
The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more - qmr
https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-ram-much-more/
======
madsushi
Why do I pay Linode $20/month instead of paying DO $5/month(1)?

Because Linode treats their servers like kittens (upgrades, addons/options,
support), and DO treats their servers like cattle. There's nothing wrong with
the cattle model of managing servers. But I'm not using Chef or Puppet, I just
have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few
services. And Linode treats that one solitary server better than any other VPS
host in the world.

(1) I do have one DO box as a simple secondary DNS server, for provider
redundancy

~~~
arb99
DO?

~~~
erichmond
Digital Ocean - [https://www.digitalocean.com/](https://www.digitalocean.com/)

------
kyrra
I forgot to benchmark the disk before I upgraded but here are some simple disk
benchmarks on an upgraded linode (the $20 plan, now with SSD)

    
    
      $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
      1024+0 records in
      1024+0 records out
      1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.31593 s, 816 MB/s
    
      $ hdparm -tT /dev/xvda
      /dev/xvda:
       Timing cached reads:   19872 MB in  1.98 seconds = 10020.63 MB/sec
       Timing buffered disk reads: 2558 MB in  3.00 seconds = 852.57 MB/sec
    
    

Upgraded cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz

Old cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz

CPUs compared:
[http://ark.intel.com/compare/75277,40201](http://ark.intel.com/compare/75277,40201)

~~~
Nux
Throughput speed is not everything, in many situations latency is more
important. Can you give results for this?

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1500 oflag=dsync

I'm getting "6.40264 s, 120 kB/s" on my laptop's SSD, but on a proper server
with a RAID card and cache enabled I get "0.187033 s, 4.1 MB/s".

~~~
kbrower
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1500 oflag=dsync 768000 bytes (768 kB)
copied, 0.3325 s, 2.3 MB/s

~~~
ausjke
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1500 oflag=dsync

768000 bytes (768 kB) copied, 0.45329 s, 1.7 MB/s

------
nivla
Awesome News. Competition really pushes companies to please their customers.
Ever since Digital Ocean became the new hip, Linode has been pushing harder.
My experience with them has been mixed. Forgiving their previous mishaps and
the feeling that the level of Customer Service has gone down, they have been
decent year long. I wouldn't mind recommending them.

[Edit: Removed the bit about DigitalOcean Plans. If you have Ghostery running,
it apparently takes out the html block listing different plans]

~~~
mimiflynn
[https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/)

------
relaxatorium
This seems pretty fantastic, I am excited to upgrade and think the SSD storage
is going to be really helpful for improving the performance of my applications
hosted there.

That said, I am not an expert on CPU virtualization but I did notice that the
new plans are differently phrased than the old ones here. The old plans all
talked about 8 CPU cores with various 1x, 2x priority levels
([https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-
upgrad...](https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrade/) for
examples), while the new plans all talk about 1, 2, etc. core counts.

Could anyone with more expertise here tell me whether this is a sneaky
reduction in CPU power for the lower tiered plans, or just a simpler way of
saying the same thing as the old plans?

~~~
Jake232
Somebody asked this on the blog post, here was the reply from Linode:

If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all.

We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old
structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent
CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth
the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly
fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc.

------
rjknight
It looks like Linode are still leaving the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market
to DO. Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less
useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO
provide.

~~~
TillE
> the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market

How big is that market, really? I keep a small VPS around for whatever (I like
Hetzner), and I'm sure lots of nerds are the same. But for any usage that's
even a little bit serious, $20/month is peanuts.

~~~
kylec
What if you want to have several tiny boxes? For example, if you want to host
a mail server as a separate box for security, that's another $20/month. Or
what if you need to use a different Linux distro for something? Another
$20/month. A few examples like that add up fast.

~~~
mwcampbell
Containers, e.g. through Docker, are good for that kind of thing.

~~~
Karunamon
Not with the tiny amounts of memory offered at that price. 2GB is very easy to
burn through in short order. Anything less than 8 feels really claustrophobic.

I've always needed memory more than disk. Really wish I could pay some of
these providers just for a one off increase of a few extra gigs of memory
without tiering up which includes an entirely higher level of storage that I
will not ever use.

~~~
jeffasinger
Some types of sites need disk more than RAM, and that market is really weird
right now too.

