15 ms·

Linode Simplifies Plans, Reveals CPU Priority

115 points by jterenzio 14y ago

FreeKill 14y ago
I wonder how these new plans will affect existing users. My plan falls directly between two of these simplified plans. The prices seem the same still, so it would cost me $15 more a month to increase to closest new package.
- TheSwordsman 14y ago
  caker (the CEO) mentioned in IRC that current users will be able to resize in to those plans for the times being, they just won't be able to add new Linodes with those plans.
kyrra 14y ago
Linode forum discussion on this topic (that I could find): http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9544 http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9544 And maybe I'm just ignorant on the topic, but what exactly does CPU priority do here? I understand basic linux process priority (like the 'nice' command), but how exactly does CPU priority behave on linode. Searching through their docs, I couldn't find anything. EDIT: to maybe answer my own question, maybe this is the Xen credit schedule? http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Credit_Scheduler http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Credit_Scheduler
- agwa 14y ago
  2x CPU priority may simply mean that you're sharing the host with 1/2 as many other guests (and each guest is guaranteed at least its equal share of the CPU). They've stated publicly in the past that larger Linodes share the host with proportionally fewer other guests.
mashmac2 14y ago
What do they mean by CPU Priority? I'm assuming that meant access to part of a processor, but how does that work with 4 CPU and 16x priority? (I'm working on the assumption that 1x priority ~= 1 core.) Of course, my assumption is probably wrong - just curious how this affects the load on a given server and how the VPS interacts with other VPS's on that node.
- wmf 14y ago
  It's probably arbitrary units, so 16x just means 16 times more than 1x. I suspect that 1x is something like 1/8 or 1/4 of a core.
  - supersaiyan 14y ago
    But the server configuration of 16x is different then 1x, they wouldn't be hosted on the same server; I still don't understand what the priority is relative to
    - wmf 14y ago
      For example, if 1x means 32 VMs per server and 16x means 2 VMs per server (assuming fair sharing), then the labeling is proportional to the minimum performance you can expect.
cllns 14y ago
Weird they haven't updated their blog with a post about this.
larrys 14y ago
Anyone care to share their experience with linode.com vs. http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ ? (We setup a few vps's with rackspace and have been happy so far.)
- cowsaysoink 14y ago
  They are kind of different beasts. Linode can spin servers up and down rather quickly and you can deploy different OS's all through the online menu. Prgmr you buy a machine send an ssh key they set it up and send you the bill. Then you get a login console at xxxxxx.prgmr.com and login and setup a user or deploy your own OS using centos recovery. But you can't create and destroy servers like linode or aws or rackspace.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    I've had a couple prgmr VPSes for about a year and I'll say this: I've never had any interruptions, they are always fast when sshed into, and make good web servers. The only problem, and its kind of a big one, is that support sucks. Reseting your ssh key (which I stupidly have needed to do a couple of times) takes about 3 days. You send them an email and they respond... eventually. But you get what you pay for and its hard to ask for much service when you're paying those low prices. For the price, the servers themselves are awesome. I'm switching to Azure because their prices are reasonable and you get the full management experience.
- thegyppo 14y ago
  Fairly similar performance, but almost $20 difference in price. Here's some data comparing the 1GB plans: Linode 1GB: http://serverbear.com/13-linode-1024-linode http://serverbear.com/13-linode-1024-linode Prgmr 1GB: http://serverbear.com/1709-1024mib-prgmr-com http://serverbear.com/1709-1024mib-prgmr-com
- nemesisj 14y ago
  We've had a great experience with Linode, horrible with Rackspace. Rackspace London is a disaster - I'd stay far away from them if possible.
dotBen 14y ago
Linode keeps instances homogeneous, so only the same type/size of instance exists on a given bare-metal machine. Unless that's changed, that would mean that all instances running on a given machine share the same CPU Priority, there will just be fewer instances demanding service from the CPU(s) the larger the plan you have. ...so wondering if that's what CPU Priority means, or if Linode is about to mix instance sizes on same hardware?
- salman89 14y ago
  Great question. If only the same type/size exists on a machine, then these priority numbers are just a rough measure of relative CPU power (between plans).
taligent 14y ago
Have they updated their security and disclosure policies ? If not they can remain in my "dodgy vendor who you can't trust" list. For those that don't remember hackers managed to get root access to several VPS via some Linode vulnerability. Didn't bother to let customers know. Didn't bother to update their status/website. Didn't bother to tell anyone what they've done to fix it. Compare that with CloudFlare: http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-attack-apparent-google-app http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-attack-apparen... Linode continues to be a recurring example of how not to behave as a vendor.
- whalesalad 14y ago
