
Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase - JshWright
http://blog.linode.com/2010/06/16/linode-turns-7-big-ram-increase/
======
teilo
I switched from Webfaction to Linode about six months ago, because the WF
server I was on kept experiencing hard drive failures leading to an
unacceptable amount of downtime. Once is tolerable, but they should have
replaced the drive then. They didn't, and two months later it failed again.
Again they tried to repair the filesystem. It failed two days later again.
When I challenged them on this, they admitted they knew the drive was bad, and
that it had no redundancy (seriously?!!!), but blamed the guys managing the
hardware (which is evidently NOT Webfaction). Not to mention a ridiculously
slow control panel at random times.

Linode has been a dream-come-true. I pay only a few bucks more a month than I
did for my Tier-4 plan at Webfaction. Plus, I'm back to managing my own server
and no longer have to deal with all the Apache port-forwarding weirdness,
local profile software installs, etc.

I've used other VPS hosting companies in the past, but Linode blows them all
out of the water. Their VPS infrastructure is very well engineered, and fast.
Nobody can touch their price/performance ratio. EDIT: BTW - I am excluding
OpenVZ-based VPS's which come with a number of issues that I don't care to
deal with.

~~~
donw
Same here; Linode has one my heart for three very important reasons, that will
mean a lot to anybody looking for small-scale hosting:

1\. Proper provisioning. They aren't the cheapest option in the market, but
they actually provide what you're paying for. I've never had CPU, disk, or
memory contention issues on my Linode because they packed too many instances
on a host.

2\. Great peering. Their network guys know what they're doing, and it shows in
the low latency I've seen on my server hosted there, even coming from Japan.

3\. Great staff. I wanted to set up my DNS with a wildcard MX record for
subdomains, so that I could route mail without having to manually add MX
records for every new account. The RFC for DNS allows this, but the Linode DNS
management interface didn't... until I contacted them and asked for it.
Initially, they gave the 'sorry, but we don't support that' line, but after I
pointed out the relevant bit in the RFC, the feature was added within two
days. I have _never_ had a hosting provider respond like that.

------
mr_luc
This is a coincidence. I had a funny experience with Linode just today!

I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card
(visa) expired a little over a month ago.

"Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less
than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all."

So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not
checking email for a month at a stretch.

They deleted my linode. It´s completely gone.

I feel a little sick ... it was just for personal use (for now), and I have
all of the git repos on my local machine as well, but I´m not yet to the point
where everything I do on the server is in a repo somewhere. Poof, hundreds of
hours of server mangling, gone forever.

Literally, if you forget to check your email, they delete it in 20 days. If
your bank card expires while you´re out of touch ... for some strange reason
... anyway, instead of warehousing your data for even a few months, they kill
you.

I like linode. I just feel sick right now.

On the one hand, I´m an idiot.

On the other hand, 20 days?!?!?! When you know how precious a customers´data
is in this context, and it´s purely a question of temporary storage, why?!?

I need a drink. Oh, yeah, Go Linode!

edit: okay, I´m over it now. Leaving the original, melodramatic writing
because, darn it linode, someone from Slicehost posted that Slicehost did it
differently, and my reaction is relevant to your business.

~~~
JshWright
tl;dr; Didn't back up data/config files, expected hosting company to store
data for free

~~~
alex_c
Actually, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a hosting company to store
some data for free. Not in the sense that I'm entitled to it as a customer,
but in the sense that it might be in their best interests: if the data is
deleted, that's a pretty good guarantee that the client won't reactivate; if
the data is saved and it's trivial to reactivate, some percentage of customers
will do so.

~~~
megablast
It really depends on the number of people they get doing this. If there are
loads of accounts that are just left to rot, then it might not be worth it
doing this. If there are lots of cases like the original poster, then it might
be.

------
mitchellh
And the tumbleweeds continue to roll across SliceHost... which is stuck in
2008.

~~~
listic
Price isn't everything.