I run a service that could get away with only 8GB of RAM, but definitely needs
at least 2TB of space, plus plenty of room to grow.

~~~
dragontamer
When numbers start getting up into that territory, I tend to look at the
discount _dedicated_ servers.

WholeSaleInternet for example, currently has a Quad-Core Xeon E3 1230 for sale
at $49/month with 5 IP Addresses. 1GBPS connection with 10TB bandwidth with
8GB of RAM / 250GB of Hard Drive.

If that 2TB Hard Drive is really needed, you can compromise on the CPU and go
for a consumer-grade AMD Fx-4100 (Quad-Core AMD) from Datashack for $55 /
month, with 5 IP Addresses, 8GB RAM / 2TB of Hard Drive space, 10TB of
Bandwidth on 1Gbps

Most web applications seem to be Disk heavy or RAM Heavy... I rarely see CPU-
heavy applications. So the AMD Fx-4100 can be good enough (its far far better
than an Atom, although it isn't as good as a modern E3 Xeon).

I've never had the need for it, but since Dedicated Servers often come with 5
or 13 IP Addresses, and they can be as cheap as ~$60/month realistically... I
think its better to just install Proxmox on a single dedicated box and spin up
your own private VMs if you are honestly going to need multiple VMs.

~~~
jeffasinger
Exactly, for that situation, I ended up going with an entirely overpowered
dedicated server with an E5 and 32GB of RAM. I shopped around, but was very
conscience of network quality, quality of support I'd get, and was still able
to get away with paying about $250/mo, which is very reasonable compared to
any kind of cloud offering.

------
__xtrimsky
I still prefer OVH.com [http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-
classic.xml](http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-classic.xml)

for $7 you get: 2 cores 2GB RAM

for 10$ you get: 3 cores 4GB RAM

They don't have SSD, but SSD doesn't do everything, I prefer more ram.

EDIT: If some of you don't know OVH, it's because its new in America, but its
not some cheap company, it's a European company that is very successful there.
And just recently created a datacenter in North America. (I used to live in
France, and have known them for some years).

~~~
giulianob
Can you run
[https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench](https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench) and see
how the performance is to compare?

~~~
mappu
Neat script! Here are some low-end results for comparison.

BuyVM 128MB ram, 15GB disk, 15USD/year

    
    
      CPU model:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz
      Number of cores: 1
      CPU frequency:  2266.746 MHz
      Total amount of RAM: 128 MB
      Total amount of swap: 128 MB
      System uptime:   39 days, 22:35,
      I/O speed:  89.9 MB/s
      Bzip 25MB: 12.89s
      Download 100MB file: 50.0MB/s
    

QuickPacket: 128MB ram, 20GB disk, 15USD/year

    
    
      CPU model:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3470 @ 2.93GHz
      Number of cores: 1
      CPU frequency:  2933.228 MHz
      Total amount of RAM: 128 MB
      Total amount of swap: 128 MB
      System uptime:   48 days, 6:07,
      I/O speed:  129 MB/s
      Bzip 25MB: 6.40s
      Download 100MB file: 1.14MB/s
    

A good aggregator for low-end deals is lowendstock.com .

------
conorh
Benchmarking using wrk the smallest linode (1024 now 2048) serving a page from
an untuned Rails application using nginx/passenger getting almost no other
traffic. Hard to compare of course given the various other factors, but
produced slightly lower performance after the upgrade. Serving a page from
nginx directly (no Rails) had no appreciable difference in performance, I
guess the Rails web serving is more vCPU bound?

Before Upgrade:

    
    
      Running 30s test @ http://...
        5 threads and 20 connections
        Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
          Latency   308.91ms  135.01ms 985.82ms   80.00%
          Req/Sec    14.15      4.61    24.00     66.36%
        2206 requests in 30.00s, 28.51MB read
      Requests/sec:     73.53
      Transfer/sec:      0.95MB
    

After Upgrade:

    
    
      Running 30s test @ http://..
        5 threads and 20 connections
        Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
          Latency   321.74ms  102.45ms 957.74ms   87.32%
          Req/Sec    12.02      2.18    17.00     80.75%
        1858 requests in 30.01s, 24.03MB read
      Requests/sec:     61.92
      Transfer/sec:    819.98KB

~~~
chc
It depends on the task. If your Rails app hits the database a lot, memory
availability and disk speed will matter a lot, which favors the new Linode
style. If your app just does one small query per page and then gets on with
its work, then probably CPU is your most important thing (since most of your
time will be spent on app logic, runtime housekeeping and rendering
templates).

------
kijin
About a week ago, I wrote a comment in another Linode-related thread asking
how the new usage patterns that hourly billing encourages might affect CPU
contention. At the time, I received 11 upvotes but no replies. Apparently,
quite a few people were interested in my question but had no useful
conjectures to share.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564764)

Now it's obvious what Linode's answer to that question is: _Lower "burstable"
CPU for lower plans._

The $20 plan used to be able to burst to 8 cores for short periods, but now it
only has access to 2 vcores. The "guaranteed" processing power is probably
higher with the newer CPUs, but at the expense of short-term burst
performance.

Another minor detail that I find interesting is that the transfer cap for the
$20 plan has been increased to 3TB, whereas the $40 plan still gets 4TB. Apart
from the transfer cap plateau-ing at the extreme high end, this is the first
time that Linode has broken its 11-year-old policy of "pay X times as much
money, get X times as much RAM/disk/transfer".

------
endijs
Most interesting part in this great upgrade is that they went from 8CPU setup
to 2CPU setup. But yeah - 2x more RAM, SSDs will guarantee that I'm not going
to switch anytime soon. Sadly I need to wait a week until this will be
available in London.

