6 ms·

$0.02/hr == approximately $14/mo if you leave it on. Is this really $6/mo cheaper than a linode 512? That might be nice for personal projects. I'm trying to t

by mr_luc 16y ago

$0.02/hr == approximately $14/mo if you leave it on. Is this really $6/mo cheaper than a linode 512? That might be nice for personal projects. I'm trying to teach myself some things that really need more than my local dev machine (puppet, backup strategies/more resilient code, learning cassandra). I've been running a bunch of VM's on my laptop, but my dev machine is a weakling and can't hardly handle it. It almost seems like I could just spin up a dozen of these little instances for $2.88 per waking day and teach myself under substantially more "real" conditions on the cheap. That's something I'd love to have as an option on linode, given that teaching myself is a large part of what I use it for. Is there any reason that wouldn't work? Is this too complicated in practice?

tibbon 16y ago
None that I can see. I'm going to buy one reserved one, even though I have 7 hardware servers. I need to get better with the platform and for $54/year, the price is right
bdonlan 16y ago
Remember, though, you still need to pay for EBS and bandwidth seperately.
- mr_luc 16y ago
  Which should be pretty low if I'm the only user. Linode doesn't charge you for bandwidth between nodes in the same datacenter -- is there something comparable in the EC2 world?
  - pcarmichael 16y ago
    Yes, but only if the nodes are in the same region and availability zone. From amazon's pricing page [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/]: There is no Data Transfer charge between Amazon EC2 and other Amazon Web Services within the same region (i.e. between Amazon EC2 US West and Amazon S3 in US West). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 instances located in different Availability Zones in the same Region will be charged Regional Data Transfer. Data transferred between AWS services in different regions will be charged as Internet Data Transfer on both sides of the transfer.
tasaro 16y ago
I haven't seen anyone mention the cost of IO requests associated with EBS. Quoted from http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ : As an example, a medium sized website database might be 100 GB in size and expect to average 100 I/Os per second over the course of a month. This would translate to $10 per month in storage costs (100 GB x $0.10/month), and approximately $26 per month in request costs (~2.6 million seconds/month x 100 I/O per second $0.10 per million I/O).
- jread 16y ago
  I'm running 4 m1.small EBS-backed LAMP servers in all 4 regions. I pay about $1/mo for EBS IO (8-11 million IO requests per instance per month). The servers get a few thousand hits per day. The cost of EBS IO should be minimal in most cases. The benefit of EBS versus the local storage you'll get with Rackspace or Linode is greater durability because it is off instance and AWS automatically duplicates the data. If the VM host system fails (i.e. power supply goes bad), you can bring your instance back online within a very short period of time on another host at the exact state it was at the time of failure.
  - shykes 16y ago
    One word of caution: sometimes when an instance becomes unavailable (think network partitioning), all its EBS volumes will become unavailable as well. You can't snapshot, you can't detach. My most frustrating experience on EC2 yet.
    - JeffJenkins 16y ago
      You can force detach using the console tools. I had this problem too
      - shykes 16y ago
        I can remember at least one case where force-detach didn't work either. In that case there is absolutely nothing you can do to access your data.
dedward 16y ago
Yup - you could - this is a fantastic move by Amazon - this is the one thing that's been missing from my experimentation world - Linode is fantastic for the servers I run permanently there - I have no plans to remove them, but the commitment to an instance for a certain period of time is what keeps me from using it to work on deployment scenarious and whatnot. Amazon is fantastic for this (and has differnet constraints, of course) This just brought AWS down into the realm of competition with the likes of Linode and others, and we can now figure out how to spin up a dozen nodes and work with all the innards of aws without worring about getting accidentally hosed on forgotten instances... works for me.
swolchok 16y ago
If you use a 1-year reserved instance, it'll cost you about $115/year, which is substantially cheaper than the lowest-priced Linode. I'll be switching http://mbusreloaded.com/ http://mbusreloaded.com/ after its Linode subscription runs out, as there's absolutely no way I use more than 10 GB of bandwidth per year.
- tibbon 16y ago
  It quoted me at $54/year.
  - tricky 16y ago
    That's the one-time fee. You still have to pay $0.007 per hour.
    - tibbon 16y ago
      Oh, I didn't catch that part. Thanks for the heads up!
kurokikaze 16y ago
I'm in the exact same situation with Riak + node.js developement. Micro instances seems like a good fit.
petercooper 16y ago
One thing to note is that even EC2's "small" instance pales in comparison CPU-wise to even the low end Linodes. When playing with EC2, it blew me away how ridiculously slow they are until you get to the high levels (oddly it seemed the memory speed was also very poor - I had to wonder if even memory was networked somehow).
- alphabetum 16y ago
  some corroboration: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
- rbranson 16y ago
  These instances are different though, they are able to burst CPU usage, just like Linode. AFAIK, none of the other EC2 instance sizes are able to do this.
  - commx 16y ago
    Linode doesn't "burst" CPU usage. Processor time is shared fairly among Linodes on a host, and you can use any time that isn't used by others. It's worth noting that each Linode has access to four cores, so you can go up to 400% CPU utilization. For a good idea of how Linode's CPU performance routinely exceeds that of competitors, try this review: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
    - rbranson 16y ago
      Semantics. The end result is the same: there is almost always a large amount of spare CPU cycles on each physical box, which can be utilized by instances to "burst" above their allocated capacity.
      - commx 16y ago
        It's more than semantics. The term "burst" carries the implication that you only get something for a short time. That's really not a good reflection of reality in this situation.
tlrobinson 16y ago
Can Linode instances occasionally randomly be killed like EC2 instances, or do they offer stronger guarantees about uptime?
- jharrison 16y ago
  Linode is a VPS provider, not a cloud provider like EC2. Instances are always on, not on-demand. If they are ever killed it would be because of some kind of outage but I've found that to be extremely rare in my experience. Slicehost has also been good for VPS.
Spoutingshite 16y ago
AWS instances don't have persistent storage...if your server crashes you loose your data, the changes to your OS and even your IP. AWS is great, but you can't compare the AWS instances with other VPS or Dedicated offerings.
- jbyers 16y ago
  Micro instances don't have any local storage -- EBS only.
mark_l_watson 16y ago
One thing that is useful: if you like to keep several instances configured and 'ready to go' for your learning experiments, when you are done, don't terminate them, just stop them. You don't pay for stopped instances (but then you do pay 24 cents a day per unattached Elastic IP address).