  Continues? I've been a happy Linode customer for a long time. Their boxes are snappy. I rarely have issues, and when I do, they are pretty quick to respond and help out. I've also had my fare share of free hosting thanks to their referral platform. Aside from the issue you mention, what else have they been doing wrong?
  - taligent 14y ago
    Congratulations. I was a happy Linode customer too until I had to find out from Reddit that a major security hack had occurred and my VPS had potentially been rooted. I don't recall every receiving an email from Linode about it. And the fact is that every single day that passes without them updating their security/disclosure policies and showing some commitment to transparency is another day they will be classed as "untrustworthy".
- jspthrowaway2 14y ago
  If you are referring to the Bitcoin incident, the only accurate statement in your comment is that hackers managed to gain root access on several VPS. The rest of it is nowhere remotely close to the truth: http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-incident.html http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-incident.h... You were very active in the very forum thread wherein the announcement was posted by another customer, not half a dozen posts above you, so I find it hard to believe this falsehood is not intentional: http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8509 http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8509 Considering the grandstanding you did in that forum thread and are continuing to do here with your overly aggressive (and false) commentary, I question whether you have some kind of overt agenda against Linode that is clouding any message you might have. Every company makes mistakes, and Linode, in my opinion, handled this one as appropriately as they could have; were it Amazon, who are far more secretive (particularly with outages), we might have never known.
MichaelGG 14y ago
I am consistently surprised how many VM hosts refuse to tell you what your CPU guarantees are. EC2 at least gives you a general equivalence to a specific hardware. Rackspace refuses to go into detail. Others I've spoken to will only commit to saying "core", without specifying what the reference hardware is. And even then, actually making sure you've got a commit of that CPU is a whole other issue. I think EC2's compute units are a commit, though. Linode's "priority" seems like ex-Slicehost's way of saying "hey bigger machines get a higher proportion"... nothing really useful for figuring out exactly what you're buying. And you can't ever really figure out what you have: things could be severely over-committed, and you'll never know until you get starved. So you can't just benchmark your way out of it.
- spindritf 14y ago
  > Others I've spoken to will only commit to saying "core", without specifying what the reference hardware is. There's probably no reference hardware beyond `cat /proc/cpuinfo`.
  - patrickgzill 14y ago
    Even that is not accurate... on an OpenVZ instance set for 2 cores, this command gives me the specs on the CPU, an E5405, twice. Of course, this chip actually has 4 cores, so to show only 2 is not really accurate. On a nearly-identical XenServer instance, it shows the same info, showing 2 CPUs but identifying the CPU as a 6-core Opteron. From this, however, you cannot infer what percentage of those 2 virtual CPUs that you are going to get.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - pixie_ 14y ago
      /proc/cpuinfo for me shows 4 Intel Xeon L5520 @ 2.27GHz
      - 14y ago
graue 14y ago
It wasn't immediately clear to me what changed. Here's the old homepage: http://web.archive.org/web/20110713211922/http://www.linode.com/index.cfm http://web.archive.org/web/20110713211922/http://www.linode.... It appears Linode removed the 768 and 1536 plans, renamed the 1024/2048/4096 plans to 1GB/2GB/4GB, and added an 8GB plan. They also added a row in the table showing CPU priority. The 512 plan is unchanged, as are specs and prices for the other three remaining plans.
- anotherbadlogin 14y ago
  Thanks for doing what the OP should have. What is up with posting this headline and then just linking to the Linode homepage? That doesn't tell us jack. LAME.
- shuzchen 14y ago
  They didn't actually add an 8GB plan, they've always had larger plans, just too many to display on the landing page. If you went into pricing or tried to signup, the larger plans were always available. Since they scrubbed some plans I guess there's room for the 8GB on the landing page now.
mp99e99 14y ago
Since there are all VPS users here, what do you think is the best way to market a VPS product.. or rather, how did you end up becoming a Linode customer?
- astrodust 14y ago
  The best way to market a VPS product is to make a better VPS product. Linode offers a very good product, but it could be better. Their dashboard and management utilities are better than most, but aren't especially manager friendly and don't scale well to teams. My ideal VPS provider would be somewhere between Heroku and Linode, offering self-managed hosting when you want it, and fully-managed hosting where you need it.
mp99e99 14y ago
Since there are all VPS users here, what do you think is the best way to market a VPS product.. or rather, how did you end up becoming a Lin
swalberg 14y ago
I'm actually disappointed. I liked the 768 package, it was big enough that you could run a fair amount of stuff [0], and cost only $30/month. I was planning on buying a new one over my Christmas holidays and moving my stuff over so I could get onto a newer CentOS. CPU has never been a problem, so this new priority is meaningless to me. For my needs, $30/mo was about as much as I'd spend on a server to host mine and a few friend's blogs, some photos, and some remote services. $40 is too much for me and the lower plan just doesn't have enough RAM to be interesting. So now my options are 1) find somewhere else, or 2) backup my data and rebuild the box in place. 0 - I manage a few Linode 768s including my own. 768 was a great size for a few small blogs and a low traffic Rails site, or a larger traffic blog.
