3 ms·

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

by jules 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      Hmm, so I should run my combinatorial search algorithms on 512 Linodes, although perhaps they wouldn't like that ;)
tbrownaw 16y ago
Their FAQ has a section on how many instances are on each host, which is 40 for 0.5GB and 20 for 1GB etc (ie, 20GB of customer instances per host, regardless of instance size). Which would mean that when you go for twice as much ram, you also get twice as much of everything else. The front page lists disk space and bandwidth, and these also scale linearly with ram size.
lsc 16y ago
>You get 512MB for $19.95 and 1024MB for $39.95. If you buy 2x512MB, don't you get twice as much CPU too? If their setup is the way I think it is, your 1024MB instance will have twice the cpu 'weight' as each 512MB instances, so, /in the case of contention/ the 1024MB instance will have twice as much cpu time as the 512. Of course, my experience has been that cpu usage rarely goes above 50% on most VPS servers, so it makes less difference.
lsc 16y ago
this lack of a 'bulk discount' is something I've given a lot of thought to. I do give a bulk discount that can seem pretty dramatic, in part because I assume the same amount of support on a $8 VPS as on a $68 VPS. - What I've found is that this is not what many customers assume. Many customers assume that if they buy a larger, more expensive VPS from you, that they will get a higher level of support, even if ram/cpu/disk is deeply discounted on that large VPS vs a small VPS. So from that point of view, adding in a 'bulk discount' doesn't make any sense, because you end up spending just as much money supporting one large (and very demanding) customer as many tiny, undemanding customers, so from that point of view, Linode is doing the exact right thing. Now, I've tried to tackle this by being more explicit about the "you are paying $4/month for support." bit. I'll be opening orders for large customers again later this month, I hope, and we'll see how well that works. Another possibility is that Linode sees support costs as fixed... in many ways, they are. You need to acquire a good team, train them in customer service, and then have enough of them that at least one is on line at any time (I'm not quite to that last part yet, which is part of why I need to insure that my prices fly beneath Linode's.) You need to have enough people to handle peaks, and support is very peaky, so unless you queue it up (causing latency and customer dissatisfaction) much of the time, many of your support people are going to be idle (or working on non-support stuff) even so, the greater your customer's support demands are, the higher your peaks will be and the more support people you need, so I think the former is far more likely than the latter.

by jules 16y ago

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 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    Hmm, so I should run my combinatorial search algorithms on 512 Linodes, although perhaps they wouldn't like that ;)

tbrownaw 16y ago

Their FAQ has a section on how many instances are on each host, which is 40 for 0.5GB and 20 for 1GB etc (ie, 20GB of customer instances per host, regardless of instance size). Which would mean that when you go for twice as much ram, you also get twice as much of everything else. The front page lists disk space and bandwidth, and these also scale linearly with ram size.

lsc 16y ago

>You get 512MB for $19.95 and 1024MB for $39.95. If you buy 2x512MB, don't you get twice as much CPU too? If their setup is the way I think it is, your 1024MB instance will have twice the cpu 'weight' as each 512MB instances, so, /in the case of contention/ the 1024MB instance will have twice as much cpu time as the 512. Of course, my experience has been that cpu usage rarely goes above 50% on most VPS servers, so it makes less difference.

lsc 16y ago

this lack of a 'bulk discount' is something I've given a lot of thought to. I do give a bulk discount that can seem pretty dramatic, in part because I assume the same amount of support on a $8 VPS as on a $68 VPS. - What I've found is that this is not what many customers assume. Many customers assume that if they buy a larger, more expensive VPS from you, that they will get a higher level of support, even if ram/cpu/disk is deeply discounted on that large VPS vs a small VPS. So from that point of view, adding in a 'bulk discount' doesn't make any sense, because you end up spending just as much money supporting one large (and very demanding) customer as many tiny, undemanding customers, so from that point of view, Linode is doing the exact right thing. Now, I've tried to tackle this by being more explicit about the "you are paying $4/month for support." bit. I'll be opening orders for large customers again later this month, I hope, and we'll see how well that works. Another possibility is that Linode sees support costs as fixed... in many ways, they are. You need to acquire a good team, train them in customer service, and then have enough of them that at least one is on line at any time (I'm not quite to that last part yet, which is part of why I need to insure that my prices fly beneath Linode's.) You need to have enough people to handle peaks, and support is very peaky, so unless you queue it up (causing latency and customer dissatisfaction) much of the time, many of your support people are going to be idle (or working on non-support stuff) even so, the greater your customer's support demands are, the higher your peaks will be and the more support people you need, so I think the former is far more likely than the latter.