15 ms·

This is great, but it would be nice to have a plan < 1GB for < $20/month. I love Linode, I've been using it for years, and the pricing is great in general. Bu

by acabal 14y ago

This is great, but it would be nice to have a plan < 1GB for < $20/month. I love Linode, I've been using it for years, and the pricing is great in general. But it'd be really nice to be able to spin up a $10/month, 512MB server for a new personal blog or other project. $20/month is prohibitively expensive for one-off side project hosting and there's lots of utility to be had from a cheap low-RAM, low-CPU server. I'd buy 10!

carbocation 14y ago
I suspect that, in the general case, keeping away people/projects for whom $20/month is prohibitively expensive ends up being a virtue for caker and the Linode crew. (Note that I'm not intending this to refer to you specifically, since you're already a subscriber anyway.)
- drewcrawford 14y ago
  The problem is that most projects make (possibly their only) hosting provider decision from a position of being unprofitable. Thus when you segment the market by "people who can afford $20-100/month", you are also segmenting the market by the correlating variables "people who are mad at their current host" and "people who can spare several days to migrate their infrastructure". As a member of that class who migrated to Linode, I can attest that the size of that market is nonzero. But I can also attest that a great many projects start and remain on AWS and lowendbox where the barrier to entry is much lower, and even as a satisfied Linode customer I continue to start and continue to maintain many projects in those environments.
  - tiredofcareer 14y ago
    Having deployed significant environments on both Linode and AWS I can safely say that the barrier to entry on AWS is nowhere near lower than Linode's, for all but the tiniest Wordpress blog. The hourly, broken-up billing is a smokescreen; for exactly what you get out of a (now) Linode 1024, you'd pay $50+/month or so on AWS. Don't forget total bandwidth, an elastic IP, and so on.
    - drewcrawford 14y ago
      The barrier-to-entry on AWS is in fact infinitely lower than on Linode: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ http://aws.amazon.com/free/ The ongoing TCO of AWS is much higher than Linode, of course. But that's precisely my point: you want to capture customers at birth, incubate them into adulthood, and then charge them a lot of money now that they can afford it.
      - tiredofcareer 14y ago
        Yeah, do you know how awful a t1.micro is? It's a joke. I've never seen steal% that high before. There must be thousands on a single machine. Although if you want to be pedantic, let's say "actually useful, potentially-production barrier to entry". There. Fixed.
        straight_talk 14y ago
        A friend of mine is running an ASP.NET MVC/Mono/MongoDB ecommerce site on micro with around a quarter million of annual sales. The site is very very fast.
        kbenson 14y ago
        If he hasn't already, get him to do a write-up on that. I'd sure be interested, and I'm sure many others would be as well.
        oasisbob 14y ago
        The high steal% is intentional, as the CPU is allowed to burst to take advantage of unused resources: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts_micro_instances.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts_... I don't find my cheap t1.micro based IRC bouncer / VPN / reverse SSH endpoint / static-content generation box to be an awful joke at all. They're quite useful for many things.
      - Klinky 14y ago
        You also want to avoid scammers and fly by night operations that don't value your business other than to find cheap CPU and bandwidth. There is a set level of overhead for each new customer, and new customers are probably more likely to need additional support. The lower you go with pricing, the larger this portion of your costs eats into your profits. There are $10 VPS solutions out there, but their poor reputations lends credence to the idea that $10 VPS solutions are not where the money is at.
  - wheels 14y ago
    This is one of those arguments that seems to makes sense when you're on the purchaser side of an SaaS product, but often breaks down when you're on the seller side. One of the biggest costs of running a SaaS business is support. I'd guess that there's not a whole lot of difference for Linode in the cost of supporting a $10/month vs. $320/month box. In fact, there may be negative correlation -- I wouldn't be surprised if the cheaper customers are more expensive. Now, your argument hinges on there being a high conversion rate from low-end plans to high-end plans. I'd guess that rate is quite low, in fact. Most accounts probably never upgrade and / or cancel after a few months. Now, the canceling in the first few months is a big problem as well, because for most SaaS businesses, your biggest support cost is going to be concentrated in those first months where the customer is getting set up. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes Linode a few months, on average (not median since support isn't evenly distributed), to get into the black on the low-end accounts. The variables in that equation are really important in deciding if it's worth putting up with cheap, less knowledgable, high churn customers just in the hopes of upselling them over time, or if it's better to slice off the segment from the beginning that finds $20/month to be onerous.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - ksec 14y ago
      just to be reminded that linode is unmanaged host.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >The problem is that most projects make (possibly their only) hosting provider decision from a position of being unprofitable. Being unprofitable and not being able to spend $240 / year is a different issue. The first is about the project being unprofitable. The second is about you being broke or not believing on it to spend even 1/150 of your income (I'm speaking of course for US/EU citizens/wages). There are however other vendors that have even $5/month plans for VPS (and even offer SSD drives). Try Digital Ocean.