- aaroneous 14y ago
  768 is still available as a resize option - not sure if that's a mistake though...
- pygatea 14y ago
  Another potential option is using a Linode 512 with "extra" RAM (see the Extras tab in the Linode Manager). Additionally, I've always found the Linode support folks to be fairly accommodating, so maybe it's worth asking if they can still provision 768s.
  - swalberg 14y ago
    Yea, some people suggested that in the forums. It doesn't end up being the full 768 (which is not the end of the world) but you also lose the extra HDD and bandwidth so you're actually paying more at that point.
- shiftpgdn 14y ago
  Have you thought about switching over to a kimsufi.ie server? Your $30 will go a lot further and you're not sharing a disk or CPU. I'd only stick with linode if you need the scale-ability.
wtf242 14y ago
This is disappointing. My Rails app gets just enough traffic that it uses 1.2-1.4 gigs of ram on average. The 1.5 gig plan was perfect for me and I've used it without issues for years now.
andmarios 14y ago
The change (removal of some plans) is a couple weeks old. About CPU priority, Linode never kept it a secret. For the small VPS (512MB RAM), you get a guaranteed 1/20 of a 4 core XEON processor and it scales linearly with each plan's RAM. As explained on their FAQ, their machines have 8 cores each and house 40 512MB VPS.
twodayslate 14y ago
Why would someone get a linode when they can get a dedicated server for $15? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838729 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838729
- JohnTheRipper 14y ago
  And why would they get a Linode when they can get a VPS from another provider for much, much cheaper? They don't bring much to the table for the price that a cheaper provider can't offer.
  - shuzchen 14y ago
    Features? Performance? A lot of people have benchmarked various cloud providers and Linode consistently gets high marks on CPU and disk IO. That particular $15/month dedicated gets you a single-core (!!!) Atom/Celeron processor. Who knows what hard drive they put on there. At $15 a month for a slot on the rack, I doubt it's any good. For the longest time I lived on a single 512 linode, and ran 6 mid sized Django sites, all with postgres and redis on the same machine. I knew how to keep lean (taking advantage of varnish, nginx, uwsgi) and even used that linode for a ongoing mumble server and irc. I've since got more Linodes (grew with more sites) and split up the responsibilities, but I still remember getting a lot of performance out of that one little instance. Also, Linode brings other features to the table, like a great API, easy to use dashboard, free nameserver, and availability in various geographic locations. Granted, my opinion is biased - I'm a really happy customer there. But I have had experience managing other machines on Slicehost (horrible experience) and EC2 (decent enough, but doesn't make me smile).
    - JohnTheRipper 14y ago
      I have a BuyVM VPS, even with the filtered IP addon it's still under 1/2 the cost of a Linode with inferior allocations of disk and bandwidth. According to ServerBear, it has a (much) higher overall score, slightly worse average network/unixbench performance, and MUCH better disk performance. It's a great little VPS, and the only issues I've had were sub-par routing to some places for a few months (fixed completely when they bought a new router for SJC — now it maxes out my home line and does great in overall network performance). I've had my VPS for almost 12 months now, and I would never go to Linode... An API sounds cool, but I have no use for that. The control panel is excellent, I have no reason to use Linode instead. BuyVM has free DNS (and 5GB of free backup space), so no reason to use Linode over them. BuyVM has SJC and Buffalo locations, sure, they could use more, but I don't need multiple servers. I've stuffed quite a bit of stuff onto my VPS, and performance has been amazing. They've even absorbed large DRDoS attacks for me with the filtered IPs, and were willing to accommodate my unusual situation (the DRDoS source slaves didn't realize the source IP was spoofed, and sent abuse reports to my provider, which were useless as they were the ones attacking me) — after explaining the situation to them, they agreed to ignore any further reports from said network. I currently have three low end virtual servers for (a lot) of things, and my favorite out of all of them is the BuyVM VPS. So, at least in my case, I can see no possible reason I'd want to go with a provider that is 2x the cost, has historic security issues, has been reported to be unwilling to deal with any sort of DDoS attack whatsoever beyond a nullroute, and offers inferior performance and resources. I actually don't like the idea of getting a OVH budget dedi over a VPS for any type of production site, it's just not as stable.
songgao 14y ago
Am I the only one here who thinks that for personal use, owning a server in house is a better choice than using a hosted VPS or server? It's quite easy to get a decent micro HP server (even with SSD storage) within $1000, which would cost $150.00 - $300.00 a month for a equivalent plan on Linode. Suppose you upgrade your server every two years, the monthly cost of the server is less than $50. You get dedicated CPU time and I/O, permissions to managing everything. Internet bandwidth might be a problem. But let's put ourselves in the 2 or 3 years future. What if you already have Gigabit Internet like Google Fiber for $70/mo? And you get other benefits for owning a server in your house. Since it's connected to your home LAN, it can be used to help build a smart home, control smart sensors/cameras, or serve as a media server. Am I missing something here?
