13 ms·

I never quite understood the love for premium vps like linode (also remember slicehost?). If you check out lowendbox vps, their top-rated providers almost alway

• cheald 14y ago
  Support matters. When your neighbor is being DDOSed and you're offline as collateral damage, active support is the difference between happy customers and angry customer losses. For hobby boxes, yeah, sure, use whatever is the most cost-efficient.
  • pavs 14y ago
    Most medium sized vps will provide DDOS measures to a certain limit (no one will provide full-proof DDOS support). Fast and good customer support from server providers are not as rare as they used to be, they are pretty much given.
  • taligent 14y ago
    Linode is great during stable periods but when there is an outage or DDOS they are completely absent. I was sick to death of waiting whilst my Fremont instances were down due to power issues and receiving no response from support tickets. And based on their security incidents Linode is absolutely in the hobby box category as well. At least Amazon is PCI DSS compliant.
    • hoop 14y ago
      I don't know if this is still true, but when I started using Linode some years ago, Fremont was easily their worst datacenter. I've been in Newark without issue for some time now and I heard most of the other datacenters are pretty solid also. Regarding their support, I've submitted tickets at sometimes very odd hours and gotten responses back within minutes. What I really find amusing though is that you follow up your complaint of "completely absent during outage" with a reference to Amazon.
    • chc 14y ago
      > And based on their security incidents Linode is absolutely in the hobby box category as well. Was that plural a typo or have there been more since the admin console phish that I missed?
    • ceejayoz 14y ago
      > I was sick to death of waiting whilst my Fremont instances were down due to power issues and receiving no response from support tickets. Do you want their engineers bringing up the datacenter or answering up a bunch of e-mails with "we're working on bringing up the datacenter"?
      • biot 14y ago
        For a company providing critical computing resources, during an incident there should be one person responsible for managing incident response. It actually shouldn't be an engineer; the person's job should be to bug engineers as little as possible but provide periodic updates in a central location (a site of the form https://status.example.com https://status.example.com) which is available to all customers.
      • oasisbob 14y ago
        That's a false dichotomy. Communication and coordination are important parts of incident response. Key engineers shouldn't be doing either. If an org doesn't have dedicated people to communicate with their customers and triage support during an outage -- especially one where a facility loses power -- they're doing something wrong. When I was in a support role, I stayed up all night with the engineers during planned maintenance to answer questions, respond to tweets, &c. And if things went pear shaped, I'd already be up to speed.
  • jaequery 14y ago
    Take a look at this, a new anti-DDoS proxy service provided by Litespeed. this type of service seems to be the future of how handling DDoS attacks. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5339500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5339500
  • csomar 14y ago
    I actually found Linode support to be terrible. It's fast, but it's not honest. If there is interest about the issue that happened to me (Backups went down), I'll write a blog post about it.
    • cheald 14y ago
      I'd love to read about your experiences. I've always had good experiences with them.
• machbio 14y ago
  Things dont come cheap, they might be beaten at the price..but the comparison ends at that.. Enterprise Hardware at 20 Dollars does not come cheap, and with their support unlike AWS or anyone else.. they are every bit worth-full
  • verelo 14y ago
    AWS support gets a lot better once you're an enterprise level user.
    • astrodust 14y ago
      Define "lots better". Qualify with examples. My experiences with AWS have consistently been absolutely awful. Things akin to "We're sorry your instance has gone away for no apparent reason. Thank you for writing." This does not ever happen on Linode.
      • taligent 14y ago
        No with Linode its: "Your instance may have been rooted. But we won't tell you what happened, whether it is fixed or whether it will happen again."
        • deleted 14y ago
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      • verelo 14y ago
        Your tone, demanding for examples is a bit off putting... Direct contacts, very fast responses, phone support that picks up almost instantly and works with you for as long as it takes to resolve a problem. I've been very pleased, and most of the time the issues have been our fault, yet they've always helped us resolve the issue. I've used Linode too, no complaints at all, but you get a lot more power with the AWS tools, so there's really no choice for us.
        • astrodust 14y ago
• walls 14y ago
  > If you check out lowendbox vps, their top-rated providers almost always beats linode (and alike) in almost all category you can think of. And then you go and try those services, and realize how poor performance and stability is. Having been through several providers, I have personally found nothing that compares.
