18 ms·

The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

584 points by qmr 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
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pavanky 13y ago
I wish Linode (or anyone else other than Amazon) provides a reasonable Plan[1] with GPUs on them. [1]: Amazon charges $2 an hour thats about $1500 a month.
- dugmartin 13y ago
  Here is a list with five other companies: http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-cloud-computing-services.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-cloud-computing-services.ht...
  - pavanky 13y ago
    Thanks for pointing it out. I should have known better considering that I am in the space :(
  - thenomad 13y ago
    Interesting - thanks! Are any of those plans more reasonably priced than Amazon's?
- ldargin 13y ago
  Hmm, Amazon now charges $0.65 per hour for their g2.2xlarge GPU plan (in Linux). See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
  - gatehouse 13y ago
    I checked spot instances just now, and it was less than $0.10 an hour. So for batch jobs that might be an option. And if you're using it interactively, than you can always go EBS backed and just turn it off when you're done.
giulianob 13y ago
Holy crap this is awesome. Good job guys at Linode. I said I would switch if the prices dropped about 25% because RAM was pricey.... So now I have to switch.
extesy 13y ago
So now they match DigitalOcean prices but offer slightly more SSD space for each plan. I wonder what DO answer to this would be. They haven't changed their pricing for quite a while.
- catinsocks 13y ago
  DigitalOcean still beats Linode on price as half the time I don't need a 2GB server but I do want to keep servers separate (multiple 512s at $5 is better for me than 1 2GB).
  - giulianob 13y ago
    I need 2gb - 4gb servers and DO's quality has decreased since they've grown so much.
    - vidyesh 13y ago
      Quality decreased? How? Please elaborate.
      - mitchwainer 13y ago
        I would love to hear why as well! Our quality and stability have significantly improved over the last year and as a co-founder of DO, I would like to understand what specific issues you faced. Feel free to shoot me an email directly (mitch@digitalocean.com) to take this conversation offline.
        giulianob 13y ago
        Mainly around spinning up instances and network latency.
  - deleted 13y ago
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- Jake232 13y ago
rjknight 13y ago
It looks like Linode are still leaving the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market to DO. Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.
- EC1 13y ago
  Shit, I should probably move to DO. I've been running a Linode for like two years, and have only ever used it once, yet I keep getting billed.
  - eli 13y ago
    Well, if you're truly not using it, you could delete the instance and not be billed, then redploy when you need it.
  - trumbitta2 13y ago
    They introduced hourly billing like a week ago :)
    - chc 13y ago
      As long as you have a Linode provisioned, you'll be charged for it even if you're not using it. The hourly billing is just a simplification of their old system, where they would charge a prorated amount when a server is created based on how far into the month you are and issue a credit when a server is deleted based on how far from the end of the month you are. The net financial impact for a given server setup is about the same (+/- a few hours' worth of usage). (Just to be clear, Digital Ocean works the same way. They're charging you for the resource allocation and associated maintenance. If you choose to not actually use the allocation you're paying for, that's your business.)
      - porker 13y ago
        Oh darn, Rackspace has the same problem. I hoped it would be like AWS, where you pay for storage on S3 when not using, and hourly running costs when it is.
relaxatorium 13y ago
This seems pretty fantastic, I am excited to upgrade and think the SSD storage is going to be really helpful for improving the performance of my applications hosted there. That said, I am not an expert on CPU virtualization but I did notice that the new plans are differently phrased than the old ones here. The old plans all talked about 8 CPU cores with various 1x, 2x priority levels (https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrade/ https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrad... for examples), while the new plans all talk about 1, 2, etc. core counts. Could anyone with more expertise here tell me whether this is a sneaky reduction in CPU power for the lower tiered plans, or just a simpler way of saying the same thing as the old plans?
- Jake232 13y ago
  Somebody asked this on the blog post, here was the reply from Linode: If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all. We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc.
  - deleted 13y ago
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- jaequery 13y ago
  cpu counts dont mean much in terms of performance. but from a strict performance standpoint, their E5 2680's are amongst the tops in the industry (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html). i'm pretty sure DO's is somewhere around 1/10th the performance of Linode's in terms of CPU power. you are getting a really good deal here w/ Linode, I dont think any cloud providers are at this level right now.
  - ac29 13y ago
    Amazon also uses E5-2680 v2 on their C3 instance types, and E5-2670 v2 on R3 types.
izietto 13y ago
Do you know cheaper alternatives? Like DigitalOcean, as @catinsocks suggests
nivla 13y ago
Awesome News. Competition really pushes companies to please their customers. Ever since Digital Ocean became the new hip, Linode has been pushing harder. My experience with them has been mixed. Forgiving their previous mishaps and the feeling that the level of Customer Service has gone down, they have been decent year long. I wouldn't mind recommending them. [Edit: Removed the bit about DigitalOcean Plans. If you have Ghostery running, it apparently takes out the html block listing different plans]
- mimiflynn 13y ago
  https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
  - deleted 13y ago
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- cshenoy 13y ago
  You mean https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ ? Seems to be working at the moment.
  - nivla 13y ago
    I am really sorry. I had Ghostery running, it took out the entire plan block so I was only able to see the FAQ.
    - andypants 13y ago
      Adblock also seems to remove their pricing info. Strange!
- svmegatron 13y ago
  It seems to be the Optimizely js, which could mean they are A/B testing something about their pricing grid. I'd really like to know the results of the test.
jaequery 13y ago
im really impressed by their new CPU specs. from experience those aren't cheap and it's possibly the fastest CPU out in the market. combined with the SSDs, it may be that Linode currently is the fastest of any cloud hosting right now.
h4pless 13y ago
I notice that Linode talked a good bit about their bandwidth and included outbound bandwidth in their pricing model which DO does not. I wonder if DO has a similar model or if transfer capacity the only thing you have control over.
- deleted 13y ago
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- geekam 13y ago
  I do not understand the difference between outbound bandwidth vs the transfer. Can you explain a bit please?
  - honopu 13y ago
    Bandwidth - How big the pipe is. Transfer - How much they let through the pipe. Just a guess.
  - kilburn 13y ago
    If you read below the price tables you'll get a good hint: > What happens if I exceed my monthly transfer quota? > You will be invoiced $0.10 for each GB over your pooled network transfer quota. Please note that all inbound traffic is free and will not count against your quota. Bandwidth is the maximum Mbps that your VPS can spill out at any moment, whereas transfer is the maximum amount of per-month cumulative traffic that you can send out before incurring on additional traffic costs.
  - h4pless 13y ago
    Yeah, honopu and kilburn got it right. My understanding is that transfer measurements are the maximum amount of data your instance can serve up in a month, while bandwidth is the speed at which it can do it. Its like downloading a 1 GB file to your computer using a 56k modem or a cable modem... the transfer amount will be 1 GB either way, but the cable modem will be a hell of a lot faster due to the increase in its bandwidth. As you upgrade your plan with Linode, your "modem" gets faster, however DO doesn't mention the speed of their "modem" or if its speed is affected by the price level you select.
endijs 13y ago
Most interesting part in this great upgrade is that they went from 8CPU setup to 2CPU setup. But yeah - 2x more RAM, SSDs will guarantee that I'm not going to switch anytime soon. Sadly I need to wait a week until this will be available in London.
- eli 13y ago
  "vCPU" In a virtualized environment, the number of "CPUs" you can see is probably not a great way to measure how much computing power you have.
  - stefantalpalaru 13y ago
    On a host that's mostly idle and where there are no CPU usage caps, seeing 2 cores instead of 8 is a pretty serious drawback if you use Gentoo on Linode like I do.
- andypants 13y ago
  They did upgrade the cpus though - "Linodes will now receive Intel’s latest high-end Ivy Bridge E5-2680.v2 full-power server-grade processors."
  - endijs 13y ago
    Yes. That's good. And Caker also wrote in blog comments: "We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it." So by their estimates 2 now should outperform previous 8.
- spyder 13y ago
  One comment on their blog post says that after the change he is getting lower performance on a CPU-heavy test (vanitygen): https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-ram-much-more/#comment-633353 https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-... IO is probably more important for most of the peoples who use VPS, but It would be good to see CPU test from others too, not just IO benchmarks.
bfrog 13y ago
I'm actually a little unhappy, it looks like they reduced the CPU count for my $20/mo instance. At this point there's basically no reason to stay with them now.
- eli 13y ago
  I would encourage you to run a benchmark before deciding that 2 vCPUs is necessarily worse than 8 vCPUs running in a different architecture.
  - ckozlowski 13y ago