~~~
eli
"vCPU"

In a virtualized environment, the number of "CPUs" you can see is probably not
a great way to measure how much computing power you have.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
On a host that's mostly idle and where there are no CPU usage caps, seeing 2
cores instead of 8 is a pretty serious drawback if you use Gentoo on Linode
like I do.

------
pavanky
I wish Linode (or anyone else other than Amazon) provides a reasonable Plan[1]
with GPUs on them.

[1]: Amazon charges $2 an hour thats about $1500 a month.

~~~
dugmartin
Here is a list with five other companies:

[http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-cloud-computing-
services.ht...](http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-cloud-computing-
services.html)

~~~
pavanky
Thanks for pointing it out. I should have known better considering that I am
in the space :(

------
nilved
Linode's recent upgrades are awesome, but people are very quick to forget the
period where they were being hacked left and right and didn't communicate with
their customers until a defensive blog post weeks after the fact. No matter
how good the servers may be, Linode should be a non-starter for anybody who
cares about the security of their droplet; and, if you don't, why would you
pay Linode's premium fee?

~~~
jsmthrowaway
Ask DigitalOcean if they're wiping data on droplet cancellation and snapshot
deletion yet. They've fucked that one up several times since the inception of
the company and each time get a little more defensive about it. For a while
there, I could spin up a droplet and get database passwords, keys, data, all
day long from the previous owner. Then they told the guy that reported it that
he was mistaken, and basically lied in a blog post and said no user data was
at risk.

I'm told that's just the beginning of security faults in their platform,
attributable to being a younger company and discovering these things for the
first time; I have been personally shown evidence that DigitalOcean's platform
initially trusted a hidden field called "userid" and allowed a user to operate
on any other user without authorization, including restoring images, shutting
down droplets, and so on. Their system at first had no protection against
spoofed packets exiting a droplet, either, so ARP poisoning the gateway was
(and possibly remains) a viable attack.

Linode is far more mature, obviously.

Every provider has security issues. It's how they rectify and move forward
that should concern you. Watching DigitalOcean react to being informed that
the issue they got burned on once had reappeared basically told me to _never_
use their services.

Also, and I actually consider this very important and not a grammatical nit,
Linode doesn't sell droplets. They sell virtual servers. You're asking for a
Pepsi from Coca-Cola. You might consider this a minor nit, but it's actually a
serious confusion issue that I already see happening.

Allow me to promise you -- not predict, promise -- that DigitalOcean will be
compromised just as badly. It's _going_ to happen. It's a matter of when and
how they react.

~~~
nilved
I don't see why your (agreeable) sentiment about Digital Ocean affects the
fact that Linode is bad at security and customer interaction. We can always
avoid both.

I didn't mean to use the word "droplet," so I'm sorry for the confusion.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
That's certainly your prerogative, but avoiding a provider simply based on
security issues will eventually leave you with nobody to host your services.
Nature of the game. You simply mitigate and plan accordingly.

~~~
bambam12897
Sure you can claim that getting hacked is "nature of the game" \- but that's
not the real issue.

The issue was with how they handled the public disclosure of the hack. Instead
of immediately alerting their clients that there has been an issue (so that -
as you say - people could take mitigating actions) they stalled on giving
information and tried to cover up the whole fiasco. This should give people
ZERO confidence in their moral integrity.

If you run a service like Linode or DO, you need to provide certain guarantees
on disclosure of security failures and maybe get an externally audit from time
to time.

------
ihowlatthemoon
VPSBench result:

Before

\-------

    
    
      CPU model:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           L5520  @ 2.27GHz
      Number of cores: 8
      CPU frequency:  2266.788 MHz
      Total amount of RAM: 988 MB
      Total amount of swap: 255 MB
      System uptime:   8 days, 12:03,
      I/O speed:  69.9 MB/s
      Bzip 25MB: 8.96s
      Download 100MB file: 47.2MB/s
    

After

\------

    
    
      CPU model:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz
      Number of cores: 2
      CPU frequency:  2800.086 MHz
      Total amount of RAM: 1993 MB
      Total amount of swap: 255 MB
      System uptime:   2 min,
      I/O speed:  638 MB/s
      Bzip 25MB: 5.10s
      Download 100MB file: 146MB/s
    

Test: [https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench](https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench)