  • taligent 14y ago
    Err. Linode has pretty average performance compared to the SSD providers. And during my time as a customer Linode was the worst out of all the VPS I had ever tried up until that point. Constant outages at Fremont and heard about the same at London DC as well.
    • nigma 14y ago
      Just logged in to one of my servers in the London DC. 952 days of uptime, so in my case it has been pretty stable over the past couple years.
      • iNeal 14y ago
        That doesn't take network outages into account, which they may or may not had.
      • eropple 14y ago
        I had around 600 on one of my machines in Newark until I forgot to update my credit card info and they shut them off.
      • tkorri 14y ago
        Same here, I've never had any outage issues with the London datacenter. Though I had one issue where I couldn't install 64bit image to the server. I sent an support ticket about it and in less than ten minutes the whole thing was sorted out.
      • rimantas 14y ago
        You prompted me to check mine. 994 days of uptime.
• slig 14y ago
  People don't mind paying a premium if they trust the company. I know that linode won't disappear tomorrow but I'm not so sure about an unknown VPS company.
• yogo 14y ago
  Are you kidding? I often evaluate offerings from lowendbox and it still surprises me that for many of them images for some of the distros don't even work (solusvm seems to be crappy too). Linode is probably the only company outside of Rackspace (slicehost) to get Arch Linux images right to the point where it works great for production use. The support is always under 5 minutes.
  • CedarMadness 14y ago
    I never used Linode for Arch, what do differently that makes it better than others?
    • yogo 14y ago
      It is very stable. I believe it is from having the custom kernel (it seems that whoever puts together image knows how to keep the arch guest and whatever host happy). What you will see with most vps providers with arch is that you purchase a plan, run pacman -Syu then something no longer works (usually the network interface). I don't know exactly what causes the problem, but my understanding is that it is due to incompatibilities with the guest kernel and the host or the technology the host is using. On linode you don't have to install the linux package they usually provide close to the latest (currently 3.7.x).
      • CedarMadness 14y ago
        Ah, I see. I use Arch on Digital Ocean, and I've had a pretty good experience, aside from their initial image being a bit old (I had to change its settings to use netcfg and systemd).
        • yogo 14y ago
          I believe they are in the process of updating the Arch image (started sometime this week) as it is no longer listed on the list of images.
• grey-area 14y ago
  If you check out lowendbox vps, their top-rated providers almost always beats linode (and alike) in almost all category you can think of. There are more things in heaven and earth, pavs, than are dreamt of in your vps comparison tables. People choose slightly more expensive hosting because it is often less oversold, not maxed out (you're sharing resources with everyone else on your server after all), they have libraries, example stacks, backups and extra services, and the support is better. If you pay $5 a month, you'll get $5 a month of support (or the provider will go out of business). How much of your time would $5 a month pay for? I've used both slicehost and Linode, and a few other hosting companies who promised the moon and failed to deliver. Currently a happy Linode customer and have more important things to worry about than saving insignificant sums of money per month on what is a critical service for a web company.
  • dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    Honestly, I just trust Linode more than what I might find off of lowendbox.com. I'm happy to support them. For most of us running startups, are we all trying to compete with our competitors purely on who can race the bottom pricing?
• deleted 14y ago
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• jackowayed 14y ago
  If you're actually running a business off of a VPS, where the cost of downtime far outstrips the monthly bill, it's absolutely worth paying more. I have a VPS I found on lowend box. $5/month for a 512MB OpenVZ. It's a pretty good deal, and it does what I need it to do; I have full control over it, I can give other people access to it, I can run any kind of website on it as long as I don't care too much about performance or uptime. But there's no way I would run any service that was bringing in money on it. It basically has downtime every single month. Usually only for a few minutes at a time, and they tend to scrape by just barely exceeding 99.90%, but still. There also was one time when they emailed me saying there had been a power loss or some other reason that the rack my server was on went down, and I actually ended up having to go into the console to start my server back up and get everything working. I've also found their support ... not particularly supportive. Sure, Linode is 4x as expensive for the "same thing" (though to get Xen from my provider is only about 3x cheaper than Linode), but the amount of total money is negligible. $15/month. Maybe if I needed more resources it would be a difference of $100/month, but if I need a 4GB VPS for a service that's meant to make me money, that should still hopefully be trivial. For a service provider with much better uptime and support, that's a no-brainer.
  • dean 14y ago
    "... and they tend to scrape by just barely exceeding 99.90% [uptime]" Wow. That sentence makes 99.9% uptime sound really shitty.
