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Linode are wonderful - best support I've had from anyone, ever. Nice instances, too!

by madaxe 16y ago

shazow 16y ago
+1 to Linode.
catch23 16y ago
another +1. we moved to linode from rackspace. They don't have that crazy backup limitation that rackspace does, and they're always open to custom inquiries. Rackspace has the big company mentality -- if our interface doesn't have an option for it, it doesn't exist.
- chopsueyar 16y ago
  I second. Moved from Rackspace to Linode. The bandwidth overage charges are much more reasonable, too.
boyter 16y ago
What are they like for CPU usage? I have been looking at VPS.NET and other such providers to ensure I get a reasonable slice of CPU which I can use for other things. Most VPS providers I have come across dont like it if you start working out the millionth digit of Pi, but sometimes you have a task that takes a while and you can't run offsite.
- madaxe 16y ago
  Great - we've got two moderately large (12+ instances) clusters with them, one in the US, one in the UK - both are fast.
- easp 16y ago
  I believe each physical host has at least 8 real cores. They give each instance 4 virtual cores. As long as CPU time is available, an instance can use the full capacity of four cores. If there is contention for CPU time, every instance gets an equal share of CPU, which is also their fare share of CPU, because all the instances on a box are the same size/pricepoint. Further, larger instances are shared with a proportionally smaller number of other instances. My experience, which seems to be shared by just about anyone who has published benchmarks, is that Linode is appropriately conservative on the degree to which they oversell CPU, because generally, it appears that a task that wants 100% of four cores does in fact get close to 100% of four cores. The only thing to look out for is that there is quite a difference in single threaded performance between their newer hardware and their older hardware. Our app is written in one of the popular interpreted dynamic languages. Generic benchmarks for that language showeda 2-3x difference on some tests when run on the different hardware, and our app showed similar differences on CPU bound tasks. There are a few implications of this: First, it complicates things when you try to make your staging environment mirror production. The quick check is to look at /proc/cpuinfo and see if clock,cache and model line up. If not, open a ticket and ask them to migrate instances so things match. Second, while they try to size things appropriately so that your guaranteed CPU Is the same, regardless of which generation of host you are on, your peak CPU is going to vary dramatically since you get 4 cores, irregardless.
tlack 16y ago
+1. In the past 24 months I've used Rackspace, ThePlanet, SoftLayer, Slicehost, Linode and the terrible Mediatemple. I'm doing all future development on Linode. Their basic VPS is pretty quick for the price and it's online almost instantly. It's still just basic Linux, so you can rig everything you want - no awkward managed interfaces to worry about. I would consider switching to a different company, but for now Linode scratches my itch better than the rest.
- mt_Sara 16y ago
  I'm sorry to read that you've had a less than stellar experience with us. May I ask what happened? -Sara at (mt) Media Temple
  - tlack 16y ago
    Create an account. Open a service ticket. Wait hours for response. Plus no firewall options on your Nitro servers, at that price range, is ridiculous and way below the standards of the industry.
easp 16y ago
I like Linode, but they are wearing a little thin for me. In general, uptimes have been excellent but the physical server hosting one of our VPSs had three emergency reboots in a little over a month before they replaced the hardware. Perhaps they'd already planned to do a replacement after th e second incident but I had no way of knowing. Which brings me to my second beef, which is that they don't share much when closing a ticket. Their explanations are pretty prefunctory. In some cases, like transient network issues I generally can't tell if they've investigated the problem and done something about it or if the first-tier tech just takes a quick look sees it's working now, and punts it back to me to let them know if there are more problems. Similarly, after a major screwup that took down most of the virtual servers they host (including the ones that hosted their own website and web-based management tool), all we got was a brief explanation of what had gone wrong and a status blog hosted on someone elses infrastructure. What I didn't get was a sense of how they were going to guard against anything similar happening again. I'm sticking with them for now, but I'm also feeling like the effort I've put into automating the configuration of our application and all it's dependencies has been time well spent. I can boot a new infrastructure on another service in an hour or so and migrate to it with minimal downtime.