~~~
pdq
Here is DigitalOcean's $5/month plan:

    
    
      CPU model:  QEMU Virtual CPU version 1.0
      Number of cores: 1
      CPU frequency:  2299.998 MHz
      Total amount of RAM: 491 MB
      Total amount of swap: 0 MB
      System uptime:   276 days, 5:04,       
      I/O speed:  253 MB/s
      Bzip 25MB: 7.83s
      Download 100MB file: 56.0MB/s
    

Here is Vultr's $5/month plan:

    
    
      CPU model:  Vultr Virtual CPU 2
      Number of cores: 1
      CPU frequency:  3399.994 MHz
      Total amount of RAM: 490 MB
      Total amount of swap: 509 MB
      System uptime:   28 days, 3:15,       
      I/O speed:  485 MB/s
      Bzip 25MB: 3.17s
      Download 100MB file: 58.2MB/s

------
munger
Rackspace cloud customer here… These Linode upgrades are very tempting to
entice me to switch.

I get I might not be their target market (small business with about
$1000/month on IaaS spending) but there are a couple things preventing me from
doing so: 1) $10/month size suitable for a dev instance. 2) Some kind of
scalable file storage solution with CDN integration – like RS
CloudFiles/Akamai or AWS S3/Cloudfront or block storage to attach to an
individual server.

I guess you get what you pay for… infrastructure components and flexibility
AWS > RS > Linode > DO which roughly matches the price point.

~~~
DougHaber
I'm in a similar boat. I use Rackspace for their servers and CDN, and Linode
is definitely starting to look nice. It could actually be cheaper to go with
Linode and a separate CDN provider, such as MaxCDN. MaxCDN has some of the
features that are missing from Cloud Files, which is real nice too. The main
thing holding me back is the time it takes to migrate. I know they target the
higher end, but hopefully RackSpace will readjust their prices as well at some
point.

~~~
munger
Although, I guess there is nothing to stop me from running servers on Linode
and continuing to use RS for Cloud Files/Akamai -- except for network speed of
course. Linode can deploy to Dallas though, where I use RS so maybe the
network speed won't be a big problem.

------
raverbashing
Congratulation on Linode

I stopped being a customer since migrating to DO but my needs were really
small

But I think their strategy of keeping the price and increasing capabilities
are good. Between $5 and $20 is a "big" difference for one person (still, it's
a day's lunch), for a company it's nothing.

However, I would definitely go to Linode for CPU/IO intensive tasks. Amazon
sucks at these (more benchmarks between the providers are of course welcome)

------
giulianob
Holy crap this is awesome. Good job guys at Linode. I said I would switch if
the prices dropped about 25% because RAM was pricey.... So now I have to
switch.

------
harrystone
I would love to see them still keep all those old disks and sell me some huge,
cheap, and slow storage on them.

------
extesy
So now they match DigitalOcean prices but offer slightly more SSD space for
each plan. I wonder what DO answer to this would be. They haven't changed
their pricing for quite a while.

~~~
catinsocks
DigitalOcean still beats Linode on price as half the time I don't need a 2GB
server but I do want to keep servers separate (multiple 512s at $5 is better
for me than 1 2GB).

~~~
giulianob
I need 2gb - 4gb servers and DO's quality has decreased since they've grown so
much.

~~~
vidyesh
Quality decreased? How? Please elaborate.

~~~
mitchwainer
I would love to hear why as well! Our quality and stability have significantly
improved over the last year and as a co-founder of DO, I would like to
understand what specific issues you faced. Feel free to shoot me an email
directly (mitch@digitalocean.com) to take this conversation offline.

~~~
giulianob
Mainly around spinning up instances and network latency.

------
ksec
Sometimes i just wish the pricing system would get better as you go larger.

What is the difference between the 16GB - 96GB Plan and a dedicated server?
And why would i pay 3x the price? The advantage of those who offer Cloud / VPS
and Dedicated Servers Hosting company is they can mix and match depending
usage. If you are actually building an any sort of infrastructure with Linode
those large box are extremely expensive.

------
vidyesh
So this makes Lindode practically on par with DO's $20 plan. Up till now $20
plan at DO was better now its just the choice of the brand.

But here is one thing that DO provides and I think Linode too should, you get
the choice to spin up a $5 instance anytime in your account for any small
project or a test instance which you cannot on Linode.

