12 ms·

Summary: Time to switch to Linode.

by cloudhead 17y ago

poutine 17y ago
I switched from Slicehost to Linode and haven't looked back. Their management GUI is complicated but way more powerful.
- callmeed 17y ago
  How so? (I've only used SH) Do they have good DNS tools like SH?
  - atambo 17y ago
    You can get a good look at the linode control panel at http://www.linode.com/features.cfm http://www.linode.com/features.cfm
    - dshah 17y ago
      The fact that they still have pages running in ColdFusion surprises me.
  - poutine 17y ago
    The DNS tools are considerably better IMHO. Take a look at the screenshots on their site. It's pretty cheap so if you have a significant amount of hosts with Slicehost it's worth picking up a linode for a month just to test yourself.
stingraycharles 17y ago
One thing scares me about Linode: I can not find any information with regards to availability guarantees at all. Even when they talk about their "datacenter availability", they're talking about which image slots are available in which datacenter. EDIT: Ok, I just found some availability information in their FAQ: http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm "What we can boast about is our commitment to resolving these issues in the quickest fashion possible. Most customers will tell you the last time they rebooted was to take advantage of a plan upgrade. 99.9% uptime, or your lost time is refunded back to your account. " This essentially means it's worthless: they're only backing it up with paying you back the time your server was down (they'd better do that!). Looks like they don't have much confidence in themselves in that area.
- etherealG 17y ago
  sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen any virtual server hosting provider that went further than this. most don't even mention paying you back for lost time, and instead will just give a 99.9% figure without saying what the rolling time on that % is. To be fair, neither are linode, but at least they offer your money back, most don't.
  - martey 17y ago
    Slicehost's "SLA" is even sillier than the 99.9 percenters: Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong.
    - mrkurt 17y ago
      SLA's are pretty silly and useless, as a rule. :) They're really only worth caring about if they can get you out of some long term contract. They'll never be good enough to counteract the losses you'll suffer from downtime.
      - wisty 17y ago
        SLA's are not useless, they are just useless for commodity hosting. If (say) the NYSE was negotiating for a host, they would make sure they had an SLA that gave massive damages if the host failed. But for commodity hosting, the provider writes the contract. There is no way they are going to expose themselves to your losses other than a fixed refund for the time you lost. Not just because of the costs, but because the costs would be a PITA to calculate. If Twitter goes down and alienates its customers, how would you calculate the damage?
        waleedka 17y ago
        Agreed. However, I'd use a different example to emphasize the point considering that Twitter's fail whale stories are legendary. I'd stick with NYSE.
timdorr 17y ago
Not necessarily. This article ignores the "neighbor" factor. That is, performance might be highly dependent on what the neighboring VPSes on the same compute node and storage node are doing. It could very well be that on Linode he was placed into a underloaded system that did not have other active VPSes on it or even have been filled out to capacity yet. It's not possible to tell. It may just reflect a better allocation system than the other providers, assigning compute nodes in a round robin fashion, not in order. So, it's a little unfair to do a benchmark when 95% of the system's resources are taken up by an unknown factor. (Note: I don't host with any of these guys, so I'm not defending Slicehost or anyone else. In fact, I run my own hosting company and I'm working on our own cloud offerings right now.)
- jasonwatkinspdx 17y ago
  One thing a lot of people have seen with Amazon is high instance to instance variation. Generally if one starts up a batch job of 10-100 odd instances all doing the same work, you'll see up to a 10x difference in throughput between best and worst instances. I'd speculate amazon has many different generations of hardware deployed and the EC2 Compute Units do not really capture the differences between these, particularly when it comes to memory bandwidth.
  - uggedal 17y ago
    As a matter of fact I ran the benchmarks on one instance in EU and one in US before I started a week long run on one US instance. I simply could not believe the numbers I was getting from what should be a larger share of physical CPUs compared to the other providers and many times more RAM.
    - lsc 17y ago
      I think you might want to go back and run a web application benchmark like you did last time; the benchmarks you used this time apparently do not benefit from having more ram, and this is, uh, rather different from most (but not all) real-world loads.
- 17y ago
tybris 17y ago
Very low storage, poor memory/$, unestablished company, but good results in a less than scientific performance comparison by a blogger. Yeah, lets switch right away. (Linode is awesome, but the reasoning is poor)
- lsc 17y ago
  unestablished company? uh, Linode has been around longer than I have. (And I've been around longer than slicehost.) If any of us VPS providers are established, Linode is. (johncompanies has also been around a while.)
charlesmarshall 17y ago
Do you believe everything you read on the internet? I'm not saying the figures are out but before you jump ship you should really try things out for yourself. Many other posters have said Linode has a 7 day trial period; maybe try that with one of your sites before switching completely (I probably will). edit: Sorry, someone below has said similar thing.. should of read the entire thread first!
bumblebird 17y ago
They also have seriously good support #linode on irc.oftc.net