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > Am I missing something here? You are missing a lot of things. 1. Linode et al buy top-end hardware. It is, generally, going to be more reliable. 2. Linode et al have redundancy in multiple parts of their system. Redundant power, redundant networking, redundant disks, redundancy all over the damn place. A server sitting in a hallway closet does not have these advantages. 3. Finally, you assume that your time is worthless; as in having a $0/hr value. I charge a lot more than $0/hr for my time. If, in actual fact, I could successfully farm out my little Wordpress blog network to a reliable host who charged a lot more than Linode, I would do so in a heartbeat because it makes financial and hair-pulling sense. I farm out the management of physical servers to Linode for the same reason. I am nearly 32, my time is expensive, my patience is short and my interest in hardware has long since abated because I have other shit to do. Linode is a bargain from my POV.
- raylu 14y ago
  Yes. Your home internet connection is not nearly as reliable as a datacenter's. (Also, you have guests over and the 5 year old unplugs the machine. Your home catches on fire or, worse, you decide to move to another city.)
- JohnTheRipper 14y ago
  There's quite a bit that you're missing. Let's start with point #1. You're paying $1000 upfront. With a VPS, you can pay a few bucks per month to get very decent performance (assuming you go with a LEB instead of a overpriced Linode). You assume that you could use your home internet, but the reality of that is that almost every consumer ISP on the face of the earth won't allow customers to run servers. Can you get away with it? Usually, yes. Is it a good idea? Not at all. Why spend the equivalent of $50/mo? You can get budget dedicated servers for that price range, with a heck of a lot better network resources, and no need to maintain your own hardware. Really, there's a ridiculously long list of reasons that running any public-facing server from your home is a horrible idea. Take the game server I used to run as an example — I'd be completely and utterly screwed if my home connection was getting 4Gbps DDoS attacks, yet with it being on a remote server, I have options to mitigate it or even ignore it (nullroute, yay). Edit: There's a ridiculously long list of reasons why home-hosting is bad.
contingencies 14y ago
I recently evaluated some cloud providers. There were differences of 10x latency for a bunch of basic (unix filesystem plus some bash script) level operations between EC2 and Rackspace. The Rackspace people failed to take complaints seriously, so we took our business elsewhere. EC2 is good but their spin-up time is crap. Though same-kernel is obviously a security reduction, the speed is far better: I for one can't wait to see more LXC and other lightweight virt stuff being made available with real cgroup-level guarantees.
- wmf 14y ago
  ...differences of 10x latency ... between EC2 and Rackspace... Was that PV vs. HVM by any chance?
Tichy 14y ago
I've heard good things about Linode, but ultimately, why not get a dedicated server for just a little more money? I pay 30€/month for mine with Hetzner, yesterday there was another host with prices starting from 10€? So what is the appeal of Linode? That you can upgrade to a faster server quickly?
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Some things may be a factor - If you hardware says goodbye, your server says goodbye as well. It needs to be physically rebuilt. With Linode, maintenance time means your server shuts down here and reboots somewhere else. - Can you reinstall your server, pick a new distro automatically? - Can you add more memory or more storage to your server with a click?
  - Tichy 14y ago
    I'm not much of an admin, but is it so much easier to transfer a virtual image to another server than to transfer an installation from one server to another? Presumably as long as the server your VM sits on has more memory than your VM, you can increase memory easily. But the maximum might only be what a dedicated server would have given you from the start? Edit: I just checked, seems Hetzner has a server with 16GB RAM for 49€/month (64$). The maximum Linode VM with 8GB sets you back 320€/month. It seems the 49€ is the cheapest standard Hetzner server atm, but you can get cheaper ones via their auctions. Of course then if you need more memory you have to move server, not sure how complicated that really is...
    - rahoulb 14y ago
      Depending upon your provider, it can be trivial to transfer VMs from one host to another. So if you want more resources than the physical host has available, or there is a hardware failure you can be up and running again in minutes (and at the company I used to work for, we automatically did the transfer, so the customer didn't even need to get out of bed). Of course, you pay for that, both in performance and cost, but that's the decision you have to make. Edit: overuse of the word "host"
MattBearman 14y ago
While I love Linode (It's my VPS host of choice) it's always bothered me they don't do any kind of volume discount - ie: the cost of 8 GB is just 32 times that of the 512 MB. I was hoping this change would rectify that, wishful thinking I suppose.
- ovi256 14y ago
  The CPU priority may be considered a volume discount.