    In a VMware environment, I'm often educating my users that more vCPUs doesn't necessarily equate to higher performance, as the delays incurred in co-scheduling increase with the number of vCPUs. For VMs that are not hypervisor-aware, the hypervisor must have all of that VM's vCPUs available at execution time since it cannot always anticipate which vCPUs the guest OS will execute against. With fewer vCPUs, one might see what you're alluding to; better utilization and lower wait states because it's easier to schedule 2 CPUs consistantly than 8 CPUs on a host running multiple VMs. Of course, that's in a VMware environment, so forgive me if Linode's hypervisor of choice avoids this problem I'm sure they're using KVM or Xen or something along those lines, maybe they're not as susceptible.
- opendais 13y ago
  tl;dr: If you had 40 VMs on 8 cores before, you have 10 on 2 cores now. It is the same ratio of VMs:Cores but with stronger processors. Long version: "If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all. We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc." From Caker's comment on the blog. It seems that this was done to reduce fighting over core and provided more consistent fair availability of processing power when they tested it b/t VMs.
davexunit 13y ago
Cool news, but their website now has the same lame design as DigitalOcean. I liked the old site layout better.
- kawsper 13y ago
  Me too, but fortunately their administration system is still old-school. I think their platform needs some love, it is a bit clunky to work with sometimes. But they are my favorite host.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
  Looks like library.linode.com has the same format, and is still the same fantastic resource. I'm embarrassed to say that once upon a time I used library.linode.com to help walk me through my first Linux server setup... running on Digital Ocean. Yes, I felt like a complete douchebag. I wanted to use Linode but I was one of those $5/month people. However it left me with a sense of obligation to give Linode business someday when I could justify/afford doing so. It looks like Linode just gave me the opportunity to do that.
  - kevinqi 13y ago
    Yeah, the library is really excellent - easy to follow and very extensive. It's smart of them to do paid crowdsourcing to create the articles. It's cool of Linode to make the library available to everyone, not just customers.
    - jsutton 13y ago
      DO does the same thing, does it not?
  - thejosh 13y ago
    DO do the same thing, plus they get paid for articles. Shame browsing it since the redesign is a complete clusterfuck between articles and community forum posts!
- morninj 13y ago
Justen 13y ago
Higher specs sound really nice, but on HN I see people commenting on the ease of DO's admin tools. How does Linode's compare?
- kawsper 13y ago
  The interface looks a little more clunky, but it works, and it is easy to work with.
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    It's not clunky it's more "dated" (and very functional). It also does a fair bit more so apples to oranges a little bit.
mwexler 13y ago
There's similar and then there's alike. I guess it makes comparison easy, but imitation certainly must be the sincerest form of flattery: Compare the look and feel of https://www.linode.com/pricing/ https://www.linode.com/pricing/ and https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  And DO's looks like a million other plan pages that already exist. It's not some unique design to DO.
jevinskie 13y ago
I resized a 1024 instance to 2048 last night and it looks like it is already running on the new processors (from /proc/cpuinfo): model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz Should I upgrade? Do I want 2 x RAM for 1/2 vCPUs? =)
raverbashing 13y ago
Congratulation on Linode I stopped being a customer since migrating to DO but my needs were really small But I think their strategy of keeping the price and increasing capabilities are good. Between $5 and $20 is a "big" difference for one person (still, it's a day's lunch), for a company it's nothing. However, I would definitely go to Linode for CPU/IO intensive tasks. Amazon sucks at these (more benchmarks between the providers are of course welcome)
- Chronic26 13y ago
  A 4x price differential is nothing for a company?
kyrra 13y ago
I forgot to benchmark the disk before I upgraded but here are some simple disk benchmarks on an upgraded linode (the $20 plan, now with SSD) $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.31593 s, 816 MB/s $ hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 19872 MB in 1.98 seconds = 10020.63 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 2558 MB in 3.00 seconds = 852.57 MB/sec Upgraded cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz Old cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz CPUs compared: http://ark.intel.com/compare/75277,40201 http://ark.intel.com/compare/75277,40201
- kawsper 13y ago
  This is mine old $20 located in London, doing exactly nothing, I just created it last week, it seems very slow in comparison: dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB) copied, 13,6791 s, 78,5 MB/s hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 3580 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1794.00 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 336 MB in 3.01 seconds = 111.75 MB/sec
  - cbull 13y ago
    Dallas data center, not upgraded, faster than London, slower than upgrade. ;) $> dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.19598 s, 489 MB/s $> hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 12446 MB in 1.98 seconds = 6273.29 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 1768 MB in 3.00 seconds = 589.00 MB/sec
  - KamiNuvini 13y ago
    Here's mine, with SSD upgrade: dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.17496 s, 494 MB/s hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 18560 MB in 1.98 seconds = 9358.78 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 2510 MB in 3.00 seconds = 836.61 MB/sec`
- 13y ago
jaequery 13y ago
DO's biggest problem is their lack of "zero-downtime snapshot backup and upgrading". i've not used Linode but anyone know if theirs is any different?
- SudoAlex 13y ago
  Upgrades/downgrades requires transferring all your data from one server to another - so that means downtime. The bigger the server, the more downtime in transferring. As for backups, Linode backups seem to get a bad reputation. They do take a snapshot of a running instance - but reports from the forums indicate that they regularly fail, leaving you with a missing backup at some points. The only way of restoring a backup is to deploy that backup as a new server. I'd recommend avoiding Linode backups and doing your own.
  - jaequery 13y ago
    upgrades for ram and storage does not have to have any downtime. same for snapshots, through LVM/ZFS, they can be nearly instant in most cases. it just seems like DO have not been able to figure this out for whatever reasons.
    - grey-area 13y ago
      Linode does not offer pain-free upgrades - your files are physically copied to another size of box, not just allocated more resources on the existing box. The bigger your files, the longer it'll take (around 30 mins usually). I agree it would be nice to do upgrades in place but presumably they have very good reasons for not doing so. Are you aware of any provider which does this in a seamless way? I'm not really sure how they'd do it, particularly for RAM.
    - giulianob 13y ago
      Linode says they only host the same plan types on the same physical hardware. For example, if you have an 8gb plan then all your neighbors are on the same plan. This might be why they have to physically move your image.
  - 13y ago
zak_mc_kracken 13y ago
Does any of LINode or DigitalOcean offer plans without any SSD? I couldn't find any. I just want to install some personal projects there for which even SSD's are overkill...
- chc 13y ago
  Overkill never hurt anybody. Would you really want to ditch the SSD even if no other numbers changed at all? Even if you don't need it, I don't see why it's a bad thing.
  - zak_mc_kracken 13y ago
    It's just overkill to me to pay $20 a month for this when I expect a non-SSD plan would be half as cheap, if not more.
    - chc 13y ago
      You can go with Digital Ocean or one of the other providers in the $5/mo range if price is your real concern here. That's what they're there for. No need to go through the indirection of talking about SSDs.
level09 13y ago
I would probably move back from Digital Ocean if they allow a 10$/mo plan. I know that's not a big price difference, but some website really don't need a lot of resources. they work well on D.O's 5$ server, and I have really a lot of them.
munger 13y ago
Rackspace cloud customer here… These Linode upgrades are very tempting to entice me to switch. I get I might not be their target market (small business with about $1000/month on IaaS spending) but there are a couple things preventing me from doing so: 1) $10/month size suitable for a dev instance. 2) Some kind of scalable file storage solution with CDN integration – like RS CloudFiles/Akamai or AWS S3/Cloudfront or block storage to attach to an individual server. I guess you get what you pay for… infrastructure components and flexibility AWS > RS > Linode > DO which roughly matches the price point.
- beering 13y ago
  I agree with your point about block storage - with Linode, there's a hard limit on how much hard drive space you get on any single server, which makes it a poor choice for anything that requires a lot of storage space (databases, file servers, etc.). Unlike Amazon, you don't have any good options for increasing your storage space on Linode using network block storage, unless you somehow run another Linode and NFS them together. Being able to launch a moderately priced server with hundreds of gigs of spinning rust on AWS is still a nice option to have.
- DougHaber 13y ago
  I'm in a similar boat. I use Rackspace for their servers and CDN, and Linode is definitely starting to look nice. It could actually be cheaper to go with Linode and a separate CDN provider, such as MaxCDN. MaxCDN has some of the features that are missing from Cloud Files, which is real nice too. The main thing holding me back is the time it takes to migrate. I know they target the higher end, but hopefully RackSpace will readjust their prices as well at some point.
  - munger 13y ago
    Although, I guess there is nothing to stop me from running servers on Linode and continuing to use RS for Cloud Files/Akamai -- except for network speed of course. Linode can deploy to Dallas though, where I use RS so maybe the network speed won't be a big problem.