    • packetslave 14y ago
      Do you consider a 45-minute outage once a month to be acceptable? Maybe for the price, it is.
      • dean 14y ago
        Depends how you look at it. A minute and a half a day? Doesn't sound too bad when you say it that way. A 3-hour outage every 4 months? My cable company can barely do that.
• mark_l_watson 14y ago
  I think it is probably worth the extra cost. I use another "premium" VPS vendor (RimuHosting) to host all of my Clojure web apps and the extra quality of service is worth it. I think you do make a good point if you are saying that for some projects the cheapest possible hosting makes sense.
• jjcm 14y ago
  I have a multitude of VPSs from various hosts (I've used vpslink, slicehost, linode, EC2, azure, prgmr, and about 4 or 5 others I can't remember off the top of my head right now). I usually do all of my web development over ssh, so I generally get a good feel for the latency of a box (as any delay will be immediately noticeable while hacking away in vim). While there are plenty of other solutions out there that offer better raw specs than linode, I've found linode to be the most consistent by far when it comes to performance. Is it a minor detail? Yea, one user with an additional 1 second on their page load out of a hundred isn't a huge deal usually, but when a consistent latency is important I've found linode to be my go-to provider.
• mootothemax 14y ago
  You advise basing the most critical part of your business on the cheapest offering possible?
  • lousy_sysadmin 14y ago
    that is one way to twist it...
  • pyre 14y ago
    So I should be registering my domain with Network Solutions for $34.99/year, right?
    • mootothemax 14y ago
      So I should be registering my domain with Network Solutions for $34.99/year, right? Can you explain this to me? I'm not sure I understand. If it's domain management you're after, MarkMonitor's the usual choice IIRC.
      • pyre 14y ago
        I just looked up an example of domain registration that was obviously more than the usual $7 ~ $10 per domain per year. I mean the domain is a pretty important piece of your business (i.e. you wouldn't want to lose it), so only an 'idiot' would go with GoDaddy/Gandi/NameCheap/etc right?
        • mootothemax 14y ago
          I mean the domain is a pretty important piece of your business (i.e. you wouldn't want to lose it), so only an 'idiot' would go with GoDaddy/Gandi/NameCheap/etc right? You're aware that there's a difference between "go with the cheapest" and "go with the most expensive," right?
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• codexon 14y ago
  As someone who has tried more than 20 deals from lowendbox, the downtime and performance is completely unsuitable for anything requiring uptime. They are fine if you are using it for DNS, VPN, backup, or a blog you don't care much about. Many of the hosts are run by kids trying to strike it rich with barely a few months worth of experience. Here's some of the things to watch out for. - IOwait so high that it takes several seconds for ls to run. - Complete data loss - Random packet loss because of all the people sharing a link or getting ddosed. - Hosts going bankrupt when they realize that no one is going to buy them out just because they have a bunch of customers obtained with their loss leading deals. If you have a good experience with them you probably: - Didn't stay on the node long enough for it to get overloaded - Are extremely lucky - Barely use the VPS Linode is overpriced, but the deals on lowendbox aren't a great alternative.
  • IgorPartola 14y ago
    I have had a mixed bag with LEB deals. Forced me to figure out how to run my apps Ina distributed fashion, which was fun. Currently with ThrustVPS where I pay $8/month. They have been solid for about two years now. BuyVM also seems to have great reputation on LEB.
    • codexon 14y ago
      Done both ThrustVPS and BuyVM. ThrustVPS: bought it, selected Debian 6. VPS stopped booting. Then they tell me that it doesn't work so I get them to install Ubuntu instead. 1 week later it goes down due to "network issues". (probably for several hours, can't be bothered to login to look at the ticket again). BuyVM: bought it to see how it was, VPS went down in the first couple of days. Never bothered to try it again. They are always out of stock. http://buyvmstatus.com/info/recent http://buyvmstatus.com/info/recent
      • frantechca 14y ago
        buyvmstatus isn't run by us. They are entirely ping based so if someone gets a flood, ICMP will go to the garbage while a nullroute kicks in a second or two later. We have an internal nodeping that monitors other services on the nodes that we're likely going to make public since more than a few people seem to get that idea about buyvmstatus. We actually provided the buyvmstatus developer a read-only HTTP page he was able to pull off each node to get the current uptime of the node but he's yet to actually work it into the system. Stock wise check back never week and we'll be reloaded on every plan in our Vegas location :) Thanks for the interest and kind words, Francisco
• walls 14y ago
  > Edit: wow, thats a lot of hostility... didn't realize linode reached fandom status. I guess I should keep my opinions to myself then? These kinds of comments have no place here, head back to Reddit. You've been given a boat load of evidence and personal experiences that reinforce lowendbox is garbage, and yet you try to rationalize it away as 'fandom status'.