115 points by jterenzio 14y ago

I wonder how these new plans will affect existing users. My plan falls directly between two of these simplified plans. The prices seem the same still, so it would cost me $15 more a month to increase to closest new package.

TheSwordsman 14y ago
caker (the CEO) mentioned in IRC that current users will be able to resize in to those plans for the times being, they just won't be able to add new Linodes with those plans.

kyrra 14y ago

Linode forum discussion on this topic (that I could find): http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9544 http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9544 And maybe I'm just ignorant on the topic, but what exactly does CPU priority do here? I understand basic linux process priority (like the 'nice' command), but how exactly does CPU priority behave on linode. Searching through their docs, I couldn't find anything. EDIT: to maybe answer my own question, maybe this is the Xen credit schedule? http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Credit_Scheduler http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Credit_Scheduler

agwa 14y ago
2x CPU priority may simply mean that you're sharing the host with 1/2 as many other guests (and each guest is guaranteed at least its equal share of the CPU). They've stated publicly in the past that larger Linodes share the host with proportionally fewer other guests.

mashmac2 14y ago

What do they mean by CPU Priority? I'm assuming that meant access to part of a processor, but how does that work with 4 CPU and 16x priority? (I'm working on the assumption that 1x priority ~= 1 core.) Of course, my assumption is probably wrong - just curious how this affects the load on a given server and how the VPS interacts with other VPS's on that node.

wmf 14y ago
It's probably arbitrary units, so 16x just means 16 times more than 1x. I suspect that 1x is something like 1/8 or 1/4 of a core.
- supersaiyan 14y ago
  But the server configuration of 16x is different then 1x, they wouldn't be hosted on the same server; I still don't understand what the priority is relative to
  - wmf 14y ago
    For example, if 1x means 32 VMs per server and 16x means 2 VMs per server (assuming fair sharing), then the labeling is proportional to the minimum performance you can expect.

cllns 14y ago

Weird they haven't updated their blog with a post about this.

larrys 14y ago

Anyone care to share their experience with linode.com vs. http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ ? (We setup a few vps's with rackspace and have been happy so far.)

cowsaysoink 14y ago
They are kind of different beasts. Linode can spin servers up and down rather quickly and you can deploy different OS's all through the online menu. Prgmr you buy a machine send an ssh key they set it up and send you the bill. Then you get a login console at xxxxxx.prgmr.com and login and setup a user or deploy your own OS using centos recovery. But you can't create and destroy servers like linode or aws or rackspace.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  I've had a couple prgmr VPSes for about a year and I'll say this: I've never had any interruptions, they are always fast when sshed into, and make good web servers. The only problem, and its kind of a big one, is that support sucks. Reseting your ssh key (which I stupidly have needed to do a couple of times) takes about 3 days. You send them an email and they respond... eventually. But you get what you pay for and its hard to ask for much service when you're paying those low prices. For the price, the servers themselves are awesome. I'm switching to Azure because their prices are reasonable and you get the full management experience.
thegyppo 14y ago
Fairly similar performance, but almost $20 difference in price. Here's some data comparing the 1GB plans: Linode 1GB: http://serverbear.com/13-linode-1024-linode http://serverbear.com/13-linode-1024-linode Prgmr 1GB: http://serverbear.com/1709-1024mib-prgmr-com http://serverbear.com/1709-1024mib-prgmr-com
nemesisj 14y ago
We've had a great experience with Linode, horrible with Rackspace. Rackspace London is a disaster - I'd stay far away from them if possible.

dotBen 14y ago

Linode keeps instances homogeneous, so only the same type/size of instance exists on a given bare-metal machine. Unless that's changed, that would mean that all instances running on a given machine share the same CPU Priority, there will just be fewer instances demanding service from the CPU(s) the larger the plan you have. ...so wondering if that's what CPU Priority means, or if Linode is about to mix instance sizes on same hardware?

salman89 14y ago
Great question. If only the same type/size exists on a machine, then these priority numbers are just a rough measure of relative CPU power (between plans).

taligent 14y ago

Have they updated their security and disclosure policies ? If not they can remain in my "dodgy vendor who you can't trust" list. For those that don't remember hackers managed to get root access to several VPS via some Linode vulnerability. Didn't bother to let customers know. Didn't bother to update their status/website. Didn't bother to tell anyone what they've done to fix it. Compare that with CloudFlare: http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-attack-apparent-google-app http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-attack-apparen... Linode continues to be a recurring example of how not to behave as a vendor.