~~~
btmorex
That's true. On the other hand, Linode is competitive on price and service.
Every ticket I've submitted has gotten a response within a couple hours.
That's pretty good considering how much I'm paying. Honestly, I don't know why
someone would get a vps from a different company.

~~~
patio11
I'm happy you are happy, and am not trying to convert you to Slicehost. That
said, a bit on my thought process: I've been with them for years, switching
costs are non-trivial in terms of my time (and switching could break stuff),
and I have absolute and total confidence in them to treat me well.

I just checked my email. In the last year, I've had three incidents with
Slicehost, all connected to issues experienced when migrating VPSes. All were
resolved in minutes.

Not to knock Linode, or Rackspace Cloud, or EC2, or whatever, but none of them
have ever been in the foxhole with me at 3 AM when the server was down and got
it back up before customers noticed.

~~~
axod
I think both have great support. They both have active and lively IRC channels
where staff hang out. It's usually very quick to resolve issues with slicehost
and linode.

The pain point for me at slicehost was bandwidth - they charge a lot, linode
charge a little. Also far more options on linode etc etc once I moved that all
added up to a better experience.

------
whyenot
One thing I personally like about Linode is that they continue to contribute
code, sponsor conferences, and otherwise support the open source community. Of
course there is a certain amount of self interest involved, but not every VPS
hosting company gives back like this.

~~~
kellishaver
I first found out about Linode by participating in Rails Rumble, which they
were providing hosting for, and switched to them from Slicehost after last
year's competition. They offered 3mo free to any competitors who wanted to
sign up. I sent in a support ticket and it was dealt with in literally 15
minutes. I've been extremely happy with them ever since.

------
lr
My sole reason for picking Linode for hosting was RAM, as there was no one
else out there who matched the RAM for the price. And now, WOW, I am a very
happy customer. Thank You, Linode!!!

------
trevorturk
I've been a happy Slicehost customer for a long time, but I've heard good
things about Linode and liked using them well enough during Rails Rumble...

This price difference is pretty tempting. Does anyone that's made the switch
from Slicehost to Linode care to tell us about their experience?

~~~
davidw
I wrote a fairly well-received article about my switch. Since I switched, I
have been happy with Linode.

~~~
jules
Link?

~~~
davidw
I actually avoided putting it because I don't want to spam it around too much,
but hey, I'm happy to:

<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode>

------
megamark16
Here's a google cache of their homepage before, for quick comparison to what's
up now, for anyone like me who didn't have their old prices memorized:

New prices: <http://www.linode.com> Old prices:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kVmwiN5...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kVmwiN52X3gJ:www.linode.com/+http://www.linode.com/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
commx
The prices didn't change... you just get more RAM for the same money :).

~~~
galactus
It is the same thing, no? You could just downgrade back to your old ram, for
less money.

~~~
uggedal
Not if you were on their 360MB plan, which I guess probably more than 90% was.

------
jonknee
This may be the final kick in the pants to switch over from Slicehost.

------
natfriedman
Linode has been fabulous, and this is great news. But I've never understood
why their storage pricing is so high:

Additional 1 GB Disk Space - (add $2.00/mo)

Additional 2 GB Disk Space - (add $4.00/mo)

Additional 3 GB Disk Space - (add $6.00/mo)

Additional 4 GB Disk Space - (add $8.00/mo)

Additional 5 GB Disk Space - (add $10.00/mo)

Additional 6 GB Disk Space - (add $12.00/mo)

About 20 times higher than Amazon EBS.

------
askedrelic
I believe I am going to switch from Slicehost now.

Anyone have a referral code they would want to me use?

~~~
woogley
[http://www.linode.com/?r=200d6bb341711532c638b475e536b0205ce...](http://www.linode.com/?r=200d6bb341711532c638b475e536b0205ce17f63)

Please and thank you.

------
barredo
I have a question about VPS, hope someone could help and not be much offtopic:

I have a dedicated server (in Softlayer) with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3220 @
2.40GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB (which I only use 5 or 6, so it's not an issue) and
2000Gb transfer. Price is 189$ a month.

Is it worth to switch to Linode's 4GB ram plan? I was thinking in getting a
new server in softlayer with 12-16GB ram.

tl;dr: is it worth switching from a dedicated to a vps with similar specs?