Summary: Time to switch to Linode.

poutine 17y ago

I switched from Slicehost to Linode and haven't looked back. Their management GUI is complicated but way more powerful.

callmeed 17y ago
How so? (I've only used SH) Do they have good DNS tools like SH?
- atambo 17y ago
  You can get a good look at the linode control panel at http://www.linode.com/features.cfm http://www.linode.com/features.cfm
  - dshah 17y ago
    The fact that they still have pages running in ColdFusion surprises me.
- poutine 17y ago
  The DNS tools are considerably better IMHO. Take a look at the screenshots on their site. It's pretty cheap so if you have a significant amount of hosts with Slicehost it's worth picking up a linode for a month just to test yourself.

stingraycharles 17y ago

One thing scares me about Linode: I can not find any information with regards to availability guarantees at all. Even when they talk about their "datacenter availability", they're talking about which image slots are available in which datacenter. EDIT: Ok, I just found some availability information in their FAQ: http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm "What we can boast about is our commitment to resolving these issues in the quickest fashion possible. Most customers will tell you the last time they rebooted was to take advantage of a plan upgrade. 99.9% uptime, or your lost time is refunded back to your account. " This essentially means it's worthless: they're only backing it up with paying you back the time your server was down (they'd better do that!). Looks like they don't have much confidence in themselves in that area.

etherealG 17y ago
sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen any virtual server hosting provider that went further than this. most don't even mention paying you back for lost time, and instead will just give a 99.9% figure without saying what the rolling time on that % is. To be fair, neither are linode, but at least they offer your money back, most don't.
- martey 17y ago
  Slicehost's "SLA" is even sillier than the 99.9 percenters: Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong.
  - mrkurt 17y ago
    SLA's are pretty silly and useless, as a rule. :) They're really only worth caring about if they can get you out of some long term contract. They'll never be good enough to counteract the losses you'll suffer from downtime.
    - wisty 17y ago
      SLA's are not useless, they are just useless for commodity hosting. If (say) the NYSE was negotiating for a host, they would make sure they had an SLA that gave massive damages if the host failed. But for commodity hosting, the provider writes the contract. There is no way they are going to expose themselves to your losses other than a fixed refund for the time you lost. Not just because of the costs, but because the costs would be a PITA to calculate. If Twitter goes down and alienates its customers, how would you calculate the damage?
      - waleedka 17y ago
        Agreed. However, I'd use a different example to emphasize the point considering that Twitter's fail whale stories are legendary. I'd stick with NYSE.

timdorr 17y ago

Not necessarily. This article ignores the "neighbor" factor. That is, performance might be highly dependent on what the neighboring VPSes on the same compute node and storage node are doing. It could very well be that on Linode he was placed into a underloaded system that did not have other active VPSes on it or even have been filled out to capacity yet. It's not possible to tell. It may just reflect a better allocation system than the other providers, assigning compute nodes in a round robin fashion, not in order. So, it's a little unfair to do a benchmark when 95% of the system's resources are taken up by an unknown factor. (Note: I don't host with any of these guys, so I'm not defending Slicehost or anyone else. In fact, I run my own hosting company and I'm working on our own cloud offerings right now.)

jasonwatkinspdx 17y ago
One thing a lot of people have seen with Amazon is high instance to instance variation. Generally if one starts up a batch job of 10-100 odd instances all doing the same work, you'll see up to a 10x difference in throughput between best and worst instances. I'd speculate amazon has many different generations of hardware deployed and the EC2 Compute Units do not really capture the differences between these, particularly when it comes to memory bandwidth.
- uggedal 17y ago
  As a matter of fact I ran the benchmarks on one instance in EU and one in US before I started a week long run on one US instance. I simply could not believe the numbers I was getting from what should be a larger share of physical CPUs compared to the other providers and many times more RAM.
  - lsc 17y ago
    I think you might want to go back and run a web application benchmark like you did last time; the benchmarks you used this time apparently do not benefit from having more ram, and this is, uh, rather different from most (but not all) real-world loads.
17y ago

tybris 17y ago

Very low storage, poor memory/$, unestablished company, but good results in a less than scientific performance comparison by a blogger. Yeah, lets switch right away. (Linode is awesome, but the reasoning is poor)

lsc 17y ago
unestablished company? uh, Linode has been around longer than I have. (And I've been around longer than slicehost.) If any of us VPS providers are established, Linode is. (johncompanies has also been around a while.)

charlesmarshall 17y ago

Do you believe everything you read on the internet? I'm not saying the figures are out but before you jump ship you should really try things out for yourself. Many other posters have said Linode has a 7 day trial period; maybe try that with one of your sites before switching completely (I probably will). edit: Sorry, someone below has said similar thing.. should of read the entire thread first!

bumblebird 17y ago

They also have seriously good support #linode on irc.oftc.net