ff_ 13y ago
Wow, that's beautiful. Currently I'm a DO customer (10$ plan), and if they had a 10$ plan I'd make the switch instantly.
madsushi 13y ago
Why do I pay Linode $20/month instead of paying DO $5/month(1)? Because Linode treats their servers like kittens (upgrades, addons/options, support), and DO treats their servers like cattle. There's nothing wrong with the cattle model of managing servers. But I'm not using Chef or Puppet, I just have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few services. And Linode treats that one solitary server better than any other VPS host in the world. (1) I do have one DO box as a simple secondary DNS server, for provider redundancy
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  I don't see that distinction at all. Both Linode and DO provide persistent local storage. Both let you resize your server. And now, they're competitive on price; Linode even has hourly billing. Granted, DO has lower-end plans than Linode. But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.
  - chc 13y ago
    I don't think anyone's ever gotten good hard numbers, but just from having seen a lot of people's anecdata over the years, my general impression is that Digital Ocean seems to have more short-term outages and to oversubscribe their boxes a bit more.
    - vbtechguy 13y ago
      that's probably due to the massive surge in growth and growing pains for DO
  - gtaylor 13y ago
    > But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't. I'm not sure "disposable" is a good word to describe DO's approach. We do know that they cram a lot more people per host machine, though. That may be where the "treat VMs like cattle" statement was getting at. You need only fire up a few instances of comparable type, get some CPU load, and watch some basic metrics to determine this for yourself.
dharma1 13y ago
ohhh yesss. DO is good for some locations like Southeast Asia but loving this upgrade for my London and Tokyo Linodes
notastartup 13y ago
These upgrades are impressive but they are a bit too late to the game. DO still has these advantages besides the cheap monthly price: - DO has excellent and easy to understand API - Step by step guides on setting up and running anything - Minimal and simple To entice me, it's no longer just a matter of price, DO has extra value added, largely due to their simplicity.
- jsmthrowaway 13y ago
  You mean like linode.com/api/ and library.linode.com?
  - notastartup 13y ago
    yeah it's not as obvious and simple like DO's REST calls. shame I never discovered this while I Was with linode but it wouldn't have caught my attention any how like how DO did with their simplicity. now I definitely don't think there's much linode can do further to entice me unless they matched digital ocean's pricing lower than 0.03/hr
vidyesh 13y ago
So this makes Lindode practically on par with DO's $20 plan. Up till now $20 plan at DO was better now its just the choice of the brand. But here is one thing that DO provides and I think Linode too should, you get the choice to spin up a $5 instance anytime in your account for any small project or a test instance which you cannot on Linode.
- yogo 13y ago
  Doesn't hourly billing address that issue? Linode now offers it.
  - damian2000 13y ago
    Yeah, that's the impression I got with hourly billing as well.
orthecreedence 13y ago
Bummer, they're taking away 8 cores for the cheap plans and replacing it with 2. Does anyone know if the new processors will offset this difference? I don't know the specs of the processors. Linode's announcements usually come in triples...I'm excited for number three. Let's hope its some kind of cheap storage service.
- opendais 13y ago
  tl;dr: If you had 40 VMs on 8 cores before, you have 10 on 2 cores now. It is the same ratio of VMs:Cores but with stronger processors. Long version: "If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all. We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc." From Caker's comment on the blog. It seems that this was done to reduce fighting over core and provided more consistent fair availability of processing power when they tested it b/t VMs.
- drzaiusapelord 13y ago
  Cores presented to your machine by the hypervisor do not have a 1 to 1 relationship with physical cores. In the world of virtual machines, how many cores you have is meaningless. For example, my VMWare server is a single 8 core processor, but my VM's only see 2 cores, as that's the way I prefer it and I believe VMWare recommends this or even one core. Those 2 virtual cores can access all 8 physical cores. The only real way to find out your cpu performance is to run a benchmark.
  - personZ 13y ago
    If you had a host machine with 8 cores, and a virtual machine with 2 cores, the virtual machine will only possibly use 25% of the CPU resources of the host machine -- one vCPU cannot be schedule in parallel across more than one physical core. However it is advisable to minimize the vCPUs in VMs because it greatly enhances scheduling -- if a VM has 8 vCPUs allocated to it, with some hypervisors that lack advanced co-scheduled it won't be scheduled until 8 cores are available, and in some situations it will sit on 8 cores during its duration whether it is only using 1 or all. If you have a large number of smaller VMs, scheduling can greatly improves. This isn't true for all hypervisors and situations. You mileage may vary.
conorh 13y ago
Benchmarking using wrk the smallest linode (1024 now 2048) serving a page from an untuned Rails application using nginx/passenger getting almost no other traffic. Hard to compare of course given the various other factors, but produced slightly lower performance after the upgrade. Serving a page from nginx directly (no Rails) had no appreciable difference in performance, I guess the Rails web serving is more vCPU bound? Before Upgrade: Running 30s test @ http://... 5 threads and 20 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 308.91ms 135.01ms 985.82ms 80.00% Req/Sec 14.15 4.61 24.00 66.36% 2206 requests in 30.00s, 28.51MB read Requests/sec: 73.53 Transfer/sec: 0.95MB After Upgrade: Running 30s test @ http://.. 5 threads and 20 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 321.74ms 102.45ms 957.74ms 87.32% Req/Sec 12.02 2.18 17.00 80.75% 1858 requests in 30.01s, 24.03MB read Requests/sec: 61.92 Transfer/sec: 819.98KB
- chc 13y ago
  It depends on the task. If your Rails app hits the database a lot, memory availability and disk speed will matter a lot, which favors the new Linode style. If your app just does one small query per page and then gets on with its work, then probably CPU is your most important thing (since most of your time will be spent on app logic, runtime housekeeping and rendering templates).
- cmelbye 13y ago
  Yeah, you went from 8 vCPU Cores to 2 vCPU Cores on that plan as part of the upgrade. It seems the processor upgrade makes up for that decrease a little bit, but it is a decrease.
ihowlatthemoon 13y ago
VPSBench result: Before ------- CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz Number of cores: 8 CPU frequency: 2266.788 MHz Total amount of RAM: 988 MB Total amount of swap: 255 MB System uptime: 8 days, 12:03, I/O speed: 69.9 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 8.96s Download 100MB file: 47.2MB/s After ------ CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz Number of cores: 2 CPU frequency: 2800.086 MHz Total amount of RAM: 1993 MB Total amount of swap: 255 MB System uptime: 2 min, I/O speed: 638 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 5.10s Download 100MB file: 146MB/s Test: https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench
- pdq 13y ago
  Here is DigitalOcean's $5/month plan: CPU model: QEMU Virtual CPU version 1.0 Number of cores: 1 CPU frequency: 2299.998 MHz Total amount of RAM: 491 MB Total amount of swap: 0 MB System uptime: 276 days, 5:04, I/O speed: 253 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 7.83s Download 100MB file: 56.0MB/s Here is Vultr's $5/month plan: CPU model: Vultr Virtual CPU 2 Number of cores: 1 CPU frequency: 3399.994 MHz Total amount of RAM: 490 MB Total amount of swap: 509 MB System uptime: 28 days, 3:15, I/O speed: 485 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 3.17s Download 100MB file: 58.2MB/s
harrystone 13y ago
I would love to see them still keep all those old disks and sell me some huge, cheap, and slow storage on them.
Kudos 13y ago
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is now available on Linode too.
hyptos 13y ago
wow EC2 instance free plan : $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 35.8268 s, 30.0 MB/s
- vacri 13y ago
  Yeah, AWS doesn't have the best speed to drive, though if you have money, you can specify how many IOPS you want... you just have to pay for your declared use every hour whether you're using it or not. It's also kinda hard to predict if you're not familiar with that kind of thing. Note that on AWS your hard drive isn't on the machine running your VM. If you want to test local disk speed, do it in /mnt, where local disk storage is mounted... but remember that data stored there won't persist if you turn your instance off.
shiloa 13y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. We're in the process of moving from Linode to Rackspace but haven't flicked the switch just yet - was planning to this weekend. Our Linode server (16 GB plan) has been performing terrible lately wrt I/O (compared to, say, a Macbook Pro running the same computations), and we decided we've had enough. I guess we'll have to compare the two after the upgrade and decide.
- thraxil 13y ago
  Did you ever put in a support ticket? I've had I/O performance issues with Linode boxes before and it's always been quickly fixed when they are notified.
  - shiloa 13y ago
    I did, they switched us to a new machine - no change. Their support was great, but the hardware needed to catch up. Perhaps this upgrade will help.
beedogs 13y ago
This is nice to see. SSD has gotten ridiculously cheap lately.
jrockway 13y ago
A nice reward for those of us who have been using Linode from before they even had x86_64 images.
- simcop2387 13y ago
  Yes. I'm actually looking at upgrading my server to a 64bit kernel just so i can take advantage of this. I've been on them so long i'm still a 32bit userland.
filmgirlcw 13y ago
Shall we call this the DigialOcean effect?
- weixiyen 13y ago
  sigh... just put 12 droplets in digitalocean last week. now thinking of switching back...