by mr_luc 16y ago

tibbon 16y ago

None that I can see. I'm going to buy one reserved one, even though I have 7 hardware servers. I need to get better with the platform and for $54/year, the price is right

bdonlan 16y ago

Remember, though, you still need to pay for EBS and bandwidth seperately.

mr_luc 16y ago
Which should be pretty low if I'm the only user. Linode doesn't charge you for bandwidth between nodes in the same datacenter -- is there something comparable in the EC2 world?
- pcarmichael 16y ago
  Yes, but only if the nodes are in the same region and availability zone. From amazon's pricing page [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/]: There is no Data Transfer charge between Amazon EC2 and other Amazon Web Services within the same region (i.e. between Amazon EC2 US West and Amazon S3 in US West). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 instances located in different Availability Zones in the same Region will be charged Regional Data Transfer. Data transferred between AWS services in different regions will be charged as Internet Data Transfer on both sides of the transfer.

tasaro 16y ago

I haven't seen anyone mention the cost of IO requests associated with EBS. Quoted from http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ : As an example, a medium sized website database might be 100 GB in size and expect to average 100 I/Os per second over the course of a month. This would translate to $10 per month in storage costs (100 GB x $0.10/month), and approximately $26 per month in request costs (~2.6 million seconds/month x 100 I/O per second $0.10 per million I/O).

