
11th Linode Birthday, $10 Linode plan - ljoshua
https://blog.linode.com/2014/06/16/11th-linode-birthday-10-linode-plan/
======
sergiotapia
Compared to DigitalOcean:

    
    
                      RAM - Processor - HD       - Transfer
        Linode        1GB - 1 Core    - 24GB SSD - 2TB
        DigitalOcean  1GB - 1 Core    - 30GB SSD - 2TB
    

Very compelling pricing, I may actually migrate a pet project of mine to
Linode because they have a more robust support system.

Now all they need to do is accept Paypal payments because I live in a third
world country and do not own an international credit card.

~~~
riquito
I suspect that the two SSD are on different levels. Linode has higher
standards.

I don't know if the following benchmarks are real, but if it is we're talking
about really different hardware (780 Mb/s vs 250 Mb/s)

[http://serverbear.com/2424-linode-2gb-ssd-
linode](http://serverbear.com/2424-linode-2gb-ssd-linode)
[http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-
digitalocean](http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean)

Maybe someone with both accounts can do a quick benchmark to verify or deny
this data.

~~~
scottlinux
Those are accurate numbers.

[https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=10960#p63254](https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=10960#p63254)

------
geerlingguy
This is great news; I have, for the past few years, been moving all my lower-
end VPSes from Linode to Digital Ocean. I recently told a Linode rep at
DrupalCon that I would start moving servers back as soon as they had a lower-
cost plan, and it looks like Linode has delivered.

Very few of my servers need more than 1 GB RAM, and the CPU and SSDs perform
similarly across DO and Linode (for my purposes). I'll still be using a bunch
of 512MB Digital Ocean servers for utility purposes, but I'm hoping that these
Linode VPSes will continue the trend of being slightly faster/more stable than
low-end VPSes from Digital Ocean and other lower-end/inexpensive hosts.

Since I now use Ansible for all my infrastructure management (and Ansible
integrates easily with Linode[1] and Digital Ocean[2]), it's trivially easy to
move individual servers between providers. This is not only nice to assist
with using the best price-performance combo, regardless of provider, but also
so I can move production infrastructure from provider to provider and
benchmark them against each other more easily.

[1]
[http://docs.ansible.com/linode_module.html](http://docs.ansible.com/linode_module.html)

[2]
[http://docs.ansible.com/digital_ocean_module.html](http://docs.ansible.com/digital_ocean_module.html)

~~~
tedchs
For the folks using Digital Ocean, have you considered Ramnode? $18 per _year_
for their ultra-tiny plan, "OpenVZ SSD VPS (SVZ v2) - Atlanta - 128MB SVZ". I
kinda love a company that constantly posts a 25% discount code on their own
homepage. :)

~~~
bluedino
Those are OpenVZ

~~~
tedchs
Correct, the ultra cheap one is OpenVZ (i.e. a container, not a VM). They do
have a KVM option that looks like similar prices to DO/etc.

------
endijs
[https://twitter.com/linode/status/478548938010939392](https://twitter.com/linode/status/478548938010939392)
for 10$ promo code if you want to try out. DigitalOcean very often gives out
credits for testing, first time I see Linode doing that.

~~~
sergiotapia
Unfortunately, they only take credit cards, and not only that - I need to type
in my non-existant card details in order to try out their free $10/month.

------
ausjke
Have been a satisfied customer with Linode for 7 years. Now I can move my
testing site to this new $10/m plan.

Meanwhile I'm slightly concerned about the future quality from Linode, as low-
priced $10 plan will certainly get lots of customers, but it may also bring
down quality from Linode. Popularity normally plays against quality, I hope I
am wrong.

~~~
agwa
I share your popularity vs quality concerns. I've been a customer for 9 years
and I've noticed two areas where I believe quality has declined in the last ~2
years as a result of their increased popularity:

1\. Their support, while still fast, has turned into script-reading drones and
I've often been frustrated when trying to deal with more complex issues. They
seem to assume everyone is stupid, which I think is a consequence of having
many customers.

2\. DoS attacks against other customers have gone way up, causing datacenter-
wide network outages. I think this is a consequence of having too many non-
professional customers who attract the wrong kind of attention. Creating a
$10/month plan will certainly not help with this.

Linode has been a great company and they deserve to enjoy the fruits of their
success, but it is definitely disappointing as a long-time customer to see
quality decline as they grow in popularity.

