers. In fact 99% won't see any difference at all.

Had they actually decided to offer SSD based instances to compete with the
likes of DigitalOcean then we would have something interesting.

Also this is a terrible way for a company to earn trust. It should be earned
based on their behaviour during the bad times. And we know how appalling
Linode handles those.

~~~
slig
My comment wasn't clear. Linode has earned my trust along the years (been a
costumer since Jan/2009), via top notch support and quality hardware/network.

------
api
2TB is good... their old bandwidth was paltry.

Everyone chant with me: price war! price war! price war!

------
jacques_chester
Once I moved out of the Fremont DC, I was very happy with Linode.

But I have sites that choke on quite modest I/O. I waited for Linode to
install SSDs, then waited, and waited more. Last week I gave up and moved to
DigitalOcean.

------
nodesocket
Linode hands down is the best VPS company. I fully expect SSD drives to be
available in Nextgen as well, looking forward to it.

~~~
DigitalJack
DigitalOcean has been working well for me. They have SSD, but only single
core.

~~~
bjxrn
Looks like they have up to 4 cores in their standard plans, and up to 24 on
their larger plans, all SSD: <https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing>

------
karolist
I have been Linode customer since sometime 2008 I think till last month, when
I fully migrated to Digital Ocean to two, individually better instances for
half the price than my one box at Linode.

I was running Gentoo at London DC without any issues, my major gripes with
Linode was how hard was it to get additional IPv4 addresses without lying
about your reasons - i.e running services on different IP addresses or
separating your business/personal websites (and very easy if you lied, I know
someone who did). Another thing was that I paid them by a virtual CC and
always put there just enough money for transaction every month, it's dedicated
for internet pay only and prevents cc fraud, but every now and then they'd get
the card declined at the beginning of the month cause I didn't put the money
in yet, like 2nd or 3rd day and always always there was this template
threatening ticket put in by a person in my account. I was paying them every
month for years, so what if I have outstanding balance on the 2nd or 3rd, is
that the reason to threat deleting my stuff? That felt really alienating.

Digital Ocean, while don't hand out IP addresses at all, costs so little that
it's $1 + damn good reason at Linode or $5 and a VPS on top for the IP at DO.

The support at DO is nor fast, nor technical, I had issues with my Gentoo
builds basically where after reboot /dev/null would come up being a text file
with junk in it, you can mknod it but it wouldn't survive reboot. I've raised
a ticket and they've removed Gentoo from selection, but I doubt it's fixed and
and I'll have to work some ugly hacks to work around this if it happens again.

They use a kernel loaded from below, so you won't really have latest and
greatest Arch if you use that, kernel upgrades are in pkg ignore list and even
if upgraded it won't load.

I might return to Linode sometime in the future if DO messes up my Gentoos
again and Linode does better at matching DO's offer.

At the moment, if you don't need to scale a lot (it's not as convenient at
Linode, $20 vs $5 starts to hurt as the number of boxes go up, also Linode
doesn't bill you by the our) and just want a personal server for your website
I'd still go with Linode, especially after increased transfer quotas.

------
machbio
Cant Love them Enough, they are meticulous in their efforts and the most
trustworthy VPS providers.. Just love them - can do free advertising for them
- call me fan or follower.. we love Linode

------
sideproject
Woo Hoo! I really don't understand much about what you guys are doing, but
well, I'm a happy linode customer, so whatever it is that you are doing to
make things faster, better, bring it on!

------
vertis
Wahey! I love good news. I'm still running a bunch of linodes for free off the
credit I won for <http://faxitforme.com> in Rails Rumble 2012

------
t0mislav
I made little benchmark, Linode vs Digital Ocean
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5221477>

------
azurelogic
The irony is that, in spite of these upgrades, my first attempt to load the
blog post timed out, and the second attempt was not speedy (or should I say
SPDY?)

~~~
rschmitty
I also had a time out. Perhaps they host their blog on some external service

~~~
azurelogic
Probably an AWS micro instance

------
Void_
If you went from 200GB to 2000GB, you increased 200GB 10 times, you increased
it by 1800GB, you increased it by 900%, not 1000%. Just sayin'.

------
jonknee
A 10x increase in bandwidth is pretty impressive. More useful to me at least
is the increased throughput though, 250Mbps is pretty speedy.

------
johnpowell
I love Linode but the paltry RAM got me to move to someone else that I have
been happy with for the last month. The customer service was great but the
specs were bad. If they double the RAM for the same price I would move back in
a heartbeat.

Hopefully Nextgen v.2 adds RAM for the same price.

------
bfrog
Been using linode for 3 years now for a little instance to do basic stuff on.
Its only ever been down once for a move to a new, faster, host. Even that they
gave significant notice for and plenty of time for me to move it (I chose when
to move it).

------
welcomen
Someone in the world are always unsatisfied for everything, yes, everything,
no matter what you changed, no matter what you improved, they always always
can point something out there to complain about. Example!? Right here!

------
tshtf
For those with high bandwidth needs this would really make sense. The cheapest
package has 2TB of egress bandwidth; this would cost $228 (0.12 x 1900GB) with
AWS EC2.

------
iframe
What is the cost of a Cisco Nexus 7000 Router and Switch?

~~~
amckenna
$83,490 but the price rises dramatically if they filled all of the expansion
slots.

_[http://www.ctistore.com/catalog/cat/prod,574258.html?gclid=C...](http://www.ctistore.com/catalog/cat/prod,574258.html?gclid=CK_Hi-3N67UCFY8WMgodZzwA_Q*)

_[http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Cisco-
Nexus-7000-Series-32-...](http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Cisco-
Nexus-7000-Series-32-Port-10-Gigabit-Ethernet-Module-with-XL-
Option/2816432.aspx?cm_mmc=ShoppingFeeds-_-GoogleBase-_-
NetComm%20Products-_-2816432_Cisco%20Nexus%207000%20Series%2032-Port%2010%20Gigabit%20Ethernet%20Module%20with%20XL%20Option%20-_CIS-N7K-M132XP-12L=*)

------
jpdoctor
They talk about interconnectivity bandwidth, but not the pipes going out to
the backbone or peering. Anyone know?

------
t0mislav
Now we are waiting part 2 and 3 of Linode Nextgen. (I think one part will be
storage)

------
404error
As a new customer who has had nothing but a great experience so far, thank
you.

------
ForFreedom
What about Rackspace Cloud?

~~~
johnward
Managed cloud at rackspace starts at $100 plus usage charges. Seems a bit
high.

~~~
ForFreedom
If managed, but unmanaged starts at $16.xx for 512MB and outbound traffic is
at 0.12/GB I think

~~~
username111
Except now rackspace is even more expensive than linode for certain uses as
the 2TB of bandwidth free would cost you an extra $240 on rackspace cloud and
because bandwidth is shared between all linodes this extra bandwidth can make
a big difference.

~~~
ForFreedom
If you are having 2TB BW then you would not host on linode or rackspace cloud,
but take a dedicated server.

------
t0mislav
I have Linode VPS for 3.5 yeras now, no problems at all.

------
alexkus
900% increase.

~~~
zupa-hu
I wished it was not only bugging me

------
andyl
I've had a system on Linode for the past two years. Zero problems, zero
downtime. My experience with Linode has been very consistent and reliable.

~~~
Skywing
My Linode accounts on their Dallas data center have gone through quite a bit
of downtime over the years. Their support is why I've stuck with them, though.

------
stefantalpalaru
original title: "Linode is increasing the monthly transfer quota 10x after a
hw upgrade"