jread 16y ago
I'm running 4 m1.small EBS-backed LAMP servers in all 4 regions. I pay about $1/mo for EBS IO (8-11 million IO requests per instance per month). The servers get a few thousand hits per day. The cost of EBS IO should be minimal in most cases. The benefit of EBS versus the local storage you'll get with Rackspace or Linode is greater durability because it is off instance and AWS automatically duplicates the data. If the VM host system fails (i.e. power supply goes bad), you can bring your instance back online within a very short period of time on another host at the exact state it was at the time of failure.
- shykes 16y ago
  One word of caution: sometimes when an instance becomes unavailable (think network partitioning), all its EBS volumes will become unavailable as well. You can't snapshot, you can't detach. My most frustrating experience on EC2 yet.
  - JeffJenkins 16y ago
    You can force detach using the console tools. I had this problem too
    - shykes 16y ago
      I can remember at least one case where force-detach didn't work either. In that case there is absolutely nothing you can do to access your data.

dedward 16y ago

Yup - you could - this is a fantastic move by Amazon - this is the one thing that's been missing from my experimentation world - Linode is fantastic for the servers I run permanently there - I have no plans to remove them, but the commitment to an instance for a certain period of time is what keeps me from using it to work on deployment scenarious and whatnot. Amazon is fantastic for this (and has differnet constraints, of course) This just brought AWS down into the realm of competition with the likes of Linode and others, and we can now figure out how to spin up a dozen nodes and work with all the innards of aws without worring about getting accidentally hosed on forgotten instances... works for me.

swolchok 16y ago

If you use a 1-year reserved instance, it'll cost you about $115/year, which is substantially cheaper than the lowest-priced Linode. I'll be switching http://mbusreloaded.com/ http://mbusreloaded.com/ after its Linode subscription runs out, as there's absolutely no way I use more than 10 GB of bandwidth per year.

tibbon 16y ago
It quoted me at $54/year.
- tricky 16y ago
  That's the one-time fee. You still have to pay $0.007 per hour.
  - tibbon 16y ago
    Oh, I didn't catch that part. Thanks for the heads up!

kurokikaze 16y ago

I'm in the exact same situation with Riak + node.js developement. Micro instances seems like a good fit.

petercooper 16y ago

One thing to note is that even EC2's "small" instance pales in comparison CPU-wise to even the low end Linodes. When playing with EC2, it blew me away how ridiculously slow they are until you get to the high levels (oddly it seemed the memory speed was also very poor - I had to wonder if even memory was networked somehow).

alphabetum 16y ago
some corroboration: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
rbranson 16y ago
These instances are different though, they are able to burst CPU usage, just like Linode. AFAIK, none of the other EC2 instance sizes are able to do this.
- commx 16y ago
  Linode doesn't "burst" CPU usage. Processor time is shared fairly among Linodes on a host, and you can use any time that isn't used by others. It's worth noting that each Linode has access to four cores, so you can go up to 400% CPU utilization. For a good idea of how Linode's CPU performance routinely exceeds that of competitors, try this review: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
  - rbranson 16y ago
    Semantics. The end result is the same: there is almost always a large amount of spare CPU cycles on each physical box, which can be utilized by instances to "burst" above their allocated capacity.
    - commx 16y ago
      It's more than semantics. The term "burst" carries the implication that you only get something for a short time. That's really not a good reflection of reality in this situation.

tlrobinson 16y ago

Can Linode instances occasionally randomly be killed like EC2 instances, or do they offer stronger guarantees about uptime?

jharrison 16y ago
Linode is a VPS provider, not a cloud provider like EC2. Instances are always on, not on-demand. If they are ever killed it would be because of some kind of outage but I've found that to be extremely rare in my experience. Slicehost has also been good for VPS.

Spoutingshite 16y ago

AWS instances don't have persistent storage...if your server crashes you loose your data, the changes to your OS and even your IP. AWS is great, but you can't compare the AWS instances with other VPS or Dedicated offerings.

jbyers 16y ago
Micro instances don't have any local storage -- EBS only.

mark_l_watson 16y ago

One thing that is useful: if you like to keep several instances configured and 'ready to go' for your learning experiments, when you are done, don't terminate them, just stop them. You don't pay for stopped instances (but then you do pay 24 cents a day per unattached Elastic IP address).