5 ms·
Good on them. Competition between Digital Ocean and Linode for the customers that often sporadically use machines will just be great. Though, FWIW, still stick
by gamegoblin 13y ago
Good on them. Competition between Digital Ocean and Linode for the customers that often sporadically use machines will just be great.
Though, FWIW, still sticking with DO for the 5$/mo.
- lsc 13y ago>Though, FWIW, still sticking with DO for the 5$/mo. DO claims that the $10/month plan is their most popular... I express doubt, as most people I have heard from are on the $5 plan. From looking at their pricing, the $5/month plan looks like a significantly better deal, in terms of resources per dollar, assuming there is no overselling of disk involved, which is my current assumption. (My motives for collecting this data are self-serving, but they are also transparent.)
- netcraft 13y agoI use $5 servers to setup images and then destroy them, but I spin up $10+ servers from those images for everything that runs all the time - just as another data point for you.
- xur17 13y agoI use the $5 servers for everything I run. Never had speed issues despite pretty heavy traffic loads, so I haven't bothered to upgrade.
- lsc 13y agoYeah, that is the real question I have about SSD; I mean, normally you want to buy enough ram to cache all the data you regularly access, because the overhead of hitting spinning disk absolutely kills you. Now, SSD is still slower than ram... way slower than ram. But it's way faster than spinning disk, especially on reads. I imagine there are some applications where SSD is fast enough that hitting disk is okay; you don't need to worry about having enough ram to cache all data you might read, and ram is still like eight or nine bucks a gig (vs. $0.6 to $2 for mlc ssd) - and if we're talking about reads here? MLC is fine for reads. Of course, part of that ram difference might be that ram prices haven't fallen much over the last year or two, (in fact, most of the ram I bought last year, I bought at a lower price than the ram I'm looking at now.) while SSD prices have really fallen fast, so I don't know if this is the long-term price-equilibrium; still, I would expect ssd to continue to be significantly less expensive than ram.
- walden42 13y agoWhat do you use for caching that uses the hard drive? Redis?
- lsc 13y agoNo, I was talking about caching disk reads in ram. Nearly all modern operating systems do this. If you have enough ram, the data you read from disk is cached in ram. With spinning disk, especially shared 7200rpm spinning disk, for interactive use? generally speaking, you have human-noticeable latency every time you do a blocking read that isn't cached. Because of this, having enough ram to cache all the data you read often is extremely important to system performance when you are on spinning disk. (and having a pagecache that doesn't dump all the stuff you use often when you do a one-time read of a big file.) I was suggesting that SSD might have fast enough read-access that for some applications, the penalty for reading from ssd rather than from pagecache might be small enough to not be a big deal, meaning you could get acceptable performance out of a system with less total ram.
- walden42 13y agoThanks for clarifying. I was wondering about Redis because it doesn't replace cached contents when there's no memory left, like Memcached.
- lsc 13y agoThanks. That's the thing; the expense of SSD being what it is, competing with their $10 or $20 plan (where they have 3 and 2 gigabytes of ssd per dolar) is going to be way easier than competing with their $5 plan (where they have 4 gigabytes of ssd for every dollar.) again assuming no disk oversubscription. The best answer sounds like it would be to decouple disk and ram allocations, use network storage and oversubscribe disk, as I imagine utilization on the disk of the $5 plans is low, but I would prefer to avoid doing that for the same reason that I believe Linode and DO avoids doing that. Network storage: reliable, fast, cheap. Pick two, if you choose really well. From what I understand of my industry, and if nothing else, I've been in it for a while, new multi-user hardware, usually, is expected to be covered by subscription fees usually within 4-6 months, for this sort of thing. SSD is going to cost you between $0.6 (for cheap consumer-grade in raid5) and $2 (for intel S3500 level 'enterprise' mlc stuff in raid10) per gigabyte, so... it makes a difference. ObLinode: Of course, if you are using real live 'enterprise' slc, the price goes way up from there... but I doubt anyone in my sector is using those for anything but cache; in fact, I think Linode posted a while back that they were doing just that, using really good SSD for write-cache. It's a good idea, really; once your server warms up, for most use cases, most of your reads are going to be cached in ram (assuming you have enough, which at today's prices, you should.) - If good ssd write-cache with something like bcache or dm-cache or your hw raid driver or what have you can get you good write speeds, that might be just as good as SSD in a real-world environment, assuming your ram cache is larger than the data you access often. Of course, you are still going to get killed by the all-ssd host on disk benchmarks and on metrics like 'how long does it take to spin up a new guest?' - there are other ways to cheat on those metrics, but all that I know of have pretty big downsides for real-world performance.
- JeremyMorgan 13y agoYeah it is a good move to compete, but I still think the customer base might be a bit different. I still think of Linode as more of a "real" type hosting environment, in the time I used them I didn't didn't notice any difference from actual bare metal servers. If I didn't know better that's what I would think they were. DO, to me is much more of a "toy" and experimenting type of service. I have tried hosting things on "droplets" and had strange issues, dropping, outages etc. Not frequent of course, but over say a week or two of uptime. I'm ok with it because it's $5 and what else would you expect? But I wouldn't think of hosting any real sites on droplets personally. It's just my opinion and many people I've talked to have had the same experiences. Both are great services for different applications.
- vcherubini 13y agoI'm of the same opinion. I host all of my production apps on Linode (the 8 cores is nice too), and my staging environment is on DO. I don't mind paying more for Linode because I think their network is better.
- threeseed 13y agoLinode is the toy here. They have a long history of hiding information from customers during security incidents and outages. No one running a proper site would be crazy enough to host on Linode.