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Linode is awesome and great for small- to mid-range server needs. Even an EC2 small instance is overkill (both in computing resources and in price) for many web

Linode is awesome and great for small- to mid-range server needs. Even an EC2 small instance is overkill (both in computing resources and in price) for many websites. However if you do need lots of resources then the cost effectiveness of VPSes - or any virtualized system for that matter - goes down the drain quickly. For high-traffic websites nothing compares to good old dedicated servers. The pricing difference between a dedicated server and EC2/Linode/etc can be as much as 5x for the same resources. Linode is also a bad choice if you need a lot of disk space, and with "a lot" I mean >100 GB. Expanding disk space on Linode is very expensive, an order of magnitude more than EBS.

thaumaturgy 16y ago
Yeah, disk space is pretty much my only complaint with Linode. I'm not a big fan of their new manager interface, but that one's not a big deal. Otherwise, Linode is really amazing, and the author is right -- they do seem to always be improving their service.
rbranson 16y ago
How is the pricing difference for a dedicated server and EC2 5 times? Maybe if you only look at the physical hardware cost, but often that is the smaller component. You are comparing a capital asset with both fixed and variable cost components to a fixed-cost per-hour lease of resource.
- FooBarWidget 16y ago
  If you really need to lease resources by the hour then by all means, go with virtualized servers. But for one of the web apps I'm building I know that there's a high chance that I'll need to keep the servers around for at least a year. The prices on e.g. hetzner.de (I'm not a customer, I just read about it on HN) totally blows EC2 Reserved Instances out of the water. I don't know why you consider dedicated servers capital assets. Maybe if you're colocating your own servers, but I plan on renting dedicated servers that a hosting company provides. They'll be responsible for replacing the hardware if it fails. Turns out that renting a dedicated server and colocating your own costs approximately the same, assuming that the hardware never fails. If the hardware does fail then renting a dedicated is cheaper.
  - petercooper 16y ago
    "Renting" also has tax benefits in some jurisdictions since you can write off the full rent instead of depreciation over time.

thaumaturgy 16y ago

Yeah, disk space is pretty much my only complaint with Linode. I'm not a big fan of their new manager interface, but that one's not a big deal. Otherwise, Linode is really amazing, and the author is right -- they do seem to always be improving their service.

rbranson 16y ago

How is the pricing difference for a dedicated server and EC2 5 times? Maybe if you only look at the physical hardware cost, but often that is the smaller component. You are comparing a capital asset with both fixed and variable cost components to a fixed-cost per-hour lease of resource.

FooBarWidget 16y ago
If you really need to lease resources by the hour then by all means, go with virtualized servers. But for one of the web apps I'm building I know that there's a high chance that I'll need to keep the servers around for at least a year. The prices on e.g. hetzner.de (I'm not a customer, I just read about it on HN) totally blows EC2 Reserved Instances out of the water. I don't know why you consider dedicated servers capital assets. Maybe if you're colocating your own servers, but I plan on renting dedicated servers that a hosting company provides. They'll be responsible for replacing the hardware if it fails. Turns out that renting a dedicated server and colocating your own costs approximately the same, assuming that the hardware never fails. If the hardware does fail then renting a dedicated is cheaper.
- petercooper 16y ago
  "Renting" also has tax benefits in some jurisdictions since you can write off the full rent instead of depreciation over time.