
Storage Space Doubled For All Linode VPS plans - prg318
https://blog.linode.com/2013/07/25/storage-space-doubled/
======
freehunter
I had been a Linode customer for years, but I had to drop them when I lived
through two security incidents where there was an almost complete lack of
response by the Linode staff. They've completely lost my trust. I work in the
information security industry, and I know the reality that almost everyone
will get hacked eventually. I don't blame them for getting hacked. I blame
their poor incident response plan. For my purposes, I just can't depend on an
infrastructure provider who isn't brave enough to tell me up front that they
made a mistake, or if they tell me "don't worry, the attackers weren't after
_your_ information!"

Because next time, they might be. You're going to have to do better than
incremental upgrades to convince me to come back.

~~~
opendais
Can you provide an example?

Every time someone says that I've noticed either: A) They missed the public
notification. B) Their security expectations aren't in line with a VPS
environment where everything is controlled through a WAN control mechanism.
[e.g. $200k worth of bitcoins stolen...why on earth aren't you using a colo
box with your own dedicated hardware that you can be certain is as secure as
you can possibly make it. That is something you can do with $2k and at most
$200/month.]

~~~
WestCoastJustin
What the hell are you talking about?

a) Linode was extremely cavalier in releasing a public notification. It was
all over slashdot and in their support channel, with _ZERO_ notification from
them (till long after the fact), leaving the community to assume the worst,
which was inline with what actually happened.

------
segmondy
I'm a linode user and not impressed. They are just keeping up with the
competition. ram/cpu/storage prices are always falling, so their prices have
to fall or resources increased to compete. They won't cut their prices as that
will cut into revenue, so they increase resources.

~~~
gtaylor
As a fellow Linode user, I find this to be a pretty silly comment. This will
save some customers a little bit of money and provide some storage breathing
room. It's an important latest step to firm up their offerings, and I commend
them for consistently doing so over time.

If you think Linode is a good value for the money, continue using them. If you
don't, go somewhere else. I don't think anyone here cares whether you're
impressed.

~~~
threeseed
It works both ways you know. Nobody here cares that you're not impressed.

The point is valid though that due to falling component prices it is expected
that Linode will either increase resources or decrease price.

------
geuis
Dear Linode: I fucking love you. I was a loyal Slicehost user until Rackspace
bought and ruined them. I should have switched to Linode long before that. My
dearest hope is that Rackspace doesn't buy them too.

~~~
sillysaurus
Counterpoint: Linode is incompetent at security. $228,000 worth of bitcoins
were stolen because Linode's admin interface was compromised by an attacker.
The reason you probably haven't heard about it is because Linode never
publicly acknowledged that it happened, as far as I know. Those are two
serious black marks against the credibility of Linode. Use at your own risk.

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-
worth-22800...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-
worth-228000-stolen-from-customers-of-hacked-webhost/)

~~~
dchuk
While the security breach is a big problem, it seems like storing $228,000
worth of bitcoins on a server that can be attacked from the internet is a bad
idea.

~~~
sillysaurus
It was a bitcoin trading platform. Many bitcoins had to be accessible by a
sever.

It wasn't the platform's fault that they lost the bitcoins. Linode's admin
interface was the attack vector. This is roughly equivalent to getting robbed
because your landlord left your apartment's master key under a doormat.

~~~
gtCameron
To continue that analogy, its roughly equivalent to keeping $200k cash in a
briefcase the floor of your apartment instead of in a safety deposit box at
the bank.

~~~
sillysaurus
That analogy is completely invalid. It was a trading platform. How do you
propose they trade bitcoins without those bitcoins being accessible by the
server?

~~~
ewillbefull
Bitcoin trading platforms do not need bitcoins accessible by remote servers.
They should have a huge portion of the coins in cold storage (not available
from remote servers). Also, the storage and attribution of coins to accounts
should be done by a server under physical possession/control, so that
authentication cannot even be forged in the event of a frontend breach.

There are a lot of things you can do to protect your bitcoins. Having them all
on linode servers is the worst thing possible.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_%28networking%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_%28networking%29)

~~~
ericd
Yeah, that's one of those applications that you really need to colo and secure
yourself with outside security verification, or at the very least go with a
host that has a reputation for ironclad security. Hosting that kind of thing
on a low-cost VPS is ridiculous.