~~~
yogo
Doesn't hourly billing address that issue? Linode now offers it.

~~~
damian2000
Yeah, that's the impression I got with hourly billing as well.

------
orthecreedence
Bummer, they're taking away 8 cores for the cheap plans and replacing it with
2. Does anyone know if the new processors will offset this difference? I don't
know the specs of the processors.

Linode's announcements usually come in triples...I'm excited for number three.
Let's hope its some kind of cheap storage service.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Cores presented to your machine by the hypervisor do not have a 1 to 1
relationship with physical cores. In the world of virtual machines, how many
cores you have is meaningless.

For example, my VMWare server is a single 8 core processor, but my VM's only
see 2 cores, as that's the way I prefer it and I believe VMWare recommends
this or even one core. Those 2 virtual cores can access all 8 physical cores.

The only real way to find out your cpu performance is to run a benchmark.

~~~
personZ
If you had a host machine with 8 cores, and a virtual machine with 2 cores,
the virtual machine will only possibly use 25% of the CPU resources of the
host machine -- one vCPU cannot be schedule in parallel across more than one
physical core.

However it is advisable to minimize the vCPUs in VMs because it greatly
enhances scheduling -- if a VM has 8 vCPUs allocated to it, with some
hypervisors that lack advanced co-scheduled it won't be scheduled until 8
cores are available, and in some situations it will sit on 8 cores during its
duration whether it is only using 1 or all. If you have a large number of
smaller VMs, scheduling can greatly improves.

This isn't true for all hypervisors and situations. You mileage may vary.

------
SCdF
> Linodes are now SSD. This is not a hybrid solution – it’s fully native SSD
> servers using battery-backed hardware RAID. No spinning rust! And, no
> consumer SSDs either – we’re using only reliable, insanely fast, datacenter-
> grade SSDs that won’t slow down over time. These suckers are not cheap.

[http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-
experim...](http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-
data-retention-after-600tb)

Not to slam what Linode is doing here, and I'm sure there are probably lots of
great reasons to buy datacentre-grade SSDs, but just thought I'd point out
that slowing down over time (or data integrity issues) are not really
consumer-grade problems any more :-)

~~~
SiVal
What has changed? (Not advocacy; I'm curious.)

------
__xtrimsky
Could someone please explain what improvements can we get from SSD for web
applications ?

I know it would read files faster, but in most cases reading a couple of PHP
files is not such a big improvement.

My guess would be maybe databases ? Read time improvement for MySQL ?

------
vbtechguy
Updated benchmark results with 2GB vs 4GB vs 8GB vs 16gb plans from Linode vs
DigitalOcean
[https://blog.centminmod.com/346](https://blog.centminmod.com/346). Definitely
Linode has the faster cpus and disk i/o as you move up in plans >2GB. 16GB
plans are pretty close though if you look at subtests in UnixBench and ignore
the subtests affected by different base Linux Kernel versions used.

------
ausjke
This is great indeed. I'm happy Linode did this. I ran below command 10 times
and used the average below:

dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync

Linode: 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.09063 s, 985 MB/s D.O: 1073741824
bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.23998 s, 331 MB/s

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1500 oflag=dsync

Linode: 768000 bytes (768 kB) copied, 0.478633 s, 1.6 MB/s D.O: 768000 bytes
(768 kB) copied, 1.01716 s, 755 kB/s

------
shiloa
I have mixed feelings about this. We're in the process of moving from Linode
to Rackspace but haven't flicked the switch just yet - was planning to this
weekend.

Our Linode server (16 GB plan) has been performing terrible lately wrt I/O
(compared to, say, a Macbook Pro running the same computations), and we
decided we've had enough. I guess we'll have to compare the two after the
upgrade and decide.

~~~
thraxil
Did you ever put in a support ticket? I've had I/O performance issues with
Linode boxes before and it's always been quickly fixed when they are notified.

~~~
shiloa
I did, they switched us to a new machine - no change. Their support was great,
but the hardware needed to catch up. Perhaps this upgrade will help.

------
mwexler
There's similar and then there's alike. I guess it makes comparison easy, but
imitation certainly must be the sincerest form of flattery:

Compare the look and feel of
[https://www.linode.com/pricing/](https://www.linode.com/pricing/) and
[https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/)

~~~
jasonlotito
And DO's looks like a million other plan pages that already exist. It's not
some unique design to DO.