~~~
tbrownaw
That depends on what % of your cpu you're using, and how sensitive you are to
disk bandwidth. Look at what fraction of the host machine you get ("How many
Linodes share a host", <http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm> ), do you use more than
that fraction of the resources that would be shared (disk I/O, CPU time)? How
much is having a nice web interface for rebooting and such worth?

~~~
jules
> Linodes of the same plan are grouped together onto a host. We adjust the
> number of slots on each host according to its resources and hardware
> specification. On average, a Linode 512 host has 40 Linodes on it. A Linode
> 768 host has on average 30. Linode 1024 host: 20 Linodes; Linode 1536 host:
> 15; Linode 2048 host: 10; Linode 4096: 5.

Does this mean that a 512 host has 40*512MB = 20GB of physical RAM? If it is
less than that, then where does the 512 figure come from?

~~~
bbatsell
I believe they have 24GB of physical RAM (with the remainder going towards
dom0 and the hypervisor).

~~~
lsc
I find that... unusual. the hypervisor eats 64MiB, and few people use more
than 1GiB in the Dom0.

~~~
bbatsell
I believe the current Xen hypervisor uses about 128MB now, but yeah — I
sincerely doubt it's out of strict necessity, but out of wanting to ensure not
to overload each machine with too many nodes. They wouldn't bump down to 22GB
because I assume their mobos are dual-channeled.

Or, they're fibbing a bit by using that "on average" language, and they
actually have more like 42 or 44 nodes, but wanted the nice round numbers for
the marketing copy.

Edit: Oh, I didn't check the username. I imagine you'd know better than I.

------
bigsassy
Wow, that's really great. Makes me feel better about the outages we've been
dealing with at the Dallas center.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1392700>

~~~
jread
Linode has 5 data centers. I've maintained a node in each of them the past six
months with the following results:

Dallas: 99.959% Newark: 99.971% London: 99.986% Fremont: 99.992% Atlanta: 100%

I've heard from others here that Atlanta has been a very reliable LN data
center for them as well.

~~~
astrodust
Do you have any metrics for this? I have found issues with all the data-
centers. NJ seems the most problematic from experience, followed closely by
Dallas, which your data does confirm.

~~~
jread
<http://uptime.cloudharmony.com>

If you click on any of the Linode links, you can see when outages occurred,
how long they were, and usually an explanation of the outage (if Linode
provided one to me)

------
mahmud
My favorite just got favoriter.

------
pdx
I was on Slicehost, and I really struggled with whether to change to Linode.
It's not that I was having any problems with Slicehost. I loved it. I just
kept looking at that extra RAM on Linode, and all those data centers.

When they got the UK data center, that clinched it. I had been hoping to
someday expand to UK, so when Linode did that, I changed over that day.

------
markmywords
Time to move my last few servers from Slicehost to Linode.

------
dubs
Enough is enough. Moving to Linode tonight.

------
imp
Wow, a lot cheaper than Slicehost now. $20/month gets you 256 MB on Slicehost
and 512 MB on Linode.

~~~
jwr
$15.20/month gets you 512MB on fivebean.com. I've been quite happy with them
so far.

~~~
spicyj
And $12 gets you 512MB on <http://prgmr.com/>.

~~~
tszming
The point is Linode has better service, e.g. 24x7 IRC, responsive ticket
system, powerful admin interface.

~~~
lsc
This is true; But good support is a difficult (and thus expensive) problem;
I'm providing a alternative where if you are willing to have slower ticket
resolution, you get a discount.

------
jules
A stupid question: why are the bigger linodes relatively more expensive? You
get 512MB for $19.95 and 1024MB for $39.95. If you buy 2x512MB, don't you get
twice as much CPU too?

~~~
kijinbear
Linode is pretty much a pay-per-use service in the guise of a VPS host. You
use twice as much resources, you pay twice as much. You stop using your VPS
for a day, your account is credited back for that day. Overage charges are
very similar to regular charges. And so on.

~~~
jules
So you can compute roughly the same number of digits of pi on 2x512 machines
as on one 1024 machine? i.e. you get the same number of execution
threads/cycles?

~~~
kijinbear
No, CPU seems to be an exception. Even on the smallest plan, you can often
burst all the way to 400% (4 cores). So it depends on what other customers are
doing, and if everyone else were idle, you'd get the same CPU in both plans.
But the host machine is at least an 8-core beast, so one person bursting to
400% doesn't affect other customers as much as it would in other hosting
platforms. Also, the main bottleneck in a VPS setup is RAM and I/O.
Personally, I've never had a CPU shortage in the two years I've been with
Linode ;)

~~~
jules
Hmm, so I should run my combinatorial search algorithms on 512 Linodes,
although perhaps they wouldn't like that ;)

------
Dirt_McGirt
Well, there went my 191 day uptime. Which is incidentally the number of days
ago they opened their London datacentre.