jdprgm 13y ago
This is really a fantastic upgrade. I've been hosting with Linode for a few months now and been very happy with them. I run a relatively transfer intense SaaS app and a 50% transfer increase makes quite an improvement.
rdl 13y ago
Semi-related: does anyone know of any good (but still fairly cheap) providers doing Atom C2750/C2758 servers yet?
__xtrimsky 13y ago
I still prefer OVH.com http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-classic.xml http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-classic.xml for $7 you get: 2 cores 2GB RAM for 10$ you get: 3 cores 4GB RAM They don't have SSD, but SSD doesn't do everything, I prefer more ram. EDIT: If some of you don't know OVH, it's because its new in America, but its not some cheap company, it's a European company that is very successful there. And just recently created a datacenter in North America. (I used to live in France, and have known them for some years).
- giulianob 13y ago
  Can you run https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench and see how the performance is to compare?
  - __xtrimsky 13y ago
    I have the 7$ VPS, here is the result: _04/17/2014 - VMPLAN - DATACENTER - OS - AUTHOR_ ``` CPU model: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4284 Number of cores: 2 CPU frequency: 3000.000 MHz Total amount of RAM: 2048 MB Total amount of swap: 128 MB System uptime: 14 days, 13:31, I/O speed: 75.4 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 7.44s Download 100MB file: 13.0MB/s ```
  - gingerlime 13y ago
    vpsbench on a 2Gb fresh Linode in Dallas ``` CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz Number of cores: 2 CPU frequency: 2800.050 MHz Total amount of RAM: 1993 MB Total amount of swap: 511 MB System uptime: 0 min, I/O speed: 811 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 4.93s Download 100MB file: 19.1MB/s ```
  - abronte 13y ago
    I have the 4gb vmware vps (http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-cloud.xml http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-cloud.xml) _04/17/2014 - VMPLAN - DATACENTER - OS - AUTHOR_ ``` CPU model: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4386 Number of cores: 4 CPU frequency: 3100.000 MHz Total amount of RAM: 3943 MB Total amount of swap: 1998 MB System uptime: 10 days, 2:25, I/O speed: 169 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 5.34s Download 100MB file: 15.8MB/s ```
ausjke 13y ago
This is great indeed. I'm happy Linode did this. I ran below command 10 times and used the average below: dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync Linode: 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.09063 s, 985 MB/s D.O: 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.23998 s, 331 MB/s dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1500 oflag=dsync Linode: 768000 bytes (768 kB) copied, 0.478633 s, 1.6 MB/s D.O: 768000 bytes (768 kB) copied, 1.01716 s, 755 kB/s
nilved 13y ago
Linode's recent upgrades are awesome, but people are very quick to forget the period where they were being hacked left and right and didn't communicate with their customers until a defensive blog post weeks after the fact. No matter how good the servers may be, Linode should be a non-starter for anybody who cares about the security of their droplet; and, if you don't, why would you pay Linode's premium fee?
- jsmthrowaway 13y ago
  Ask DigitalOcean if they're wiping data on droplet cancellation and snapshot deletion yet. They've fucked that one up several times since the inception of the company and each time get a little more defensive about it. For a while there, I could spin up a droplet and get database passwords, keys, data, all day long from the previous owner. Then they told the guy that reported it that he was mistaken, and basically lied in a blog post and said no user data was at risk. I'm told that's just the beginning of security faults in their platform, attributable to being a younger company and discovering these things for the first time; I have been personally shown evidence that DigitalOcean's platform initially trusted a hidden field called "userid" and allowed a user to operate on any other user without authorization, including restoring images, shutting down droplets, and so on. Their system at first had no protection against spoofed packets exiting a droplet, either, so ARP poisoning the gateway was (and possibly remains) a viable attack. Linode is far more mature, obviously. Every provider has security issues. It's how they rectify and move forward that should concern you. Watching DigitalOcean react to being informed that the issue they got burned on once had reappeared basically told me to never use their services. Also, and I actually consider this very important and not a grammatical nit, Linode doesn't sell droplets. They sell virtual servers. You're asking for a Pepsi from Coca-Cola. You might consider this a minor nit, but it's actually a serious confusion issue that I already see happening. Allow me to promise you -- not predict, promise -- that DigitalOcean will be compromised just as badly. It's going to happen. It's a matter of when and how they react.
  - nilved 13y ago
    I don't see why your (agreeable) sentiment about Digital Ocean affects the fact that Linode is bad at security and customer interaction. We can always avoid both. I didn't mean to use the word "droplet," so I'm sorry for the confusion.
__xtrimsky 13y ago
Could someone please explain what improvements can we get from SSD for web applications ? I know it would read files faster, but in most cases reading a couple of PHP files is not such a big improvement. My guess would be maybe databases ? Read time improvement for MySQL ?
corford 13y ago
Big shame the new $20 plan now only offers 2 cores versus 8 with the current plan. For my workloads, I don't need 2GB RAM or SSD disks, I just need the cores :(
- aroman 13y ago
  Interestingly, I had the opposite reaction. I plan on running node.js applications on Linode, and as node cannot automatically take advantage of multiple cores (and even manually the support is experimental), the announcement of vertically scaled but horizontally contracted CPU cores was very exciting to me.
SCdF 13y ago
> Linodes are now SSD. This is not a hybrid solution – it’s fully native SSD servers using battery-backed hardware RAID. No spinning rust! And, no consumer SSDs either – we’re using only reliable, insanely fast, datacenter-grade SSDs that won’t slow down over time. These suckers are not cheap. http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim... Not to slam what Linode is doing here, and I'm sure there are probably lots of great reasons to buy datacentre-grade SSDs, but just thought I'd point out that slowing down over time (or data integrity issues) are not really consumer-grade problems any more :-)
- SiVal 13y ago
  What has changed? (Not advocacy; I'm curious.)
kolev 13y ago
Goodbye, Digital Ocean!
- kolev 13y ago
  You can downvote as much as you want, but having faster nodes from a long-established company, which doesn't keep your old images available to new customers to peek in, beats DO! I've been with DO since they launched and I can't say they are one of the more reliable services I've dealt with!
funkyy 13y ago
I would love to see Linode going to large HDD drives option for storage as well. I am dying to find really inexpensive cloud provider with cheap data space (SATA is fine), reasonable bandwidth but low cpu and ram and Linode style support/caring. Give server with ~500 GB hard drive, 2 TB outgoing transfer, 1 core and 1 GB ram for ~$20-30 and I am all yours.
kijin 13y ago
About a week ago, I wrote a comment in another Linode-related thread asking how the new usage patterns that hourly billing encourages might affect CPU contention. At the time, I received 11 upvotes but no replies. Apparently, quite a few people were interested in my question but had no useful conjectures to share. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564764 Now it's obvious what Linode's answer to that question is: Lower "burstable" CPU for lower plans. The $20 plan used to be able to burst to 8 cores for short periods, but now it only has access to 2 vcores. The "guaranteed" processing power is probably higher with the newer CPUs, but at the expense of short-term burst performance. Another minor detail that I find interesting is that the transfer cap for the $20 plan has been increased to 3TB, whereas the $40 plan still gets 4TB. Apart from the transfer cap plateau-ing at the extreme high end, this is the first time that Linode has broken its 11-year-old policy of "pay X times as much money, get X times as much RAM/disk/transfer".
jebblue 13y ago
I was looking into alternatives but now I'll stick with them, I can't find another cloud provider whose stuff works so well. edit: I just finished the migration, my disk speed test is through the roof, free ram is phenomenal!
EGreg 13y ago
I love linode. I switched from slicehost for its 32bitness back in the day, stayed for the awesome culture and independence. Slice host got sold to rack space. However, I am seriously considering a move to Amazon Web services for one main reason: I need to decouple the hard drive space from the ram. The hard drive space is so expensive on linodes!!
ksec 13y ago
Sometimes i just wish the pricing system would get better as you go larger. What is the difference between the 16GB - 96GB Plan and a dedicated server? And why would i pay 3x the price? The advantage of those who offer Cloud / VPS and Dedicated Servers Hosting company is they can mix and match depending usage. If you are actually building an any sort of infrastructure with Linode those large box are extremely expensive.
icantthinkofone 13y ago
Without FreeBSD support, it means nothing to me.
vbtechguy 13y ago
Updated benchmark results with 2GB vs 4GB vs 8GB vs 16gb plans from Linode vs DigitalOcean https://blog.centminmod.com/346 https://blog.centminmod.com/346. Definitely Linode has the faster cpus and disk i/o as you move up in plans >2GB. 16GB plans are pretty close though if you look at subtests in UnixBench and ignore the subtests affected by different base Linux Kernel versions used.
mark_lee 13y ago
awesome, linode or DO, if you're small or media companies, no other options should be considered at all, even AWS or Google Cloud.
ForFreedom 13y ago
The specs for $20 is same for DO and Linode excepting for the 8GB extra HDD on Linde.
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584 points by qmr 13y ago