------
Justen
Higher specs sound really nice, but on HN I see people commenting on the ease
of DO's admin tools. How does Linode's compare?

~~~
kawsper
The interface looks a little more clunky, but it works, and it is easy to work
with.

~~~
noir_lord
It's not clunky it's more "dated" (and very functional).

It also does a fair bit more so apples to oranges a little bit.

------
funkyy
I would love to see Linode going to large HDD drives option for storage as
well. I am dying to find really inexpensive cloud provider with cheap data
space (SATA is fine), reasonable bandwidth but low cpu and ram and Linode
style support/caring. Give server with ~500 GB hard drive, 2 TB outgoing
transfer, 1 core and 1 GB ram for ~$20-30 and I am all yours.

------
EGreg
I love linode. I switched from slicehost for its 32bitness back in the day,
stayed for the awesome culture and independence. Slice host got sold to rack
space.

However, I am seriously considering a move to Amazon Web services for one main
reason: I need to decouple the hard drive space from the ram. The hard drive
space is so expensive on linodes!!

------
davexunit
Cool news, but their website now has the same lame design as DigitalOcean. I
liked the old site layout better.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
Looks like library.linode.com has the same format, and is still the same
fantastic resource.

I'm embarrassed to say that once upon a time I used library.linode.com to help
walk me through my first Linux server setup... running on Digital Ocean. Yes,
I felt like a complete douchebag. I _wanted_ to use Linode but I was one of
those $5/month people.

However it left me with a sense of obligation to give Linode business someday
when I could justify/afford doing so. It looks like Linode just gave me the
opportunity to do that.

~~~
kevinqi
Yeah, the library is really excellent - easy to follow and very extensive.
It's smart of them to do paid crowdsourcing to create the articles.

It's cool of Linode to make the library available to everyone, not just
customers.

~~~
jsutton
DO does the same thing, does it not?

------
jrockway
A nice reward for those of us who have been using Linode from before they even
had x86_64 images.

~~~
simcop2387
Yes. I'm actually looking at upgrading my server to a 64bit kernel just so i
can take advantage of this. I've been on them so long i'm still a 32bit
userland.

------
jaequery
im really impressed by their new CPU specs. from experience those aren't cheap
and it's possibly the fastest CPU out in the market. combined with the SSDs,
it may be that Linode currently is the fastest of any cloud hosting right now.

------
level09
I would probably move back from Digital Ocean if they allow a 10$/mo plan.

I know that's not a big price difference, but some website really don't need a
lot of resources. they work well on D.O's 5$ server, and I have really a lot
of them.

------
jevinskie
I resized a 1024 instance to 2048 last night and it looks like it is already
running on the new processors (from /proc/cpuinfo): model name : Intel(R)
Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz

Should I upgrade? Do I want 2 x RAM for 1/2 vCPUs? =)

------
h4pless
I notice that Linode talked a good bit about their bandwidth and included
outbound bandwidth in their pricing model which DO does not. I wonder if DO
has a similar model or if transfer capacity the only thing you have control
over.

~~~
geekam
I do not understand the difference between outbound bandwidth vs the transfer.
Can you explain a bit please?

~~~
kilburn
If you read below the price tables you'll get a good hint:

> What happens if I exceed my monthly transfer quota?

> You will be invoiced $0.10 for each GB over your pooled network transfer
> quota. Please note that all inbound traffic is free and will not count
> against your quota.

Bandwidth is the maximum Mbps that your VPS can spill out at any moment,
whereas transfer is the maximum amount of per-month cumulative traffic that
you can send out before incurring on additional traffic costs.

------
jdprgm
This is really a fantastic upgrade. I've been hosting with Linode for a few
months now and been very happy with them. I run a relatively transfer intense
SaaS app and a 50% transfer increase makes quite an improvement.

------
jebblue
I was looking into alternatives but now I'll stick with them, I can't find
another cloud provider whose stuff works so well.

edit: I just finished the migration, my disk speed test is through the roof,
free ram is phenomenal!

------
bfrog
I'm actually a little unhappy, it looks like they reduced the CPU count for my
$20/mo instance. At this point there's basically no reason to stay with them
now.

~~~
opendais
tl;dr: If you had 40 VMs on 8 cores before, you have 10 on 2 cores now. It is
the same ratio of VMs:Cores but with stronger processors.