whalesalad 14y ago
Continues? I've been a happy Linode customer for a long time. Their boxes are snappy. I rarely have issues, and when I do, they are pretty quick to respond and help out. I've also had my fare share of free hosting thanks to their referral platform. Aside from the issue you mention, what else have they been doing wrong?
- taligent 14y ago
  Congratulations. I was a happy Linode customer too until I had to find out from Reddit that a major security hack had occurred and my VPS had potentially been rooted. I don't recall every receiving an email from Linode about it. And the fact is that every single day that passes without them updating their security/disclosure policies and showing some commitment to transparency is another day they will be classed as "untrustworthy".
jspthrowaway2 14y ago
If you are referring to the Bitcoin incident, the only accurate statement in your comment is that hackers managed to gain root access on several VPS. The rest of it is nowhere remotely close to the truth: http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-incident.html http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-incident.h... You were very active in the very forum thread wherein the announcement was posted by another customer, not half a dozen posts above you, so I find it hard to believe this falsehood is not intentional: http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8509 http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8509 Considering the grandstanding you did in that forum thread and are continuing to do here with your overly aggressive (and false) commentary, I question whether you have some kind of overt agenda against Linode that is clouding any message you might have. Every company makes mistakes, and Linode, in my opinion, handled this one as appropriately as they could have; were it Amazon, who are far more secretive (particularly with outages), we might have never known.

MichaelGG 14y ago

I am consistently surprised how many VM hosts refuse to tell you what your CPU guarantees are. EC2 at least gives you a general equivalence to a specific hardware. Rackspace refuses to go into detail. Others I've spoken to will only commit to saying "core", without specifying what the reference hardware is. And even then, actually making sure you've got a commit of that CPU is a whole other issue. I think EC2's compute units are a commit, though. Linode's "priority" seems like ex-Slicehost's way of saying "hey bigger machines get a higher proportion"... nothing really useful for figuring out exactly what you're buying. And you can't ever really figure out what you have: things could be severely over-committed, and you'll never know until you get starved. So you can't just benchmark your way out of it.

spindritf 14y ago
> Others I've spoken to will only commit to saying "core", without specifying what the reference hardware is. There's probably no reference hardware beyond `cat /proc/cpuinfo`.
- patrickgzill 14y ago
  Even that is not accurate... on an OpenVZ instance set for 2 cores, this command gives me the specs on the CPU, an E5405, twice. Of course, this chip actually has 4 cores, so to show only 2 is not really accurate. On a nearly-identical XenServer instance, it shows the same info, showing 2 CPUs but identifying the CPU as a 6-core Opteron. From this, however, you cannot infer what percentage of those 2 virtual CPUs that you are going to get.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - pixie_ 14y ago
    /proc/cpuinfo for me shows 4 Intel Xeon L5520 @ 2.27GHz
    - 14y ago

graue 14y ago

It wasn't immediately clear to me what changed. Here's the old homepage: http://web.archive.org/web/20110713211922/http://www.linode.com/index.cfm http://web.archive.org/web/20110713211922/http://www.linode.... It appears Linode removed the 768 and 1536 plans, renamed the 1024/2048/4096 plans to 1GB/2GB/4GB, and added an 8GB plan. They also added a row in the table showing CPU priority. The 512 plan is unchanged, as are specs and prices for the other three remaining plans.

anotherbadlogin 14y ago
Thanks for doing what the OP should have. What is up with posting this headline and then just linking to the Linode homepage? That doesn't tell us jack. LAME.
shuzchen 14y ago
They didn't actually add an 8GB plan, they've always had larger plans, just too many to display on the landing page. If you went into pricing or tried to signup, the larger plans were always available. Since they scrubbed some plans I guess there's room for the 8GB on the landing page now.

mp99e99 14y ago

Since there are all VPS users here, what do you think is the best way to market a VPS product.. or rather, how did you end up becoming a Linode customer?

astrodust 14y ago
The best way to market a VPS product is to make a better VPS product. Linode offers a very good product, but it could be better. Their dashboard and management utilities are better than most, but aren't especially manager friendly and don't scale well to teams. My ideal VPS provider would be somewhere between Heroku and Linode, offering self-managed hosting when you want it, and fully-managed hosting where you need it.

mp99e99 14y ago

Since there are all VPS users here, what do you think is the best way to market a VPS product.. or rather, how did you end up becoming a Lin

swalberg 14y ago

I'm actually disappointed. I liked the 768 package, it was big enough that you could run a fair amount of stuff [0], and cost only $30/month. I was planning on buying a new one over my Christmas holidays and moving my stuff over so I could get onto a newer CentOS. CPU has never been a problem, so this new priority is meaningless to me. For my needs, $30/mo was about as much as I'd spend on a server to host mine and a few friend's blogs, some photos, and some remote services. $40 is too much for me and the lower plan just doesn't have enough RAM to be interesting. So now my options are 1) find somewhere else, or 2) backup my data and rebuild the box in place. 0 - I manage a few Linode 768s including my own. 768 was a great size for a few small blogs and a low traffic Rails site, or a larger traffic blog.