~~~
jebblue
I've been with them for 4 years and don't see any decline, at all.

------
edwinyzh
I have just submitted a ticket to ask Linode about downgrading from my current
$20 plan, since I host PHP websites only, and I use Ubuntu 32bit, and I don't
want to take risks to switch the kernel to 64bit in order to take advantage of
their recent free hardware
upgrades:[https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-
double-...](https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-ram-
much-more/)

I don't see any reasons they'll not let me downgrade, since there is no reason
to pay $20 and use the $10 spec, right? I'll keep you posted about it.

~~~
haelio
I've paid for a year of the $20 plan and am wondering whether my expiry date
will be pushed out pro-rata if I downgrade to the $10 plan. Any ideas?

~~~
haelio
Support answered my ticket within a few minutes. Basically my account is
credited the delta, and my account will automatically renew at the new rate
when the current period ends.

Basically, I don't lose any money.

------
mcescalante
Does anybody have a good comparison or story of why Linode is "more reliable"
than DO? I've read the simple "Digital Ocean vs. Linode" stuff posted here,
but it never offers any quantitative insight as to why people find Linode more
reliable. Anecdotes encouraged :)

~~~
opendais
[http://status.linode.com/](http://status.linode.com/)

vs.

[https://status.digitalocean.com/](https://status.digitalocean.com/)

I don't trust people's opinions unless either of them get caught outright
lying on their status pages. ;)

Anecdotal: I've seen ~5x as many VPS restarts due to host issues on DO than
Linode.

~~~
abhorrence
DO pretty much never seems to post anything on their status page unless it
affects a lot of their customers -- I've had support tickets with them where
they say a problem is affecting "some" customers, but they pretty much never
posted it on their status page. Whereas Linode seems to post status problems
far more frequently, and pretty much none of the problems listed have ever
affected any of my nodes.

Of course, this is all anecdotal, but Linode really does seem to over report
on their status page. And DO perhaps under reports.

~~~
yogo
This. My experience has been that Linode is very transparent about status
messages, and I'd even go so far as to say the most transparent I've seen.
Usually if an external service reports a timeout to me and I visit the status
page there is often an investigation notice posted regarding network latency.

------
skylan_q
I was considering getting a vps with them (since DO is dropping support for
arch) but $20/month seemed like too much of a commitment for some hobby work.
Now I'm sold. :)

~~~
yogo
I wasn't aware of this but found
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-
will-h...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-will-happen-
to-arch-linux-sign-here-against-deprecation)

One of my big reasons for having a few DO instances was the price + having
Arch--many of the cheap providers don't provide Arch images. This new Linode
plan will be a good option for the lower-end needs.

------
zapt02
Linode is taking up the fight with DigitalOcean! With Linodes great reputation
I'm sure a lot of people on DO will be trying their service in the coming
weeks.

~~~
erikano
I have a VPS with DigitalOcean and for some reason, logging in over SSH takes
disturbingly long. I may decide to switch over to Linode with these new
prices.

~~~
grey-area
This may be an issue with ssh trying to resolve reverse DNS on your server -
you can check by turning off UseDNS in ssh settings and logging in again.

~~~
erikano
Hey, thank you very much. I did as you said and now login is much much faster
:D

------
guylhem
Use promo code LINODE10 and you'll get $10 off - ie one free month! You'll be
charged $5 on your credit card, but your account will then show a $15 credit.

Feel free to use my referral code 9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7494470 or
link
[https://www.linode.com/?r=9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7...](https://www.linode.com/?r=9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7494470)
so that I benefit from it too :-)

------
guylhem
I'm new to linode. What is their outgoing bandwidth policy?

I mean, is it possible to automatically set up a throttle, to avoid charges
when going over 2TB? (or do I have to fiddle with iptables to find a way to do
that).

Also, do you know if it's possible to get a /48 IPv6?

On
[https://library.linode.com/networking/ipv6](https://library.linode.com/networking/ipv6)
they only mention /56

I'd hate to run a HE tunnelbroker just because they don't support that :-/ (I
love HE.net and tunnelbroker.net, but it would just be wasteful)

EDIT: /48 make running multiple VPNs very easy - that's lazy, but IPv6 are not
scarce resources!

EDIT2: just got an answer - they can't do /48 :-(

~~~
RKearney
What use case do you have for requiring a /48 on one server? That's 65536
/64s.