Long version: "If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus
and all.

We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old
structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent
CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth
the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly
fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc."

From Caker's comment on the blog. It seems that this was done to reduce
fighting over core and provided more consistent fair availability of
processing power when they tested it b/t VMs.

~~~
ckozlowski
Makes a lot of sense.

If your hosts have, say, dual 4-way CPUs, and you're giving your VMs 8 vCPUs,
then a single VM can execute per clock cycle since a VM needs all of it's
vCPUs made available to the guest OS. With 8 VMs, that means one VM is
executing every 8th clock cycle.

If you "downgrade" those VMs to 2 vCPUs, then 4 VMs can execute per clock
cycle, and that VM can now execute every other clock cycle instead of waiting
8 cycles. More work gets done, even though the amount of CPUs has gone down.

Since most VMs are probably executing work that only has 1-2 threads, then
there's no loss from lack of parallelism. Remember, a VM needs all cores
available, regardless of how many threads need to be executed.

Of course, some workloads do need that many threads, and so balancing number
of cores vs. available execution time becomes a little more tricky. but based
on what you shared, it sounds like Linode took a closer look and came to the
same conclusion.

~~~
nhaehnle
_If your hosts have, say, dual 4-way CPUs, and you 're giving your VMs 8
vCPUs, then a single VM can execute per clock cycle since a VM needs all of
it's vCPUs made available to the guest OS._

This seems wrong to me. We're talking about virtualization; technologically,
it is absolutely feasibly to have only one physical CPU running a VM even if
the VM sees multiple virtual CPUs. And it seems like having this capability in
virtualization software from the very beginning is really a no-brainer.

Evidence for your claim, please ;-)

~~~
ckozlowski
Certainly. Rather than retype the wheel though, I'm going to rely on some
various posts:

Gabe spells it out pretty well here: [http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/how-
too-many-vcpus-can-nega...](http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/how-too-many-
vcpus-can-negatively-affect-your-performance/)

In a previous environment of mine, we ran dual socket, 4-way CPUs. VMs were
configured with a mix of 1, 2, and 4 vCPU VMs. Our VMs appeared slow,
especially on our 4-way systems. However, CPU utilization was low. More
digging revealed that our co-stop values were high, meaning that the system
couldn't schedule execution time effectively, meaning the VM had to sit in a
READY state, which kept CPU utilization low.

Our first fix was to rebalance our cluster, so that 1 and 2 vCPU VMs were
relegated to their own set of hosts, and our 4 vCPU VMs executed on their own
set. Instantly, out co-stop values dropped, and CPU utilization rates went
up...they were now doing work!

VMware briefly talks about the issue here:
[http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&doc...](http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1005362)

If you'd really like the nuts and bolts of it, then those can be found here:
[https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-
CP...](https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-CPU-Sched-
Perf.pdf)

The VMware co-scheduler has improved over the years, but I still read (The
"Mastering vSphere 5.5" book by Scott Lowe carries a warning on this as well)
that carefully balancing vCPUs is a must in a VMware environment. (Again, I
don't believe Linode uses VMware, so I can't say with any certainty that KVM
or Xen exhibit this behavior.)

So why can't we run 8 vCPUs on one physical one? Because while they're virtual
to some extent, they're not completely abstracted. Anytime the hypervisor has
to perform a translation between the guest OS and the host, a performance
penalty is incured. So while the hypervisor may abstract scheduling, it
reveals as much of the physical CPU to the guest VM as possible. Here's a
little blurb from an older VMware manual explaining a bit of the difference:
[http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-4-esx-
vcenter/index.jsp?topic...](http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-4-esx-
vcenter/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.vsphere.resourcemanagement.doc_41/managing_cpu_resources/c_understanding_cpu_virtualization.html)

CPU virtualization =/= emulation

For this reason, (again, at least in a VMware environment) we can't give a VM
more vCPUs than exist pCPUs to align them to.

Hope this helps!

~~~
mnordhoff
Fortunately, Linode runs Xen.

------
jaequery
DO's biggest problem is their lack of "zero-downtime snapshot backup and
upgrading". i've not used Linode but anyone know if theirs is any different?

~~~
SudoAlex
Upgrades/downgrades requires transferring all your data from one server to
another - so that means downtime. The bigger the server, the more downtime in
transferring.

As for backups, Linode backups seem to get a bad reputation. They do take a
snapshot of a running instance - but reports from the forums indicate that
they regularly fail, leaving you with a missing backup at some points. The
only way of restoring a backup is to deploy that backup as a new server.

I'd recommend avoiding Linode backups and doing your own.