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I wish Linode (or anyone else other than Amazon) provides a reasonable Plan[1] with GPUs on them. [1]: Amazon charges $2 an hour thats about $1500 a month.

dugmartin 13y ago
Here is a list with five other companies: http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-cloud-computing-services.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-cloud-computing-services.ht...
- pavanky 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing it out. I should have known better considering that I am in the space :(
- thenomad 13y ago
  Interesting - thanks! Are any of those plans more reasonably priced than Amazon's?
ldargin 13y ago
Hmm, Amazon now charges $0.65 per hour for their g2.2xlarge GPU plan (in Linux). See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
- gatehouse 13y ago
  I checked spot instances just now, and it was less than $0.10 an hour. So for batch jobs that might be an option. And if you're using it interactively, than you can always go EBS backed and just turn it off when you're done.

giulianob 13y ago

Holy crap this is awesome. Good job guys at Linode. I said I would switch if the prices dropped about 25% because RAM was pricey.... So now I have to switch.

extesy 13y ago

So now they match DigitalOcean prices but offer slightly more SSD space for each plan. I wonder what DO answer to this would be. They haven't changed their pricing for quite a while.

catinsocks 13y ago
DigitalOcean still beats Linode on price as half the time I don't need a 2GB server but I do want to keep servers separate (multiple 512s at $5 is better for me than 1 2GB).
- giulianob 13y ago
  I need 2gb - 4gb servers and DO's quality has decreased since they've grown so much.
  - vidyesh 13y ago
    Quality decreased? How? Please elaborate.
    - mitchwainer 13y ago
      I would love to hear why as well! Our quality and stability have significantly improved over the last year and as a co-founder of DO, I would like to understand what specific issues you faced. Feel free to shoot me an email directly (mitch@digitalocean.com) to take this conversation offline.
      - giulianob 13y ago
        Mainly around spinning up instances and network latency.
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Jake232 13y ago

rjknight 13y ago

It looks like Linode are still leaving the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market to DO. Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.

EC1 13y ago
Shit, I should probably move to DO. I've been running a Linode for like two years, and have only ever used it once, yet I keep getting billed.
- eli 13y ago
  Well, if you're truly not using it, you could delete the instance and not be billed, then redploy when you need it.
- trumbitta2 13y ago
  They introduced hourly billing like a week ago :)
  - chc 13y ago
    As long as you have a Linode provisioned, you'll be charged for it even if you're not using it. The hourly billing is just a simplification of their old system, where they would charge a prorated amount when a server is created based on how far into the month you are and issue a credit when a server is deleted based on how far from the end of the month you are. The net financial impact for a given server setup is about the same (+/- a few hours' worth of usage). (Just to be clear, Digital Ocean works the same way. They're charging you for the resource allocation and associated maintenance. If you choose to not actually use the allocation you're paying for, that's your business.)
    - porker 13y ago
      Oh darn, Rackspace has the same problem. I hoped it would be like AWS, where you pay for storage on S3 when not using, and hourly running costs when it is.

relaxatorium 13y ago

This seems pretty fantastic, I am excited to upgrade and think the SSD storage is going to be really helpful for improving the performance of my applications hosted there. That said, I am not an expert on CPU virtualization but I did notice that the new plans are differently phrased than the old ones here. The old plans all talked about 8 CPU cores with various 1x, 2x priority levels (https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrade/ https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrad... for examples), while the new plans all talk about 1, 2, etc. core counts. Could anyone with more expertise here tell me whether this is a sneaky reduction in CPU power for the lower tiered plans, or just a simpler way of saying the same thing as the old plans?

Jake232 13y ago
Somebody asked this on the blog post, here was the reply from Linode: If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all. We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc.
- deleted 13y ago
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jaequery 13y ago
cpu counts dont mean much in terms of performance. but from a strict performance standpoint, their E5 2680's are amongst the tops in the industry (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html). i'm pretty sure DO's is somewhere around 1/10th the performance of Linode's in terms of CPU power. you are getting a really good deal here w/ Linode, I dont think any cloud providers are at this level right now.
- ac29 13y ago
  Amazon also uses E5-2680 v2 on their C3 instance types, and E5-2670 v2 on R3 types.

izietto 13y ago

Do you know cheaper alternatives? Like DigitalOcean, as @catinsocks suggests

nivla 13y ago

Awesome News. Competition really pushes companies to please their customers. Ever since Digital Ocean became the new hip, Linode has been pushing harder. My experience with them has been mixed. Forgiving their previous mishaps and the feeling that the level of Customer Service has gone down, they have been decent year long. I wouldn't mind recommending them. [Edit: Removed the bit about DigitalOcean Plans. If you have Ghostery running, it apparently takes out the html block listing different plans]

mimiflynn 13y ago
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
- deleted 13y ago
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- deleted 13y ago
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cshenoy 13y ago
You mean https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ ? Seems to be working at the moment.
- nivla 13y ago
  I am really sorry. I had Ghostery running, it took out the entire plan block so I was only able to see the FAQ.
  - andypants 13y ago
    Adblock also seems to remove their pricing info. Strange!
svmegatron 13y ago
It seems to be the Optimizely js, which could mean they are A/B testing something about their pricing grid. I'd really like to know the results of the test.

jaequery 13y ago

im really impressed by their new CPU specs. from experience those aren't cheap and it's possibly the fastest CPU out in the market. combined with the SSDs, it may be that Linode currently is the fastest of any cloud hosting right now.

h4pless 13y ago

I notice that Linode talked a good bit about their bandwidth and included outbound bandwidth in their pricing model which DO does not. I wonder if DO has a similar model or if transfer capacity the only thing you have control over.

deleted 13y ago
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geekam 13y ago
I do not understand the difference between outbound bandwidth vs the transfer. Can you explain a bit please?
- honopu 13y ago
  Bandwidth - How big the pipe is. Transfer - How much they let through the pipe. Just a guess.
- kilburn 13y ago
  If you read below the price tables you'll get a good hint: > What happens if I exceed my monthly transfer quota? > You will be invoiced $0.10 for each GB over your pooled network transfer quota. Please note that all inbound traffic is free and will not count against your quota. Bandwidth is the maximum Mbps that your VPS can spill out at any moment, whereas transfer is the maximum amount of per-month cumulative traffic that you can send out before incurring on additional traffic costs.
- h4pless 13y ago
  Yeah, honopu and kilburn got it right. My understanding is that transfer measurements are the maximum amount of data your instance can serve up in a month, while bandwidth is the speed at which it can do it. Its like downloading a 1 GB file to your computer using a 56k modem or a cable modem... the transfer amount will be 1 GB either way, but the cable modem will be a hell of a lot faster due to the increase in its bandwidth. As you upgrade your plan with Linode, your "modem" gets faster, however DO doesn't mention the speed of their "modem" or if its speed is affected by the price level you select.

endijs 13y ago

Most interesting part in this great upgrade is that they went from 8CPU setup to 2CPU setup. But yeah - 2x more RAM, SSDs will guarantee that I'm not going to switch anytime soon. Sadly I need to wait a week until this will be available in London.

eli 13y ago
"vCPU" In a virtualized environment, the number of "CPUs" you can see is probably not a great way to measure how much computing power you have.
- stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  On a host that's mostly idle and where there are no CPU usage caps, seeing 2 cores instead of 8 is a pretty serious drawback if you use Gentoo on Linode like I do.
andypants 13y ago
They did upgrade the cpus though - "Linodes will now receive Intel’s latest high-end Ivy Bridge E5-2680.v2 full-power server-grade processors."
- endijs 13y ago
  Yes. That's good. And Caker also wrote in blog comments: "We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it." So by their estimates 2 now should outperform previous 8.
spyder 13y ago
One comment on their blog post says that after the change he is getting lower performance on a CPU-heavy test (vanitygen): https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-ram-much-more/#comment-633353 https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-... IO is probably more important for most of the peoples who use VPS, but It would be good to see CPU test from others too, not just IO benchmarks.

bfrog 13y ago

I'm actually a little unhappy, it looks like they reduced the CPU count for my $20/mo instance. At this point there's basically no reason to stay with them now.

