A stupid question: why are the bigger linodes relatively more expensive? You get 512MB for $19.95 and 1024MB for $39.95. If you buy 2x512MB, don't you get twice as much CPU too?
Their FAQ has a section on how many instances are on each host, which is 40 for 0.5GB and 20 for 1GB etc (ie, 20GB of customer instances per host, regardless of instance size). Which would mean that when you go for twice as much ram, you also get twice as much of everything else. The front page lists disk space and bandwidth, and these also scale linearly with ram size.
Linode is pretty much a pay-per-use service in the guise of a VPS host. You use twice as much resources, you pay twice as much. You stop using your VPS for a day, your account is credited back for that day. Overage charges are very similar to regular charges. And so on.
So you can compute roughly the same number of digits of pi on 2x512 machines as on one 1024 machine? i.e. you get the same number of execution threads/cycles?
No, CPU seems to be an exception. Even on the smallest plan, you can often burst all the way to 400% (4 cores). So it depends on what other customers are doing, and if everyone else were idle, you'd get the same CPU in both plans. But the host machine is at least an 8-core beast, so one person bursting to 400% doesn't affect other customers as much as it would in other hosting platforms. Also, the main bottleneck in a VPS setup is RAM and I/O. Personally, I've never had a CPU shortage in the two years I've been with Linode ;)
And the tumbleweeds continue to roll across SliceHost... which is stuck in 2008.
I've had sites on linode and slicehost, and have found Slicehost to have less downtime, packet loss, network problems (unreachable), and so on. I'm satisfied with both, overall.
Wow, that's really great. Makes me feel better about the outages we've been dealing with at the Dallas center. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1392700
Linode has 5 data centers. I've maintained a node in each of them the past six months with the following results: Dallas: 99.959% Newark: 99.971% London: 99.986% Fremont: 99.992% Atlanta: 100% I've heard from others here that Atlanta has been a very reliable LN data center for them as well.
Do you have any metrics for this? I have found issues with all the data-centers. NJ seems the most problematic from experience, followed closely by Dallas, which your data does confirm.
In terms of iPhone apps, linode easily beats slicehost. Nice graphs for CPU, network, etc. And last i looked, slicehost required you to make a URL with you API key and mail it to yourself, which is a huge PITA.
I wrote the Slicehost app. Would love to add graphs, but that data's not available yet in the API. As for the email link, that's because the app came out before the iPhone had a copy/paste feature. You don't need that anymore with copy/paste.
So you can compute roughly the same number of digits of pi on 2x512 machines as on one 1024 machine? i.e. you get the same number of execution threads/cycles?
No, CPU seems to be an exception. Even on the smallest plan, you can often burst all the way to 400% (4 cores). So it depends on what other customers are doing, and if everyone else were idle, you'd get the same CPU in both plans. But the host machine is at least an 8-core beast, so one person bursting to 400% doesn't affect other customers as much as it would in other hosting platforms. Also, the main bottleneck in…
Hmm, so I should run my combinatorial search algorithms on 512 Linodes, although perhaps they wouldn't like that ;)