~~~
jaequery
upgrades for ram and storage does not have to have any downtime. same for
snapshots, through LVM/ZFS, they can be nearly instant in most cases. it just
seems like DO have not been able to figure this out for whatever reasons.

~~~
grey-area
Linode does not offer pain-free upgrades - your files are physically copied to
another size of box, not just allocated more resources on the existing box.
The bigger your files, the longer it'll take (around 30 mins usually).

I agree it would be nice to do upgrades in place but presumably they have very
good reasons for not doing so. Are you aware of any provider which does this
in a seamless way? I'm not really sure how they'd do it, particularly for RAM.

------
corford
Big shame the new $20 plan now only offers 2 cores versus 8 with the current
plan. For my workloads, I don't need 2GB RAM or SSD disks, I just need the
cores :(

~~~
aroman
Interestingly, I had the opposite reaction. I plan on running node.js
applications on Linode, and as node cannot automatically take advantage of
multiple cores (and even manually the support is experimental), the
announcement of vertically scaled but horizontally contracted CPU cores was
very exciting to me.

------
ff_
Wow, that's beautiful. Currently I'm a DO customer (10$ plan), and if they had
a 10$ plan I'd make the switch instantly.

------
rdl
Semi-related: does anyone know of any good (but still fairly cheap) providers
doing Atom C2750/C2758 servers yet?

------
filmgirlcw
Shall we call this the DigialOcean effect?

~~~
weixiyen
sigh... just put 12 droplets in digitalocean last week. now thinking of
switching back...

------
ForFreedom
The specs for $20 is same for DO and Linode excepting for the 8GB extra HDD on
Linde.

------
beedogs
This is nice to see. SSD has gotten ridiculously cheap lately.

------
mark_lee
awesome, linode or DO, if you're small or media companies, no other options
should be considered at all, even AWS or Google Cloud.

------
Kudos
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is now available on Linode too.

------
hyptos
wow EC2 instance free plan :

$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync

1024+0 records in

1024+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 35.8268 s, 30.0 MB/s

~~~
vacri
Yeah, AWS doesn't have the best speed to drive, though if you have money, you
can specify how many IOPS you want... you just have to pay for your declared
use every hour whether you're using it or not. It's also kinda hard to predict
if you're not familiar with that kind of thing.

Note that on AWS your hard drive isn't on the machine running your VM. If you
want to test local disk speed, do it in /mnt, where local disk storage is
mounted... but remember that data stored there won't persist if you turn your
instance off.

------
dharma1
ohhh yesss. DO is good for some locations like Southeast Asia but loving this
upgrade for my London and Tokyo Linodes

------
icantthinkofone
Without FreeBSD support, it means nothing to me.

------
notastartup
These upgrades are impressive but they are a bit too late to the game. DO
still has these advantages besides the cheap monthly price:

\- DO has excellent and easy to understand API \- Step by step guides on
setting up and running anything \- Minimal and simple

To entice me, it's no longer just a matter of price, DO has extra value added,
largely due to their simplicity.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
You mean like linode.com/api/ and library.linode.com?

~~~
notastartup
yeah it's not as obvious and simple like DO's REST calls. shame I never
discovered this while I Was with linode but it wouldn't have caught my
attention any how like how DO did with their simplicity.

now I definitely don't think there's much linode can do further to entice me
unless they matched digital ocean's pricing lower than 0.03/hr

------
kolev
Goodbye, Digital Ocean!

~~~
kolev
You can downvote as much as you want, but having faster nodes from a long-
established company, which doesn't keep your old images available to new
customers to peek in, beats DO! I've been with DO since they launched and I
can't say they are one of the more reliable services I've dealt with!

------
zak_mc_kracken
Does any of LINode or DigitalOcean offer plans without any SSD? I couldn't
find any.

I just want to install some personal projects there for which even SSD's are
overkill...

~~~
chc
Overkill never hurt anybody. Would you really want to ditch the SSD even if no
other numbers changed at all? Even if you don't need it, I don't see why it's
a bad thing.

~~~
zak_mc_kracken
It's just overkill to me to pay $20 a month for this when I expect a non-SSD
plan would be half as cheap, if not more.

~~~
chc
You can go with Digital Ocean or one of the other providers in the $5/mo range
if price is your real concern here. That's what they're there for. No need to
go through the indirection of talking about SSDs.

------
izietto
Do you know cheaper alternatives? Like DigitalOcean, as @catinsocks suggests