eli 13y ago
I would encourage you to run a benchmark before deciding that 2 vCPUs is necessarily worse than 8 vCPUs running in a different architecture.
- ckozlowski 13y ago
  In a VMware environment, I'm often educating my users that more vCPUs doesn't necessarily equate to higher performance, as the delays incurred in co-scheduling increase with the number of vCPUs. For VMs that are not hypervisor-aware, the hypervisor must have all of that VM's vCPUs available at execution time since it cannot always anticipate which vCPUs the guest OS will execute against. With fewer vCPUs, one might see what you're alluding to; better utilization and lower wait states because it's easier to schedule 2 CPUs consistantly than 8 CPUs on a host running multiple VMs. Of course, that's in a VMware environment, so forgive me if Linode's hypervisor of choice avoids this problem I'm sure they're using KVM or Xen or something along those lines, maybe they're not as susceptible.
opendais 13y ago
tl;dr: If you had 40 VMs on 8 cores before, you have 10 on 2 cores now. It is the same ratio of VMs:Cores but with stronger processors. Long version: "If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all. We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc." From Caker's comment on the blog. It seems that this was done to reduce fighting over core and provided more consistent fair availability of processing power when they tested it b/t VMs.

davexunit 13y ago

Cool news, but their website now has the same lame design as DigitalOcean. I liked the old site layout better.

kawsper 13y ago
Me too, but fortunately their administration system is still old-school. I think their platform needs some love, it is a bit clunky to work with sometimes. But they are my favorite host.
6cxs2hd6 13y ago
Looks like library.linode.com has the same format, and is still the same fantastic resource. I'm embarrassed to say that once upon a time I used library.linode.com to help walk me through my first Linux server setup... running on Digital Ocean. Yes, I felt like a complete douchebag. I wanted to use Linode but I was one of those $5/month people. However it left me with a sense of obligation to give Linode business someday when I could justify/afford doing so. It looks like Linode just gave me the opportunity to do that.
- kevinqi 13y ago
  Yeah, the library is really excellent - easy to follow and very extensive. It's smart of them to do paid crowdsourcing to create the articles. It's cool of Linode to make the library available to everyone, not just customers.
  - jsutton 13y ago
    DO does the same thing, does it not?
- thejosh 13y ago
  DO do the same thing, plus they get paid for articles. Shame browsing it since the redesign is a complete clusterfuck between articles and community forum posts!
morninj 13y ago

Justen 13y ago

Higher specs sound really nice, but on HN I see people commenting on the ease of DO's admin tools. How does Linode's compare?

kawsper 13y ago
The interface looks a little more clunky, but it works, and it is easy to work with.
- noir_lord 13y ago
  It's not clunky it's more "dated" (and very functional). It also does a fair bit more so apples to oranges a little bit.

mwexler 13y ago

There's similar and then there's alike. I guess it makes comparison easy, but imitation certainly must be the sincerest form of flattery: Compare the look and feel of https://www.linode.com/pricing/ https://www.linode.com/pricing/ and https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

jasonlotito 13y ago
And DO's looks like a million other plan pages that already exist. It's not some unique design to DO.

jevinskie 13y ago

I resized a 1024 instance to 2048 last night and it looks like it is already running on the new processors (from /proc/cpuinfo): model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz Should I upgrade? Do I want 2 x RAM for 1/2 vCPUs? =)

raverbashing 13y ago

Congratulation on Linode I stopped being a customer since migrating to DO but my needs were really small But I think their strategy of keeping the price and increasing capabilities are good. Between $5 and $20 is a "big" difference for one person (still, it's a day's lunch), for a company it's nothing. However, I would definitely go to Linode for CPU/IO intensive tasks. Amazon sucks at these (more benchmarks between the providers are of course welcome)

Chronic26 13y ago
A 4x price differential is nothing for a company?

kyrra 13y ago

I forgot to benchmark the disk before I upgraded but here are some simple disk benchmarks on an upgraded linode (the $20 plan, now with SSD) $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.31593 s, 816 MB/s $ hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 19872 MB in 1.98 seconds = 10020.63 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 2558 MB in 3.00 seconds = 852.57 MB/sec Upgraded cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz Old cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz CPUs compared: http://ark.intel.com/compare/75277,40201 http://ark.intel.com/compare/75277,40201

kawsper 13y ago
This is mine old $20 located in London, doing exactly nothing, I just created it last week, it seems very slow in comparison: dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB) copied, 13,6791 s, 78,5 MB/s hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 3580 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1794.00 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 336 MB in 3.01 seconds = 111.75 MB/sec
- cbull 13y ago
  Dallas data center, not upgraded, faster than London, slower than upgrade. ;) $> dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.19598 s, 489 MB/s $> hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 12446 MB in 1.98 seconds = 6273.29 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 1768 MB in 3.00 seconds = 589.00 MB/sec
- KamiNuvini 13y ago
  Here's mine, with SSD upgrade: dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.17496 s, 494 MB/s hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 18560 MB in 1.98 seconds = 9358.78 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 2510 MB in 3.00 seconds = 836.61 MB/sec`
13y ago

jaequery 13y ago

DO's biggest problem is their lack of "zero-downtime snapshot backup and upgrading". i've not used Linode but anyone know if theirs is any different?

SudoAlex 13y ago
Upgrades/downgrades requires transferring all your data from one server to another - so that means downtime. The bigger the server, the more downtime in transferring. As for backups, Linode backups seem to get a bad reputation. They do take a snapshot of a running instance - but reports from the forums indicate that they regularly fail, leaving you with a missing backup at some points. The only way of restoring a backup is to deploy that backup as a new server. I'd recommend avoiding Linode backups and doing your own.
- jaequery 13y ago
  upgrades for ram and storage does not have to have any downtime. same for snapshots, through LVM/ZFS, they can be nearly instant in most cases. it just seems like DO have not been able to figure this out for whatever reasons.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    Linode does not offer pain-free upgrades - your files are physically copied to another size of box, not just allocated more resources on the existing box. The bigger your files, the longer it'll take (around 30 mins usually). I agree it would be nice to do upgrades in place but presumably they have very good reasons for not doing so. Are you aware of any provider which does this in a seamless way? I'm not really sure how they'd do it, particularly for RAM.
  - giulianob 13y ago
    Linode says they only host the same plan types on the same physical hardware. For example, if you have an 8gb plan then all your neighbors are on the same plan. This might be why they have to physically move your image.
- 13y ago

zak_mc_kracken 13y ago

Does any of LINode or DigitalOcean offer plans without any SSD? I couldn't find any. I just want to install some personal projects there for which even SSD's are overkill...

chc 13y ago
Overkill never hurt anybody. Would you really want to ditch the SSD even if no other numbers changed at all? Even if you don't need it, I don't see why it's a bad thing.
- zak_mc_kracken 13y ago
  It's just overkill to me to pay $20 a month for this when I expect a non-SSD plan would be half as cheap, if not more.
  - chc 13y ago
    You can go with Digital Ocean or one of the other providers in the $5/mo range if price is your real concern here. That's what they're there for. No need to go through the indirection of talking about SSDs.

level09 13y ago

I would probably move back from Digital Ocean if they allow a 10$/mo plan. I know that's not a big price difference, but some website really don't need a lot of resources. they work well on D.O's 5$ server, and I have really a lot of them.

munger 13y ago

Rackspace cloud customer here… These Linode upgrades are very tempting to entice me to switch. I get I might not be their target market (small business with about $1000/month on IaaS spending) but there are a couple things preventing me from doing so: 1) $10/month size suitable for a dev instance. 2) Some kind of scalable file storage solution with CDN integration – like RS CloudFiles/Akamai or AWS S3/Cloudfront or block storage to attach to an individual server. I guess you get what you pay for… infrastructure components and flexibility AWS > RS > Linode > DO which roughly matches the price point.

beering 13y ago
I agree with your point about block storage - with Linode, there's a hard limit on how much hard drive space you get on any single server, which makes it a poor choice for anything that requires a lot of storage space (databases, file servers, etc.). Unlike Amazon, you don't have any good options for increasing your storage space on Linode using network block storage, unless you somehow run another Linode and NFS them together. Being able to launch a moderately priced server with hundreds of gigs of spinning rust on AWS is still a nice option to have.
DougHaber 13y ago
I'm in a similar boat. I use Rackspace for their servers and CDN, and Linode is definitely starting to look nice. It could actually be cheaper to go with Linode and a separate CDN provider, such as MaxCDN. MaxCDN has some of the features that are missing from Cloud Files, which is real nice too. The main thing holding me back is the time it takes to migrate. I know they target the higher end, but hopefully RackSpace will readjust their prices as well at some point.
- munger 13y ago
  Although, I guess there is nothing to stop me from running servers on Linode and continuing to use RS for Cloud Files/Akamai -- except for network speed of course. Linode can deploy to Dallas though, where I use RS so maybe the network speed won't be a big problem.

ff_ 13y ago

Wow, that's beautiful. Currently I'm a DO customer (10$ plan), and if they had a 10$ plan I'd make the switch instantly.