~~~
rimantas
Same here. It was 400+ before moving to London DC from the one in US.

------
Daevien
Very nice, just more proof that linode rules :)

------
xinsight
In terms of iPhone apps, linode easily beats slicehost. Nice graphs for CPU,
network, etc. And last i looked, slicehost required you to make a URL with you
API key and mail it to yourself, which is a huge PITA.

~~~
Greenisus
I wrote the Slicehost app. Would love to add graphs, but that data's not
available yet in the API. As for the email link, that's because the app came
out before the iPhone had a copy/paste feature. You don't need that anymore
with copy/paste.

~~~
xinsight
Cut/paste that string is still quite fiddly.

Do you know why slicehost doesn't just make their private API key a link in
the slice manager? I'm also curious what extra level of security the API key
buys. If I lose my phone people can still mess with my slices.

I thought the iphone app was a slicehost product - but are you saying you just
developed the app as a customer? That's mighty generous...

------
yurylifshits
I am with linode and pretty happy with the experience

------
hack_edu
Linode is still second to Chunkhost in terms of value at the low-end, free-
beta and beta tester discounts aside. Chunkhost has had 512mb for a year now,
and still offers 20% more disk space. In my experience Linode's network speeds
to be much less consistent and, at their peaks, considerably slower.

Yes, all this probably change when Chunkhost goes stable.

~~~
carbon8
I like chunkhost and have a vps there, but the admin interface is still
incredibly rudimentary. You can't really do anything other than reboot,
create, destroy and reimage. Still, I'm a happy chunkhost customer, I think
they have great potential and recommend them to anyone who is looking for a
simple, cheap VPS.

------
listic
How much is the extra traffic, again?

200GB of traffic included seemed good at the time, but it doesn't already. I'm
seeing (and using) more offers lately that have much more traffic included.

~~~
zefhous
They aren't very draconian about overages — they won't shut you down if you go
over.

$0.10/GB if purchased in advance, $0.15 retrospectively.

Also, if you have multiple linodes your bandwidth is pooled.

[http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#what-if-i-go-over-my-
monthly-n...](http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#what-if-i-go-over-my-monthly-
network-data-transfer)

------
spicyj
I wish they would offer a "Linode 256" VPS for $10 a month, but I doubt that
they will. Guess that would make them look cheap, which they're trying to
avoid.

~~~
joeyh
Me too.. I'd be happy with 128 mb at my current level of use. But I suspect
they might lose money at that price point.

~~~
lsc
unless their costs are radically different from mine, (and if anything, their
automation is better, so their costs should be lower) the small instances are
quite profitable.

~~~
spicyj
(None of this takes into account semiyearly/yearly pricing discounts.)

The difference is that they sell their boxes with prices proportional to
memory so that doubling resources costs double (25.6MB RAM per dollar),
whereas at prgmr, you charge a flat $4-per-guest fee and then charge linearly
for space on top of that (64 MB per dollar).

Bonus fact: If you both were to offer a 173 MB size, the costs would be almost
the same (~$6.70/mo).

~~~
lsc
It's funny, because my choice of pricing with my current support costs, and
the fact that nearly all my advertising is fixed-cost 'brand building' vs.
per-customer cost referrals or click ads, actually makes the smaller domains
/much/ more profitable than the larger domains, which yes, probably means I've
mispriced something. But the smaller domains do have a much larger 'margin for
error' - if I sell a block of them to spammers, or to people expecting a full-
time sysadmin, they can get expensive fast.

------
truebosko
Switched from Slicehost to Linode for my own VPS and haven't looked back.
Reliable, speedy, better pricing, and an awesome control panel.

------
melvin
I was thinking '720 to 768? That's not such a big deal...' until I actually
read the chart.

That's great! My 720 just went to a 1024. Thanks, Linode!

------
steve19
Goodbye Slicehost

------
gaiusparx
Thank you! I am a happy customer.

------
adamilardi
Good job!

------
mkramlich
gotta love bday parties where the guests get the presents instead

\-- happy Linode customer