- antihero 14y ago
  It would be neat if it was an option for people who already have Linodes. a tiny $10 server would be great as a build server or a puppet/salt master.
TillE 14y ago
Use one decent server for all your side projects. $20/month is not very much, unless it's just sitting there doing nothing. Alternatively, Hetzner will give you a 512MB VM for about $10.34/month.
- nobleach 14y ago
  https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/ will give you a 20GB SSD and 512MB of RAM for 5 bucks a month. Perfect for those little side projects.
  - carbocation 14y ago
    I think buying a few raspberries pi is competitive for a few projects over the course of a year.
    - superuser2 14y ago
      Good luck with the upload bandwidth on residential cable. Also in some cases simultaneous up/down kills the download speed. I guess if you had google fibre, though.
      - Vieira 14y ago
        http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/ http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/
  - nwh 14y ago
    Signing up with SSDTWEET nets you $11 of account credit too.
    - nobleach 14y ago
      Saw that tweet this morning!
- acabal 14y ago
gingerlime 14y ago
I agree, but can understand why Linode might want to stay away from the real lowend side of the scale. Personally I've started using Digital Ocean for those smaller non-production servers (staging, dev etc). I still wouldn't trust DO for anything production. The Linode service and support is second to none, and I'm happy paying the price (which now gives effectively twice the value!).
- trustfundbaby 14y ago
  You're on to something here. I imagine it was people with < 1GB plans that churned out the most (quit linode for a better offering) as soon as folks like Digital Ocean showed up. I should know, I was on a 768MB plan and as DO showed up with better pricing and more RAM I was gone. So I imagine that they've eliminated this plan to bring more stability to their recurring revenue, which makes sound business sense. The interesting thing is that linode started out as a cheaper alternative to slicehost, so its ironic that they are now trying to differentiate themselves in much the same way slicehost did back then.
  - grahamedgecombe 14y ago
    > The interesting thing is that linode started out as a cheaper alternative to slicehost Linode have been around since 2003. I think Slicehost was founded later than this (in 2006 according to a quick search for their name.)
    - agwa 14y ago
      > Linode have been around since 2003. I think Slicehost was founded later than this This is correct. I signed up with Linode in 2005 and there was no Slicehost then. I was moving from another VPS provider (Redwood Virtual) which had twice the resources for the same price as Linode but were really, really crummy (they don't even exist anymore). That experience really taught me the value of considering quality in addition to the price/feature ratio, which is why I'm not jumping ship to DigitalOcean. (I might if/when they establish a solid reputation, but no sooner.)
  - 14y ago
mixmastamyk 14y ago
Hmm, I guess they could offer 2,4,10 packs to make the total cost reasonable.
avenger123 14y ago
There are definitely providers that give you that. Checkout www.lowendtalk.com/. BuyVM.net is also very reliable and competitive for what you get.
- Matsta 14y ago
  Big up BuyVM! http://www.doesbuyvmhavestock.com/ http://www.doesbuyvmhavestock.com/ They actually have stock which only seems to happen a few times a year.
autoreverse 14y ago
512MB (burst), 20GB HDD VPS for 4.99/month http://quickweb.co.nz/lowendbox.html http://quickweb.co.nz/lowendbox.html I've been using these guys for small projects for about a year now - never a problem.
trotsky 14y ago
With ARIN likely to be 100% out of contiguos space by the end of this year, everybody really wants to discourage things like simple blog hosting taking up a /32 on its own. I'm sure they'd be happy to cut you a good deal if you were willing to only use 6, but fair market value for an IP will arguably be > $5/month in the not too distant future.
mrgreenfur 14y ago
For a simple side project, you don't really need 512mb dedicated. Voila: http://www.lowendbox.com/ http://www.lowendbox.com/
alex_doom 14y ago
I have single linode with several domains/projects on it. It's not to difficult to setup virtual domains.
dstorrs 14y ago
http://www.nephoscale.com/nephoscale-cloud-servers http://www.nephoscale.com/nephoscale-cloud-servers $7.30 / month for a 0.25G instance (on the members plan) $11.68 / month for a 0.5G $22.63 / month for a 1G I've worked with them a lot, and they are excellent. The underlying hardware is really, really fast, their tech support guys are very competent, and they are highly responsive.
kylefox 14y ago
> $20/month is prohibitively expensive If you're capable of using a bare-bones Linux VPS but are unable to pay $20/mo for your side projects, it's time for you to find a better paying job.
- porker 14y ago
  Why? If side-projects are just that, hobby tasks, then it's a toss up of spending $X disposable income on things I/my family enjoy, vs $X - $20. $20 is an additional day out with the kids, or half a pair of shoes for one of them... or an extra $20 overpayment on the mortgage (worth so much more in the long-term). Bottom line: it has nothing to do with income, but what people value.
mikeash 14y ago
They're going to have a certain amount of fixed overhead per instance, mostly in the form of support, so it may not be worthwhile to them to drop below $20 for any size.