madsushi 13y ago

Why do I pay Linode $20/month instead of paying DO $5/month(1)? Because Linode treats their servers like kittens (upgrades, addons/options, support), and DO treats their servers like cattle. There's nothing wrong with the cattle model of managing servers. But I'm not using Chef or Puppet, I just have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few services. And Linode treats that one solitary server better than any other VPS host in the world. (1) I do have one DO box as a simple secondary DNS server, for provider redundancy

mwcampbell 13y ago
I don't see that distinction at all. Both Linode and DO provide persistent local storage. Both let you resize your server. And now, they're competitive on price; Linode even has hourly billing. Granted, DO has lower-end plans than Linode. But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.
- chc 13y ago
  I don't think anyone's ever gotten good hard numbers, but just from having seen a lot of people's anecdata over the years, my general impression is that Digital Ocean seems to have more short-term outages and to oversubscribe their boxes a bit more.
  - vbtechguy 13y ago
    that's probably due to the massive surge in growth and growing pains for DO
- gtaylor 13y ago
  > But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't. I'm not sure "disposable" is a good word to describe DO's approach. We do know that they cram a lot more people per host machine, though. That may be where the "treat VMs like cattle" statement was getting at. You need only fire up a few instances of comparable type, get some CPU load, and watch some basic metrics to determine this for yourself.

dharma1 13y ago

ohhh yesss. DO is good for some locations like Southeast Asia but loving this upgrade for my London and Tokyo Linodes

notastartup 13y ago

These upgrades are impressive but they are a bit too late to the game. DO still has these advantages besides the cheap monthly price: - DO has excellent and easy to understand API - Step by step guides on setting up and running anything - Minimal and simple To entice me, it's no longer just a matter of price, DO has extra value added, largely due to their simplicity.

jsmthrowaway 13y ago
You mean like linode.com/api/ and library.linode.com?
- notastartup 13y ago
  yeah it's not as obvious and simple like DO's REST calls. shame I never discovered this while I Was with linode but it wouldn't have caught my attention any how like how DO did with their simplicity. now I definitely don't think there's much linode can do further to entice me unless they matched digital ocean's pricing lower than 0.03/hr

vidyesh 13y ago

So this makes Lindode practically on par with DO's $20 plan. Up till now $20 plan at DO was better now its just the choice of the brand. But here is one thing that DO provides and I think Linode too should, you get the choice to spin up a $5 instance anytime in your account for any small project or a test instance which you cannot on Linode.

yogo 13y ago
Doesn't hourly billing address that issue? Linode now offers it.
- damian2000 13y ago
  Yeah, that's the impression I got with hourly billing as well.

orthecreedence 13y ago

Bummer, they're taking away 8 cores for the cheap plans and replacing it with 2. Does anyone know if the new processors will offset this difference? I don't know the specs of the processors. Linode's announcements usually come in triples...I'm excited for number three. Let's hope its some kind of cheap storage service.

opendais 13y ago
tl;dr: If you had 40 VMs on 8 cores before, you have 10 on 2 cores now. It is the same ratio of VMs:Cores but with stronger processors. Long version: "If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all. We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc." From Caker's comment on the blog. It seems that this was done to reduce fighting over core and provided more consistent fair availability of processing power when they tested it b/t VMs.
drzaiusapelord 13y ago
Cores presented to your machine by the hypervisor do not have a 1 to 1 relationship with physical cores. In the world of virtual machines, how many cores you have is meaningless. For example, my VMWare server is a single 8 core processor, but my VM's only see 2 cores, as that's the way I prefer it and I believe VMWare recommends this or even one core. Those 2 virtual cores can access all 8 physical cores. The only real way to find out your cpu performance is to run a benchmark.
- personZ 13y ago
  If you had a host machine with 8 cores, and a virtual machine with 2 cores, the virtual machine will only possibly use 25% of the CPU resources of the host machine -- one vCPU cannot be schedule in parallel across more than one physical core. However it is advisable to minimize the vCPUs in VMs because it greatly enhances scheduling -- if a VM has 8 vCPUs allocated to it, with some hypervisors that lack advanced co-scheduled it won't be scheduled until 8 cores are available, and in some situations it will sit on 8 cores during its duration whether it is only using 1 or all. If you have a large number of smaller VMs, scheduling can greatly improves. This isn't true for all hypervisors and situations. You mileage may vary.

conorh 13y ago

Benchmarking using wrk the smallest linode (1024 now 2048) serving a page from an untuned Rails application using nginx/passenger getting almost no other traffic. Hard to compare of course given the various other factors, but produced slightly lower performance after the upgrade. Serving a page from nginx directly (no Rails) had no appreciable difference in performance, I guess the Rails web serving is more vCPU bound? Before Upgrade: Running 30s test @ http://... 5 threads and 20 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 308.91ms 135.01ms 985.82ms 80.00% Req/Sec 14.15 4.61 24.00 66.36% 2206 requests in 30.00s, 28.51MB read Requests/sec: 73.53 Transfer/sec: 0.95MB After Upgrade: Running 30s test @ http://.. 5 threads and 20 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 321.74ms 102.45ms 957.74ms 87.32% Req/Sec 12.02 2.18 17.00 80.75% 1858 requests in 30.01s, 24.03MB read Requests/sec: 61.92 Transfer/sec: 819.98KB

chc 13y ago
It depends on the task. If your Rails app hits the database a lot, memory availability and disk speed will matter a lot, which favors the new Linode style. If your app just does one small query per page and then gets on with its work, then probably CPU is your most important thing (since most of your time will be spent on app logic, runtime housekeeping and rendering templates).
cmelbye 13y ago
Yeah, you went from 8 vCPU Cores to 2 vCPU Cores on that plan as part of the upgrade. It seems the processor upgrade makes up for that decrease a little bit, but it is a decrease.

ihowlatthemoon 13y ago

VPSBench result: Before ------- CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz Number of cores: 8 CPU frequency: 2266.788 MHz Total amount of RAM: 988 MB Total amount of swap: 255 MB System uptime: 8 days, 12:03, I/O speed: 69.9 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 8.96s Download 100MB file: 47.2MB/s After ------ CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz Number of cores: 2 CPU frequency: 2800.086 MHz Total amount of RAM: 1993 MB Total amount of swap: 255 MB System uptime: 2 min, I/O speed: 638 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 5.10s Download 100MB file: 146MB/s Test: https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench

pdq 13y ago
Here is DigitalOcean's $5/month plan: CPU model: QEMU Virtual CPU version 1.0 Number of cores: 1 CPU frequency: 2299.998 MHz Total amount of RAM: 491 MB Total amount of swap: 0 MB System uptime: 276 days, 5:04, I/O speed: 253 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 7.83s Download 100MB file: 56.0MB/s Here is Vultr's $5/month plan: CPU model: Vultr Virtual CPU 2 Number of cores: 1 CPU frequency: 3399.994 MHz Total amount of RAM: 490 MB Total amount of swap: 509 MB System uptime: 28 days, 3:15, I/O speed: 485 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 3.17s Download 100MB file: 58.2MB/s

harrystone 13y ago

I would love to see them still keep all those old disks and sell me some huge, cheap, and slow storage on them.

Kudos 13y ago

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is now available on Linode too.

hyptos 13y ago

wow EC2 instance free plan : $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 35.8268 s, 30.0 MB/s

vacri 13y ago
Yeah, AWS doesn't have the best speed to drive, though if you have money, you can specify how many IOPS you want... you just have to pay for your declared use every hour whether you're using it or not. It's also kinda hard to predict if you're not familiar with that kind of thing. Note that on AWS your hard drive isn't on the machine running your VM. If you want to test local disk speed, do it in /mnt, where local disk storage is mounted... but remember that data stored there won't persist if you turn your instance off.

shiloa 13y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. We're in the process of moving from Linode to Rackspace but haven't flicked the switch just yet - was planning to this weekend. Our Linode server (16 GB plan) has been performing terrible lately wrt I/O (compared to, say, a Macbook Pro running the same computations), and we decided we've had enough. I guess we'll have to compare the two after the upgrade and decide.

thraxil 13y ago
Did you ever put in a support ticket? I've had I/O performance issues with Linode boxes before and it's always been quickly fixed when they are notified.
- shiloa 13y ago
  I did, they switched us to a new machine - no change. Their support was great, but the hardware needed to catch up. Perhaps this upgrade will help.

beedogs 13y ago

This is nice to see. SSD has gotten ridiculously cheap lately.

jrockway 13y ago

A nice reward for those of us who have been using Linode from before they even had x86_64 images.

simcop2387 13y ago
Yes. I'm actually looking at upgrading my server to a 64bit kernel just so i can take advantage of this. I've been on them so long i'm still a 32bit userland.

filmgirlcw 13y ago

Shall we call this the DigialOcean effect?

weixiyen 13y ago
sigh... just put 12 droplets in digitalocean last week. now thinking of switching back...

jdprgm 13y ago

This is really a fantastic upgrade. I've been hosting with Linode for a few months now and been very happy with them. I run a relatively transfer intense SaaS app and a 50% transfer increase makes quite an improvement.

rdl 13y ago

Semi-related: does anyone know of any good (but still fairly cheap) providers doing Atom C2750/C2758 servers yet?