• account_taken 14y ago
  Linode is pretty darn good. I have several sites with them and I have NEVER had any down time! I also have a few sites on RamNode and BuyVM which were voted as the better low end providers. They're anything but low end. I am getting better performance SSDs, better CPUs), more resources for 1/2 the cost of a comparable Linode VPS. No problems yet, going on three months. Their control panels leave a lot to be desired compared to Linode.
• dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I don't think it's about fandom and nobody should be hostile but I think it is a fair point that it is a little sketchy to run a business off some of the offers from lowendbox.com. I think Linode is a very reasonable company to work with and host a Web app; they have a good offering with good I/O performance compared to other providers.
• lsc 14y ago
  >I never quite understood the love for premium vps like linode This is true now (Linode is a premium vps provider) but it was not always true. Linode started out cheap, like almost everyone in our industry does. Linode was one of the first in the market; they've been selling VPSs longer even than I have. >Its nice that they are now increasing the bandwidth cap, but it was on the low side to begin with. My takeaway from this is that "linode finally joins everyone else in network speed and bandwidth." Eh, the way the industry works is that price pressure is applied by new entrants. Linode used to be that 'incredibly cheap provider' - but generally speaking? as you develop a reputation, you increase your resource allocations more slowly than moore's law would allow, and Linode has a pretty good reputation, so they get to charge substantially more than new entrants to the market. So yeah, if the new entrants aren't a way better deal in terms of resources? something is terribly wrong (and that new entrant probably won't gain the traction they need to survive long enough to be able to let their prices rise to a higher margin level) I mean, personally, I would think I have been letting my own prices rise (comparatively, I mean, by not increasing resource allocation) more than my reputation would allow me to... but I'm still gaining customers (though not at an awesome rate) - Linode announcing a network upgrade is putting /incredible/ pressure on me to upgrade my network. I can be okay with a new entrant flying below me, but Linode has a better reputation than I do; I have to provide more resources per dollar than they do. Now, the big counterexample here is slicehost. Slicehost started out fairly expensive (compared to the industry standard at the time) and they went from zero to twenty thousand customers in like two years. It was incredible. I don't know exactly what they did, but they had a reputation for providing managed hosting level service for (premium) unmanaged hosting prices. Now, how much of that reputation was marketing, and how much of that reputation was that their support really was that good, I don't know, but I do know that was their reputation.
  • jnw2 14y ago
    Is linode announcing their own netblocks under their own ASN, though? My impression has been that you have more diversity of immediate upstreams than linode...
    • lsc 14y ago
• antihero 14y ago
  The way I see it, if your business cannot take 512MB of RAM and a bunch of storage space, and fails to convert it into 20$ a month, or any amount where $20 a month is actually a factor, you have a shitty business.
• antihero 14y ago
  The way I see it, if your business cannot take 512MB of RAM and a bunch of storage space, and fails to convert it into 20$ a month, or any amount where $20 a month is actually a factor, you have a shitty business.
• dharma1 14y ago
  The thing with low end boxes are that you never know how long they're going to stay in business for, or whether your data is going to be safe With Linode I can at least sleep in peace, even if it costs a bit more
• coldtea 14y ago
  >Edit: wow, thats a lot of hostility... didn't realize linode reached fandom status. I guess I should keep my opinions to myself then? Sometimes, yes. In this particular case you were comparing apples to oranges. Take for example your opening line: "I never quite understood the love for premium vps like linode". The statement is absurd -- even if one includes the part about low cost VPS being faster. The idea behind "premium VPS" (or premium whatever) has to do with support, reliability, them being around a while, etc. Some cheaper VPS offering "more bandwidth" or "faster cpus" is not the same thing at all. Now, if you had said "there are cheaper VPS just as reliable and with good support as Linode, and on top of it, faster also, so why _pay_ a premium", that would make sense. If you could also support it. But a statement like: "I don't understand premium X" in general?