~~~
ceol
From what I remember, it was a 17 year old kid who built and ran the site, and
it was his first time ever handling financial transactions (there was another
bitcoin-related hacking around the same time, so I might be confusing them.)
It was a recipe for disaster.

~~~
sillysaurus
It's incredible how much people are willfully ignoring Linode's gross
incompetence in this matter.

~~~
ceol
Their only gross incompetence was not informing customers in a timely manner,
which I could forgive them for. _Having_ a security breach is something that
happens to, quite literally, _every_ hosting provider.

I say all this as someone who dropped Linode for DO due to not being able to
afford them anymore.

------
earlz
And this is why I love Linode. I have been paying $20/month for around 3
years. At first I had 256M of RAM and 12G of harddrive space... and now I have
1G of RAM and 48G of harddrive space. I dare you to look at other providers
and see if they have offered such aggressive, yet free, upgrades

~~~
LordIllidan
Meanwhile, $20 a month at digitalocean gets you 2G of RAM and 40 Gb of ssd.

Not to diss Linode, I use them myself, but they're not the cheapest. It's
quite evident to me that these free upgrades are a defensive tactic.

How much memory or disk space would $20 a month get from other providers 3
years ago?

~~~
clicks
I switched to DO a few months ago, ... and just recently switched back to
Linode.

I'll pay the extra few bucks for reliability and decent uptime.

I had very frequent downtimes and the support was often unhelpful. I heard
from others that it was just the datacenter that my VPS was on and other DC
weren't as bad, but I guess it gave me enough of a bad impression that I went
back to Linode anyway.

~~~
forsaken
I'm using it non-production things, and have had a similar experience. I'm in
the SFO data center, and I've lost connectivity to the machine at least 5
times in the past month.

~~~
sumukh1
I've had the same issues and it's preventing me from using it for anything
serious. A lot of the other things with DO (provisioning, backup, snapshots)
are great but the network seems to the biggest issue at the SF datacenter.

------
danneu
Everyone interested in web dev should own a VPS.

After a year working at a Rails shop that deploys to Heroku, I decided it's
time to learn some sysadmin basics. Here are some things I've done the past
couple months that might give other noobs some ideas.

\- Make aliases for most Linux commands. Abstract Linux into a simple
interface of aliases that you can browse in your .zshrc/.bashrc/fish.config.
Linux becomes much more enjoyable when you can type `untar <file>` instead of
remembering the magical incantation `sudo tar -xzvf <file>`. Make aliases for
everything. nginx-reload. nginx-restart. alias z="vim ~/.zshrc && source
~/.zshrc". I even abstract apt-get commands into ag-install, ag-update, ag-
remote, etc.

\- Use dropbox cli, a shared folder with dotfiles, and symlinks to keep
dotfiles synced between your server(s) and laptop(s).

\- Install tmux on it so that you can `$ tmux attach` to a persistent shell so
that things still run when you close your remote connection and they're still
there when you log back in.

\- Run weechat (terminal irc client) in tmux so that you never have to log out
of irc again.

\- Learn how to rsync up and down files from your server.

\- rsync your Sinatra app (or whatever) onto your server and run it on port
5000, immediately see it live.

\- Install nginx and have your VPS serve multiple domain names, each domain
name pointing to a Sinatra app running on port 5000, 5001, and 5002.

\- Run each website in its own tmux tab. At the beginning it's easier to
reason about a foreground process than some daemonized process.

\- Install postgres or whatever database you use to your VPS. Get your db-
driven app to connect to it. Connect to your remote db using your favorite db
gui.

\- Take notes of all the commands you use to set up each component so that you
can refer to them later, see how you might have messed up.

\- Learn enough bash/zsh/fish to automate all of those commands. Polish it
enough so that you can curl your script from a Github gist on a fresh VPS and
it will set up your entire environment.

\- Install `htop` as a nice overview of your server's stats and the processes
that are running. Run it in another tmux tab. My tmux right now has a tab for
weechat (irc), tabs for my Clojure apps, and an htop tab. On Friday nights I
pretend I'm NASA mission control.

\- Learn how to use the `ssh` command to reverse tunnel a connection from your
VPS to an app you're running on your local machine for a fast development
feedback loop.

\- Learn how to use your VPS to encrypt your connection when you're working at
coffee shops.

I'm still a noob but I leveled up considerably from this quest arc. I highly
recommend.

I still don't have a raging clue about most of Linux, even stuff like what all
the folders are supposed to be for: /var/opt /etc/www /usr/local
/usr/shared/local ... etc. and why files go the places they go, but it's all
an iterative process.

