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Linode seems to occupy a good middle-ground. You get much more for your money than Slicehost and it's a fairly large, well-established host with multiple locati
by asb 17y ago
Linode seems to occupy a good middle-ground. You get much more for your money than Slicehost and it's a fairly large, well-established host with multiple locations. A $20 Linode for instance gives you 360mb of of RAM, 16gb storage and 200gb transfer. They also use more powerful CPUs than the Athlon's listed for Slicehost/prgmr - my Linode is on a quad-core Xeon L5420 (2.5ghz, 6mb cache).
Just guessing, but I'd expect disk access is a bigger bottleneck on highly loaded VPS servers than the CPU, so the worst and average case disk performance are probably what would concern me the most. I think prgmr is a fantastic deal - I certainly haven't seen anybody else offering so much RAM at that price point. I'd be a customer if they were located on the east coast.
Finally, for those who don't know, prgmr is owned and run by lsc who's a member here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc
- buugs 17y agoThe cool thing about linode is that they hand out free upgrades often, usually ram and storage. I think the storage was 12gb before march for a 20 dollar linode and it got upped and if you look at their blog you'll see a large history of this usually about every six months. Slicehost does however have very nice and useful articles and it is nice to support them if you use those.
- m0shen 17y agohttp://www.fsckvps.com/ http://www.fsckvps.com/ has similar pricing for OpenVZ based virtual servers.
- lsc 17y agoIf you like OpenVZ, I would recommend http://www.johncompanies.com/ http://www.johncompanies.com/ Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly. The Johncompanies people, last time I tried them, were excellent.
- thesethings 17y ago"Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly." This is really interesting, I'm wondering if you can elaborate a bit?
- lsc 17y agoOpenVZ is a thinner virtualization layer. everyone shares the same kernel. It's resource separation isn't nearly as strong. On the other hand, it is also more efficient. you can reasonably expect to get more total performance out of a OpenVZ system than the same system running xen, but the problem is with OpenVZ, if one user is hogging resources, that user is much more likely to effect other customers than they would be under Xen, with it's non-shared ram and stronger CPU scheduling.
- thesethings 17y agoThanks for the response! I'm reasonably familiar with OpenVZ and other "container" approaches (zones, jails). It sounds like there's a missing abstraction layer, or maybe just fewer administrative tools for these container approaches than the built-in-at-time-of-creation attributes of a true virtualized guest.
- thesethings 17y agoAlso, thanks in general for your HN participation and frank and open discussion of your hosting business. I find it really interesting and also helpful the way you classify different types of hosting needs and potential good hosting fits, ( that are not always your own company ;D ). Very cool!
- lsc 17y agoI agree about the disk access. Disk is by far the weakest part of my system. I do provide you mirrored disk, putting me ahead of the low-end ec2 stuff, but you are sharing that mirror with a lot of people. Fortunately, more ram can usually make up for slow disk. I am working on a zfs based network storage system that just might solve the problem and then some, but it's not anywhere near ready yet.