Linode are wonderful - best support I've had from anyone, ever. Nice instances, too!

by madaxe 16y ago

Linode are wonderful - best support I've had from anyone, ever. Nice instances, too!

shazow 16y ago

+1 to Linode.

catch23 16y ago

another +1. we moved to linode from rackspace. They don't have that crazy backup limitation that rackspace does, and they're always open to custom inquiries. Rackspace has the big company mentality -- if our interface doesn't have an option for it, it doesn't exist.

chopsueyar 16y ago
I second. Moved from Rackspace to Linode. The bandwidth overage charges are much more reasonable, too.

boyter 16y ago

What are they like for CPU usage? I have been looking at VPS.NET and other such providers to ensure I get a reasonable slice of CPU which I can use for other things. Most VPS providers I have come across dont like it if you start working out the millionth digit of Pi, but sometimes you have a task that takes a while and you can't run offsite.

madaxe 16y ago
Great - we've got two moderately large (12+ instances) clusters with them, one in the US, one in the UK - both are fast.
easp 16y ago
I believe each physical host has at least 8 real cores. They give each instance 4 virtual cores. As long as CPU time is available, an instance can use the full capacity of four cores. If there is contention for CPU time, every instance gets an equal share of CPU, which is also their fare share of CPU, because all the instances on a box are the same size/pricepoint. Further, larger instances are shared with a proportionally smaller number of other instances. My experience, which seems to be shared by just about anyone who has published benchmarks, is that Linode is appropriately conservative on the degree to which they oversell CPU, because generally, it appears that a task that wants 100% of four cores does in fact get close to 100% of four cores. The only thing to look out for is that there is quite a difference in single threaded performance between their newer hardware and their older hardware. Our app is written in one of the popular interpreted dynamic languages. Generic benchmarks for that language showeda 2-3x difference on some tests when run on the different hardware, and our app showed similar differences on CPU bound tasks. There are a few implications of this: First, it complicates things when you try to make your staging environment mirror production. The quick check is to look at /proc/cpuinfo and see if clock,cache and model line up. If not, open a ticket and ask them to migrate instances so things match. Second, while they try to size things appropriately so that your guaranteed CPU Is the same, regardless of which generation of host you are on, your peak CPU is going to vary dramatically since you get 4 cores, irregardless.

tlack 16y ago

+1. In the past 24 months I've used Rackspace, ThePlanet, SoftLayer, Slicehost, Linode and the terrible Mediatemple. I'm doing all future development on Linode. Their basic VPS is pretty quick for the price and it's online almost instantly. It's still just basic Linux, so you can rig everything you want - no awkward managed interfaces to worry about. I would consider switching to a different company, but for now Linode scratches my itch better than the rest.

mt_Sara 16y ago
I'm sorry to read that you've had a less than stellar experience with us. May I ask what happened? -Sara at (mt) Media Temple
- tlack 16y ago
  Create an account. Open a service ticket. Wait hours for response. Plus no firewall options on your Nitro servers, at that price range, is ridiculous and way below the standards of the industry.

easp 16y ago

I like Linode, but they are wearing a little thin for me. In general, uptimes have been excellent but the physical server hosting one of our VPSs had three emergency reboots in a little over a month before they replaced the hardware. Perhaps they'd already planned to do a replacement after th e second incident but I had no way of knowing. Which brings me to my second beef, which is that they don't share much when closing a ticket. Their explanations are pretty prefunctory. In some cases, like transient network issues I generally can't tell if they've investigated the problem and done something about it or if the first-tier tech just takes a quick look sees it's working now, and punts it back to me to let them know if there are more problems. Similarly, after a major screwup that took down most of the virtual servers they host (including the ones that hosted their own website and web-based management tool), all we got was a brief explanation of what had gone wrong and a status blog hosted on someone elses infrastructure. What I didn't get was a sense of how they were going to guard against anything similar happening again. I'm sticking with them for now, but I'm also feeling like the effort I've put into automating the configuration of our application and all it's dependencies has been time well spent. I can boot a new infrastructure on another service in an hour or so and migrate to it with minimal downtime.