------
subbu
How does this compare to Hetzner's servers? Lets say
[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq12](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq12)

~~~
gtaylor
The only correct answer is: benchmark according to your specific application's
needs, since your demands may be different than mine or someone else's.

For more general benchmarks, this is handy:
[http://serverbear.com/](http://serverbear.com/)

But really, spin them up and test for the things that your usage case most
needs. My stuff doesn't hit the disk at all, so the fact that Hetzner doesn't
(at a glance) appear to be SSD-backed wouldn't bother me, but might not be OK
for someone else's usage case.

------
vcherubini
And there goes my DO plan. This is what Linode was missing, and I'm so happy
it's here. Thanks, Linode!

------
blisterpeanuts
Really, this is excellent news. I just deleted my $20/month Linode last week,
because I only got it to do some proof-of-concept stuff at work. But the $10
price point will probably persuade me to start it up again, and I can always
upgrade later if I start needing the premium resources.

------
misterbwong
What does everyone use these low-end plans for? Seeing the interest in this
thread has gotten me curious.

~~~
spurofthemoment
VPSes with 1 GB of RAM are more than enough to host a couple of web apps
(depending on traffic of course) with Python, PHP, or similar setups. When
Linode started out, their bottom offering was actually 512 MB if I remember
correctly, and SliceHost (later Rackspace Cloud) had 256 MB offerings.

~~~
rschoon
From a quick peek at their announcements from long ago, it looks like they
used to run 64MB as the smallest size, but this was, of course, back in
2003/2004.

Until 2008 or 2009, they were also still using UML, instead of XEN.

------
godDLL
CloudLix $10 1.5GB - 1 Core - 50GB SSD - 100Mbps 'unmetered'
[http://www.cloudlix.com/nuolaida;1bb1f52aa5](http://www.cloudlix.com/nuolaida;1bb1f52aa5)
(thank you).

------
ahmett
Note, DigitalOcean has a $5 plan, and works quite fine for my case where I
host tons of small traffic websites and background tasks.

~~~
efuquen
Agreed. Funny timing as I was just checking back to look at Linode pricing
yesterday after having made the switch to DO over a year ago and was amazed
they're cheapest plan was $20. Good to see they've lowered it further but even
that $5 difference is a big deal if you're using a lot of vms and simply don't
need the extra memory from a $10 a month plan. They need to at least reach
parity, otherwise there really isn't any incentive for me to switch to pay $5
more a month per VM that I know doesn't need the extra resources.

------
nickporter
I've been using linode for +3 years now, and it's been great. Top notch
support, and they have Gentoo images!

------
thecosas
Just downgraded to this. Half the price of the $20/m plan. Never really needed
all they were giving me. Woo hoo!

~~~
kibwen
I've just downgraded as well. While the server itself is invaluable, I've only
ever used a tiny fraction of its potential each month.

However, at this price point, I'm considering spinning up a second server just
to tool around with (which is what this server was originally for before I and
all my friends started relying on it as a proxy/gameserver/URL shortener/IRC
persistor).

------
scorpioxy
Very nice. I can't seem to find it anymore on the site; is the discount on
yearly prepayment still valid?

~~~
kbar13
for all new customer accounts, no. You can still get the discount if you're
still on the legacy prepaid billing accounts.

------
NYCHacker
how does Linode compare to Amazon AWS?

~~~
gtaylor
Apples to oranges. AWS's main appeal isn't VMs (EC2), it's the huge portfolio
of other services you can make use of.

Linode is more of a VM host with a few also-ran services that they are
experimenting with (Load Balancing).

If all you need is somewhere to host a cheap VM, go Linode. If you want to
make use of a larger collection of services (that you don't have to maintain)
to build applications on, AWS may be worth a look.

~~~
Kudos
You can use Linode for not cheap VMs too. A good use case for Linode is high
bandwidth sites, Amazon's data transfer charges are horrendous.

------
ekar45
[http://perks.coderin90.com](http://perks.coderin90.com) (we wanna join in on
the fun!!!!) learn to code and get some perks

~~~
ForHackernews
Stop spamming your site on every tangentially-related article.