by acabal 14y ago

carbocation 14y ago

I suspect that, in the general case, keeping away people/projects for whom $20/month is prohibitively expensive ends up being a virtue for caker and the Linode crew. (Note that I'm not intending this to refer to you specifically, since you're already a subscriber anyway.)

drewcrawford 14y ago
The problem is that most projects make (possibly their only) hosting provider decision from a position of being unprofitable. Thus when you segment the market by "people who can afford $20-100/month", you are also segmenting the market by the correlating variables "people who are mad at their current host" and "people who can spare several days to migrate their infrastructure". As a member of that class who migrated to Linode, I can attest that the size of that market is nonzero. But I can also attest that a great many projects start and remain on AWS and lowendbox where the barrier to entry is much lower, and even as a satisfied Linode customer I continue to start and continue to maintain many projects in those environments.
- tiredofcareer 14y ago
  Having deployed significant environments on both Linode and AWS I can safely say that the barrier to entry on AWS is nowhere near lower than Linode's, for all but the tiniest Wordpress blog. The hourly, broken-up billing is a smokescreen; for exactly what you get out of a (now) Linode 1024, you'd pay $50+/month or so on AWS. Don't forget total bandwidth, an elastic IP, and so on.
  - drewcrawford 14y ago
    The barrier-to-entry on AWS is in fact infinitely lower than on Linode: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ http://aws.amazon.com/free/ The ongoing TCO of AWS is much higher than Linode, of course. But that's precisely my point: you want to capture customers at birth, incubate them into adulthood, and then charge them a lot of money now that they can afford it.
    - tiredofcareer 14y ago
      Yeah, do you know how awful a t1.micro is? It's a joke. I've never seen steal% that high before. There must be thousands on a single machine. Although if you want to be pedantic, let's say "actually useful, potentially-production barrier to entry". There. Fixed.
      - straight_talk 14y ago
        A friend of mine is running an ASP.NET MVC/Mono/MongoDB ecommerce site on micro with around a quarter million of annual sales. The site is very very fast.
        kbenson 14y ago
        If he hasn't already, get him to do a write-up on that. I'd sure be interested, and I'm sure many others would be as well.
      - oasisbob 14y ago
        The high steal% is intentional, as the CPU is allowed to burst to take advantage of unused resources: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts_micro_instances.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts_... I don't find my cheap t1.micro based IRC bouncer / VPN / reverse SSH endpoint / static-content generation box to be an awful joke at all. They're quite useful for many things.
    - Klinky 14y ago
      You also want to avoid scammers and fly by night operations that don't value your business other than to find cheap CPU and bandwidth. There is a set level of overhead for each new customer, and new customers are probably more likely to need additional support. The lower you go with pricing, the larger this portion of your costs eats into your profits. There are $10 VPS solutions out there, but their poor reputations lends credence to the idea that $10 VPS solutions are not where the money is at.
- wheels 14y ago
  This is one of those arguments that seems to makes sense when you're on the purchaser side of an SaaS product, but often breaks down when you're on the seller side. One of the biggest costs of running a SaaS business is support. I'd guess that there's not a whole lot of difference for Linode in the cost of supporting a $10/month vs. $320/month box. In fact, there may be negative correlation -- I wouldn't be surprised if the cheaper customers are more expensive. Now, your argument hinges on there being a high conversion rate from low-end plans to high-end plans. I'd guess that rate is quite low, in fact. Most accounts probably never upgrade and / or cancel after a few months. Now, the canceling in the first few months is a big problem as well, because for most SaaS businesses, your biggest support cost is going to be concentrated in those first months where the customer is getting set up. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes Linode a few months, on average (not median since support isn't evenly distributed), to get into the black on the low-end accounts. The variables in that equation are really important in deciding if it's worth putting up with cheap, less knowledgable, high churn customers just in the hopes of upselling them over time, or if it's better to slice off the segment from the beginning that finds $20/month to be onerous.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - ksec 14y ago
    just to be reminded that linode is unmanaged host.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >The problem is that most projects make (possibly their only) hosting provider decision from a position of being unprofitable. Being unprofitable and not being able to spend $240 / year is a different issue. The first is about the project being unprofitable. The second is about you being broke or not believing on it to spend even 1/150 of your income (I'm speaking of course for US/EU citizens/wages). There are however other vendors that have even $5/month plans for VPS (and even offer SSD drives). Try Digital Ocean.
antihero 14y ago
It would be neat if it was an option for people who already have Linodes. a tiny $10 server would be great as a build server or a puppet/salt master.