Email me (profile) if you need help with any of the bullet points. I am trying
to shape it into a more helpful blog post to share with other noobs.

~~~
cma
>\- Make aliases for most Linux commands. Abstract Linux into a simple
interface of aliases that you can browse in your .zshrc/.bashrc/fish.config.
Linux becomes much more enjoyable when you can type `untar <file>` instead of
remembering the magical incantation `sudo tar -xzvf <file>`. Make aliases for
everything. nginx-reload. nginx-restart. alias z="vim ~/.zshrc && source
~/.zshrc". I even abstract apt-get commands into ag-install, ag-update, ag-
remote, etc.

One problem with this is you become a cripple when you have to use an outside
machine or need to write a script for wide distribution.

~~~
danneu
I find that it's the opposite for me since my needs are so simple and I'm not
logging hours into Linux cli every day. I simply don't use the VPS cli enough
to retain everything and that just makes it frustrating. It's more like
Billy's First VPS Side-project rather than a roadmap for industrial-grade
sysadmin skills which I'll probably never have.

Aliases become a self-documenting interface. Using my aliases, getting exposed
to them every time I add a new one, tweaking them, and simple browsing them
from time to time is what helps me remember commands.

It saves me brain cycles sort of like buttons on a GUI.

For me, the alternative to writing an `untar` alias isn't that I remember `tar
-xzvf` but that I have to google it every time (or scroll through dozens of
possible flags in the man page). I'm not untar'ing things every day.

Now multiply that example across all sorts of commands. I never remember the
right flags to `stat`. or `column -nts: /etc/passwd` just to quickly see
users.

I won't remember that I like the `--show-upgraded` flag sent to `apt-get
upgrade` every time. I don't remember that my nginx conf and websites are in
`/etc/nginx/` while their static files are in `/var/www/`. When life gets busy
and it's a month since my last VPS login, I'll remember my own `disk-space`
abstraction instead of `df -h`.

Finally, I'm not a sysadmin. I don't find myself on random machines nor am I
writing scripts for wide distribution. When I spin up a new VPS, I curl a gist
that even installs fishshell and then bootstraps the rest of my niceties with
fish scripts. If I'm lazy, I'll just wget my .bashrc aliases. If I'm even
lazier, I'll just curl it like it's a manpage and browse my abstractions. Not
much different than using manpages directly.

But actually over time it turns out that I end up remembering what many of
these aliases represent.

~~~
tankbot
The concern you are responding to here was my initial reaction, but I think
you've changed my mind.

I like this a lot. Not only do you gain experience using commands by setting
up your aliases, but you now have a reference for the future and are learning
the commands by repetition; exposing yourself to the config during tweaks.

Add in the use of apropos to find appropriate commands (without googling) and
learn to use the search feature while viewing a man page (/[STRING] same as
vim!) and you're golden.

------
whalers
It's frustratingly difficult to find a high-storage VPS at an affordable
price. This announcement by Linode is a start. But I think the market has a
ways to go yet.

~~~
secabeen
You can back your way into one at Dreamhost. Their shared hosting plans are
unlimited disk/unlimited bandwidth for web-related data. Then add a VPS to
that. You still get the same disk/bandwidth allocation. If you get really big,
there's probably some throttling, but it works well for me. I have over 500GB
of data stored there.

~~~
bradleyland
Dreamhost's policy is that your storage space is unlimited only for files
related to the sites you're hosting with them. Not to mention, availability of
Dreamhost's shared plans is, well, a nightmare. Don't get me wrong, it's still
a bargain, but you get what you pay for.

------
xutopia
Why would anyone use them over DigitalOcean? What's the advantage? Am I
missing out on something?

~~~
barik
I'm a customer of both DigitalOcean as well as Linode. I use DigitalOcean for
random experiments and side projects and Linode for production sites.

I haven't directly observed any practical differences in ways that affect me
in terms of VPS infrastructure itself, but I've found Linode's support to be
significantly better and I'm willing to pay a premium for that on "sites that
matter". I don't want to imply that DigitalOcean's support is bad -- it's not,
but I feel they're average when compared with Linode responses.