aaroneous 14y ago
768 is still available as a resize option - not sure if that's a mistake though...
pygatea 14y ago
Another potential option is using a Linode 512 with "extra" RAM (see the Extras tab in the Linode Manager). Additionally, I've always found the Linode support folks to be fairly accommodating, so maybe it's worth asking if they can still provision 768s.
- swalberg 14y ago
  Yea, some people suggested that in the forums. It doesn't end up being the full 768 (which is not the end of the world) but you also lose the extra HDD and bandwidth so you're actually paying more at that point.
shiftpgdn 14y ago
Have you thought about switching over to a kimsufi.ie server? Your $30 will go a lot further and you're not sharing a disk or CPU. I'd only stick with linode if you need the scale-ability.

wtf242 14y ago

This is disappointing. My Rails app gets just enough traffic that it uses 1.2-1.4 gigs of ram on average. The 1.5 gig plan was perfect for me and I've used it without issues for years now.

andmarios 14y ago

The change (removal of some plans) is a couple weeks old. About CPU priority, Linode never kept it a secret. For the small VPS (512MB RAM), you get a guaranteed 1/20 of a 4 core XEON processor and it scales linearly with each plan's RAM. As explained on their FAQ, their machines have 8 cores each and house 40 512MB VPS.

twodayslate 14y ago

Why would someone get a linode when they can get a dedicated server for $15? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838729 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838729

JohnTheRipper 14y ago
And why would they get a Linode when they can get a VPS from another provider for much, much cheaper? They don't bring much to the table for the price that a cheaper provider can't offer.
- shuzchen 14y ago
  Features? Performance? A lot of people have benchmarked various cloud providers and Linode consistently gets high marks on CPU and disk IO. That particular $15/month dedicated gets you a single-core (!!!) Atom/Celeron processor. Who knows what hard drive they put on there. At $15 a month for a slot on the rack, I doubt it's any good. For the longest time I lived on a single 512 linode, and ran 6 mid sized Django sites, all with postgres and redis on the same machine. I knew how to keep lean (taking advantage of varnish, nginx, uwsgi) and even used that linode for a ongoing mumble server and irc. I've since got more Linodes (grew with more sites) and split up the responsibilities, but I still remember getting a lot of performance out of that one little instance. Also, Linode brings other features to the table, like a great API, easy to use dashboard, free nameserver, and availability in various geographic locations. Granted, my opinion is biased - I'm a really happy customer there. But I have had experience managing other machines on Slicehost (horrible experience) and EC2 (decent enough, but doesn't make me smile).
  - JohnTheRipper 14y ago
    I have a BuyVM VPS, even with the filtered IP addon it's still under 1/2 the cost of a Linode with inferior allocations of disk and bandwidth. According to ServerBear, it has a (much) higher overall score, slightly worse average network/unixbench performance, and MUCH better disk performance. It's a great little VPS, and the only issues I've had were sub-par routing to some places for a few months (fixed completely when they bought a new router for SJC — now it maxes out my home line and does great in overall network performance). I've had my VPS for almost 12 months now, and I would never go to Linode... An API sounds cool, but I have no use for that. The control panel is excellent, I have no reason to use Linode instead. BuyVM has free DNS (and 5GB of free backup space), so no reason to use Linode over them. BuyVM has SJC and Buffalo locations, sure, they could use more, but I don't need multiple servers. I've stuffed quite a bit of stuff onto my VPS, and performance has been amazing. They've even absorbed large DRDoS attacks for me with the filtered IPs, and were willing to accommodate my unusual situation (the DRDoS source slaves didn't realize the source IP was spoofed, and sent abuse reports to my provider, which were useless as they were the ones attacking me) — after explaining the situation to them, they agreed to ignore any further reports from said network. I currently have three low end virtual servers for (a lot) of things, and my favorite out of all of them is the BuyVM VPS. So, at least in my case, I can see no possible reason I'd want to go with a provider that is 2x the cost, has historic security issues, has been reported to be unwilling to deal with any sort of DDoS attack whatsoever beyond a nullroute, and offers inferior performance and resources. I actually don't like the idea of getting a OVH budget dedi over a VPS for any type of production site, it's just not as stable.

songgao 14y ago

Am I the only one here who thinks that for personal use, owning a server in house is a better choice than using a hosted VPS or server? It's quite easy to get a decent micro HP server (even with SSD storage) within $1000, which would cost $150.00 - $300.00 a month for a equivalent plan on Linode. Suppose you upgrade your server every two years, the monthly cost of the server is less than $50. You get dedicated CPU time and I/O, permissions to managing everything. Internet bandwidth might be a problem. But let's put ourselves in the 2 or 3 years future. What if you already have Gigabit Internet like Google Fiber for $70/mo? And you get other benefits for owning a server in your house. Since it's connected to your home LAN, it can be used to help build a smart home, control smart sensors/cameras, or serve as a media server. Am I missing something here?