__xtrimsky 13y ago

I still prefer OVH.com http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-classic.xml http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-classic.xml for $7 you get: 2 cores 2GB RAM for 10$ you get: 3 cores 4GB RAM They don't have SSD, but SSD doesn't do everything, I prefer more ram. EDIT: If some of you don't know OVH, it's because its new in America, but its not some cheap company, it's a European company that is very successful there. And just recently created a datacenter in North America. (I used to live in France, and have known them for some years).

giulianob 13y ago
Can you run https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench and see how the performance is to compare?
- __xtrimsky 13y ago
  I have the 7$ VPS, here is the result: _04/17/2014 - VMPLAN - DATACENTER - OS - AUTHOR_ ``` CPU model: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4284 Number of cores: 2 CPU frequency: 3000.000 MHz Total amount of RAM: 2048 MB Total amount of swap: 128 MB System uptime: 14 days, 13:31, I/O speed: 75.4 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 7.44s Download 100MB file: 13.0MB/s ```
- gingerlime 13y ago
  vpsbench on a 2Gb fresh Linode in Dallas ``` CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz Number of cores: 2 CPU frequency: 2800.050 MHz Total amount of RAM: 1993 MB Total amount of swap: 511 MB System uptime: 0 min, I/O speed: 811 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 4.93s Download 100MB file: 19.1MB/s ```
- abronte 13y ago
  I have the 4gb vmware vps (http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-cloud.xml http://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-cloud.xml) _04/17/2014 - VMPLAN - DATACENTER - OS - AUTHOR_ ``` CPU model: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4386 Number of cores: 4 CPU frequency: 3100.000 MHz Total amount of RAM: 3943 MB Total amount of swap: 1998 MB System uptime: 10 days, 2:25, I/O speed: 169 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 5.34s Download 100MB file: 15.8MB/s ```

ausjke 13y ago

This is great indeed. I'm happy Linode did this. I ran below command 10 times and used the average below: dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync Linode: 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.09063 s, 985 MB/s D.O: 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.23998 s, 331 MB/s dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1500 oflag=dsync Linode: 768000 bytes (768 kB) copied, 0.478633 s, 1.6 MB/s D.O: 768000 bytes (768 kB) copied, 1.01716 s, 755 kB/s

nilved 13y ago

Linode's recent upgrades are awesome, but people are very quick to forget the period where they were being hacked left and right and didn't communicate with their customers until a defensive blog post weeks after the fact. No matter how good the servers may be, Linode should be a non-starter for anybody who cares about the security of their droplet; and, if you don't, why would you pay Linode's premium fee?

jsmthrowaway 13y ago
Ask DigitalOcean if they're wiping data on droplet cancellation and snapshot deletion yet. They've fucked that one up several times since the inception of the company and each time get a little more defensive about it. For a while there, I could spin up a droplet and get database passwords, keys, data, all day long from the previous owner. Then they told the guy that reported it that he was mistaken, and basically lied in a blog post and said no user data was at risk. I'm told that's just the beginning of security faults in their platform, attributable to being a younger company and discovering these things for the first time; I have been personally shown evidence that DigitalOcean's platform initially trusted a hidden field called "userid" and allowed a user to operate on any other user without authorization, including restoring images, shutting down droplets, and so on. Their system at first had no protection against spoofed packets exiting a droplet, either, so ARP poisoning the gateway was (and possibly remains) a viable attack. Linode is far more mature, obviously. Every provider has security issues. It's how they rectify and move forward that should concern you. Watching DigitalOcean react to being informed that the issue they got burned on once had reappeared basically told me to never use their services. Also, and I actually consider this very important and not a grammatical nit, Linode doesn't sell droplets. They sell virtual servers. You're asking for a Pepsi from Coca-Cola. You might consider this a minor nit, but it's actually a serious confusion issue that I already see happening. Allow me to promise you -- not predict, promise -- that DigitalOcean will be compromised just as badly. It's going to happen. It's a matter of when and how they react.
- nilved 13y ago
  I don't see why your (agreeable) sentiment about Digital Ocean affects the fact that Linode is bad at security and customer interaction. We can always avoid both. I didn't mean to use the word "droplet," so I'm sorry for the confusion.

__xtrimsky 13y ago

Could someone please explain what improvements can we get from SSD for web applications ? I know it would read files faster, but in most cases reading a couple of PHP files is not such a big improvement. My guess would be maybe databases ? Read time improvement for MySQL ?

corford 13y ago

Big shame the new $20 plan now only offers 2 cores versus 8 with the current plan. For my workloads, I don't need 2GB RAM or SSD disks, I just need the cores :(

aroman 13y ago
Interestingly, I had the opposite reaction. I plan on running node.js applications on Linode, and as node cannot automatically take advantage of multiple cores (and even manually the support is experimental), the announcement of vertically scaled but horizontally contracted CPU cores was very exciting to me.

SCdF 13y ago

> Linodes are now SSD. This is not a hybrid solution – it’s fully native SSD servers using battery-backed hardware RAID. No spinning rust! And, no consumer SSDs either – we’re using only reliable, insanely fast, datacenter-grade SSDs that won’t slow down over time. These suckers are not cheap. http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim... Not to slam what Linode is doing here, and I'm sure there are probably lots of great reasons to buy datacentre-grade SSDs, but just thought I'd point out that slowing down over time (or data integrity issues) are not really consumer-grade problems any more :-)

SiVal 13y ago
What has changed? (Not advocacy; I'm curious.)

kolev 13y ago

Goodbye, Digital Ocean!

kolev 13y ago
You can downvote as much as you want, but having faster nodes from a long-established company, which doesn't keep your old images available to new customers to peek in, beats DO! I've been with DO since they launched and I can't say they are one of the more reliable services I've dealt with!

funkyy 13y ago

I would love to see Linode going to large HDD drives option for storage as well. I am dying to find really inexpensive cloud provider with cheap data space (SATA is fine), reasonable bandwidth but low cpu and ram and Linode style support/caring. Give server with ~500 GB hard drive, 2 TB outgoing transfer, 1 core and 1 GB ram for ~$20-30 and I am all yours.

kijin 13y ago

About a week ago, I wrote a comment in another Linode-related thread asking how the new usage patterns that hourly billing encourages might affect CPU contention. At the time, I received 11 upvotes but no replies. Apparently, quite a few people were interested in my question but had no useful conjectures to share. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564764 Now it's obvious what Linode's answer to that question is: Lower "burstable" CPU for lower plans. The $20 plan used to be able to burst to 8 cores for short periods, but now it only has access to 2 vcores. The "guaranteed" processing power is probably higher with the newer CPUs, but at the expense of short-term burst performance. Another minor detail that I find interesting is that the transfer cap for the $20 plan has been increased to 3TB, whereas the $40 plan still gets 4TB. Apart from the transfer cap plateau-ing at the extreme high end, this is the first time that Linode has broken its 11-year-old policy of "pay X times as much money, get X times as much RAM/disk/transfer".

jebblue 13y ago

I was looking into alternatives but now I'll stick with them, I can't find another cloud provider whose stuff works so well. edit: I just finished the migration, my disk speed test is through the roof, free ram is phenomenal!

EGreg 13y ago

I love linode. I switched from slicehost for its 32bitness back in the day, stayed for the awesome culture and independence. Slice host got sold to rack space. However, I am seriously considering a move to Amazon Web services for one main reason: I need to decouple the hard drive space from the ram. The hard drive space is so expensive on linodes!!

ksec 13y ago

Sometimes i just wish the pricing system would get better as you go larger. What is the difference between the 16GB - 96GB Plan and a dedicated server? And why would i pay 3x the price? The advantage of those who offer Cloud / VPS and Dedicated Servers Hosting company is they can mix and match depending usage. If you are actually building an any sort of infrastructure with Linode those large box are extremely expensive.

icantthinkofone 13y ago

Without FreeBSD support, it means nothing to me.

vbtechguy 13y ago

Updated benchmark results with 2GB vs 4GB vs 8GB vs 16gb plans from Linode vs DigitalOcean https://blog.centminmod.com/346 https://blog.centminmod.com/346. Definitely Linode has the faster cpus and disk i/o as you move up in plans >2GB. 16GB plans are pretty close though if you look at subtests in UnixBench and ignore the subtests affected by different base Linux Kernel versions used.

mark_lee 13y ago

awesome, linode or DO, if you're small or media companies, no other options should be considered at all, even AWS or Google Cloud.

ForFreedom 13y ago

The specs for $20 is same for DO and Linode excepting for the 8GB extra HDD on Linde.

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