On the other hand, my impressions may be biased since I rarely have to contact
support in the first place. I'd be interested in whether or not others have
had the same experience in terms of customer support.

~~~
davidw
I wrote this a while back:
[http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons](http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons)

Part of the problem is that it's very easy to compare on price, but difficult
to compare on service. I think my conclusions may not be quite as valid today,
because news gets around so quickly, but I think the concept is a worthwhile
one to think about.

Anecdotally, I've been very happy with Linode's service: a few months ago, I
had some kind of problem and things weren't booting. Panic! I sent in a
support ticket, and went to their IRC channel right away. I started describing
the problem, and one of the guys in the channel says "oh, I think I just
answered that", and indeed, the support ticket had already been answered with
real, helpful information.

My interaction with them has usually been quite positive.

------
Aldo_MX
To be honest I would never trust my credit card number to linode again.

~~~
eropple
Why? You lose nothing if it's compromised. That's the bank's worry.

~~~
Aldo_MX
For starters, I had to pay for the replacement card...

~~~
xxpor
What kind of shitty bank do you have?

------
ck2
If OVH ever brings that $27 i5 dedicated to the US (CA) datacenter, VPS
providers are in trouble.

~~~
Veratyr
They have $39 ones :)

[https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-
servers/kimsufi.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/kimsufi.xml)

I wish they'd let Australians buy them... They actually forbid you from buying
outside your country.

~~~
ck2
Only the K2 $50 one listed there is equal to the 16G, not the K1

The 16G is effectively half the price.

And I believe people buy ovh servers in other countries all the time for
backups, maybe you need an account with them first in your own country (but
they are not in AUS I guess?)

------
xoe26
This is excellent news. I've had a VPS on Linode for a couple of years now and
the only thing that was really lacking was the disk space.

------
fiatmoney
Here's a question: where can I get a VPS with a large amount (multiple TB) of
not-necessarily-fast storage? It seems like someone out there should have a
SAN-backed VPS, yet I've had trouble locating one.

~~~
ianmcgowan
[https://backupsy.com/](https://backupsy.com/)

$80/mo for 2TB. Deals floating around as well as "40% Off For Life Coupon:
40PERCENT" on the home page.

Just signed up with them, and they are having problems with credit card
billing, so only feedback so far is they seem responsive to tickets...

------
lurien
I've recently started hosting with 6sync and been very happy with their
services so far. It's a lot lighter on documentation and has fewer users than
linode. But functionality and performance is there.

------
desireco42
I think DigitalOcean is next shiny hosting thing :), even without this
security thing everyone keeps reminding me.

------
BadassFractal
The question I keep asking everybody is: "Where do I host my Postgres if I
want to have the option to grow disk without paying for higher VM tier?".
Specifically assuming I'm managing Postgres myself, not going through Heroku
etc. So far only AWS seems to give you that option.

~~~
opendais
I believe Linode used to have the option to attach extra storage but you'd
still need to reformat, merge, etc.

Personally, for high diskspace growth needs, I just use a dedicated where I
can just get them to throw additional disks in with little to no downtime.

~~~
SpenserJ
They still have that option, but you're limited to an additional 12GB (at
least on the 2GB plan). Costs $1/mo per GB that you add on.

------
seunosewa
Still no SSD option? As the owner of a top forum, I think IOPs are far more
important than gigabytes.

~~~
kintamanimatt
A lot of your woes would be solved by in memory caching.

~~~
jacques_chester
If it's a LAMP app, then not really.

If you have tables with TEXT fields, MySQL up to and including 5.5 will
perform certain joins with on-disk tables _no matter what you tell it to do_
and will _ignore indexes_ you create to prevent that on-disk stupidity. This
behaviour is independent of engine.

Being I/O choked on Linode is why I moved to DigitalOcean.

~~~
ceol
It sounds like you should have moved from MySQL to PostgreSQL instead of
switching hosting providers.

~~~
jacques_chester
Please call me when Wordpress and thousands of plugins and themes have been
expunged of all MySQLisms.

Otherwise, heartily agreed.

~~~
ceol
Ahh, Wordpress. You have my deepest sympathies.

If you don't mind my asking, is there some key feature of Wordpress or its
plugins that holds you to it? I'm always interested to hear why people stick
with it.

~~~
jacques_chester
I personally detest it. But my bloggers are comfortable with it.

------
justplay
Is it because of competition or prices goes down?

------
JimWillTri
Every time I upgrade I lose email functionality. Anyone having the same
problem?

------
aioprisan
it's good to see more space but it would be nice to see IOPS options

------
shitlord
What got hacked this time?

------
chris_mahan
This thread reminds me of webhostingtalk.com.

------
bfrog
Sweeeeeeeeet