jacques_chester 14y ago
> Am I missing something here? You are missing a lot of things. 1. Linode et al buy top-end hardware. It is, generally, going to be more reliable. 2. Linode et al have redundancy in multiple parts of their system. Redundant power, redundant networking, redundant disks, redundancy all over the damn place. A server sitting in a hallway closet does not have these advantages. 3. Finally, you assume that your time is worthless; as in having a $0/hr value. I charge a lot more than $0/hr for my time. If, in actual fact, I could successfully farm out my little Wordpress blog network to a reliable host who charged a lot more than Linode, I would do so in a heartbeat because it makes financial and hair-pulling sense. I farm out the management of physical servers to Linode for the same reason. I am nearly 32, my time is expensive, my patience is short and my interest in hardware has long since abated because I have other shit to do. Linode is a bargain from my POV.
raylu 14y ago
Yes. Your home internet connection is not nearly as reliable as a datacenter's. (Also, you have guests over and the 5 year old unplugs the machine. Your home catches on fire or, worse, you decide to move to another city.)
JohnTheRipper 14y ago
There's quite a bit that you're missing. Let's start with point #1. You're paying $1000 upfront. With a VPS, you can pay a few bucks per month to get very decent performance (assuming you go with a LEB instead of a overpriced Linode). You assume that you could use your home internet, but the reality of that is that almost every consumer ISP on the face of the earth won't allow customers to run servers. Can you get away with it? Usually, yes. Is it a good idea? Not at all. Why spend the equivalent of $50/mo? You can get budget dedicated servers for that price range, with a heck of a lot better network resources, and no need to maintain your own hardware. Really, there's a ridiculously long list of reasons that running any public-facing server from your home is a horrible idea. Take the game server I used to run as an example — I'd be completely and utterly screwed if my home connection was getting 4Gbps DDoS attacks, yet with it being on a remote server, I have options to mitigate it or even ignore it (nullroute, yay). Edit: There's a ridiculously long list of reasons why home-hosting is bad.

contingencies 14y ago

I recently evaluated some cloud providers. There were differences of 10x latency for a bunch of basic (unix filesystem plus some bash script) level operations between EC2 and Rackspace. The Rackspace people failed to take complaints seriously, so we took our business elsewhere. EC2 is good but their spin-up time is crap. Though same-kernel is obviously a security reduction, the speed is far better: I for one can't wait to see more LXC and other lightweight virt stuff being made available with real cgroup-level guarantees.

wmf 14y ago
...differences of 10x latency ... between EC2 and Rackspace... Was that PV vs. HVM by any chance?

Tichy 14y ago

I've heard good things about Linode, but ultimately, why not get a dedicated server for just a little more money? I pay 30€/month for mine with Hetzner, yesterday there was another host with prices starting from 10€? So what is the appeal of Linode? That you can upgrade to a faster server quickly?

raverbashing 14y ago
Some things may be a factor - If you hardware says goodbye, your server says goodbye as well. It needs to be physically rebuilt. With Linode, maintenance time means your server shuts down here and reboots somewhere else. - Can you reinstall your server, pick a new distro automatically? - Can you add more memory or more storage to your server with a click?
- Tichy 14y ago
  I'm not much of an admin, but is it so much easier to transfer a virtual image to another server than to transfer an installation from one server to another? Presumably as long as the server your VM sits on has more memory than your VM, you can increase memory easily. But the maximum might only be what a dedicated server would have given you from the start? Edit: I just checked, seems Hetzner has a server with 16GB RAM for 49€/month (64$). The maximum Linode VM with 8GB sets you back 320€/month. It seems the 49€ is the cheapest standard Hetzner server atm, but you can get cheaper ones via their auctions. Of course then if you need more memory you have to move server, not sure how complicated that really is...
  - rahoulb 14y ago
    Depending upon your provider, it can be trivial to transfer VMs from one host to another. So if you want more resources than the physical host has available, or there is a hardware failure you can be up and running again in minutes (and at the company I used to work for, we automatically did the transfer, so the customer didn't even need to get out of bed). Of course, you pay for that, both in performance and cost, but that's the decision you have to make. Edit: overuse of the word "host"

MattBearman 14y ago

While I love Linode (It's my VPS host of choice) it's always bothered me they don't do any kind of volume discount - ie: the cost of 8 GB is just 32 times that of the 512 MB. I was hoping this change would rectify that, wishful thinking I suppose.

ovi256 14y ago
The CPU priority may be considered a volume discount.