TillE 14y ago

Use one decent server for all your side projects. $20/month is not very much, unless it's just sitting there doing nothing. Alternatively, Hetzner will give you a 512MB VM for about $10.34/month.

nobleach 14y ago
https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/ will give you a 20GB SSD and 512MB of RAM for 5 bucks a month. Perfect for those little side projects.
- carbocation 14y ago
  I think buying a few raspberries pi is competitive for a few projects over the course of a year.
  - superuser2 14y ago
    Good luck with the upload bandwidth on residential cable. Also in some cases simultaneous up/down kills the download speed. I guess if you had google fibre, though.
    - Vieira 14y ago
      http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/ http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/
- nwh 14y ago
  Signing up with SSDTWEET nets you $11 of account credit too.
  - nobleach 14y ago
    Saw that tweet this morning!
acabal 14y ago

gingerlime 14y ago

I agree, but can understand why Linode might want to stay away from the real lowend side of the scale. Personally I've started using Digital Ocean for those smaller non-production servers (staging, dev etc). I still wouldn't trust DO for anything production. The Linode service and support is second to none, and I'm happy paying the price (which now gives effectively twice the value!).

trustfundbaby 14y ago
You're on to something here. I imagine it was people with < 1GB plans that churned out the most (quit linode for a better offering) as soon as folks like Digital Ocean showed up. I should know, I was on a 768MB plan and as DO showed up with better pricing and more RAM I was gone. So I imagine that they've eliminated this plan to bring more stability to their recurring revenue, which makes sound business sense. The interesting thing is that linode started out as a cheaper alternative to slicehost, so its ironic that they are now trying to differentiate themselves in much the same way slicehost did back then.
- grahamedgecombe 14y ago
  > The interesting thing is that linode started out as a cheaper alternative to slicehost Linode have been around since 2003. I think Slicehost was founded later than this (in 2006 according to a quick search for their name.)
  - agwa 14y ago
    > Linode have been around since 2003. I think Slicehost was founded later than this This is correct. I signed up with Linode in 2005 and there was no Slicehost then. I was moving from another VPS provider (Redwood Virtual) which had twice the resources for the same price as Linode but were really, really crummy (they don't even exist anymore). That experience really taught me the value of considering quality in addition to the price/feature ratio, which is why I'm not jumping ship to DigitalOcean. (I might if/when they establish a solid reputation, but no sooner.)
- 14y ago

mixmastamyk 14y ago

Hmm, I guess they could offer 2,4,10 packs to make the total cost reasonable.

avenger123 14y ago

There are definitely providers that give you that. Checkout www.lowendtalk.com/. BuyVM.net is also very reliable and competitive for what you get.

Matsta 14y ago
Big up BuyVM! http://www.doesbuyvmhavestock.com/ http://www.doesbuyvmhavestock.com/ They actually have stock which only seems to happen a few times a year.

autoreverse 14y ago

512MB (burst), 20GB HDD VPS for 4.99/month http://quickweb.co.nz/lowendbox.html http://quickweb.co.nz/lowendbox.html I've been using these guys for small projects for about a year now - never a problem.

trotsky 14y ago

With ARIN likely to be 100% out of contiguos space by the end of this year, everybody really wants to discourage things like simple blog hosting taking up a /32 on its own. I'm sure they'd be happy to cut you a good deal if you were willing to only use 6, but fair market value for an IP will arguably be > $5/month in the not too distant future.

mrgreenfur 14y ago

For a simple side project, you don't really need 512mb dedicated. Voila: http://www.lowendbox.com/ http://www.lowendbox.com/

alex_doom 14y ago

I have single linode with several domains/projects on it. It's not to difficult to setup virtual domains.

dstorrs 14y ago

http://www.nephoscale.com/nephoscale-cloud-servers http://www.nephoscale.com/nephoscale-cloud-servers $7.30 / month for a 0.25G instance (on the members plan) $11.68 / month for a 0.5G $22.63 / month for a 1G I've worked with them a lot, and they are excellent. The underlying hardware is really, really fast, their tech support guys are very competent, and they are highly responsive.

kylefox 14y ago

> $20/month is prohibitively expensive If you're capable of using a bare-bones Linux VPS but are unable to pay $20/mo for your side projects, it's time for you to find a better paying job.

porker 14y ago
Why? If side-projects are just that, hobby tasks, then it's a toss up of spending $X disposable income on things I/my family enjoy, vs $X - $20. $20 is an additional day out with the kids, or half a pair of shoes for one of them... or an extra $20 overpayment on the mortgage (worth so much more in the long-term). Bottom line: it has nothing to do with income, but what people value.

mikeash 14y ago

They're going to have a certain amount of fixed overhead per instance, mostly in the form of support, so it may not be worthwhile to them to drop below $20 for any size.