Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2 but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.
Reality of budget VPS services
11–20 of 70 posts
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#12Anyone care to follow this up with a brief article on the more expensive VPS providers? (such as A Small Orange) Are those of us on Linode, Rackspace Cloud, and Slicehost missing out at all?
Well as someone who has used quite a few VPS servers over the years from a plethora of providers I must say at this point in time Linode is probably the best bang for your buck with all the utilities and uptime it provides. The only thing about Linode is you must not order from the fremont datacenter and you have to subscribe to the status updates to realize what's going on.
The only thing that a more expensive provider will give you that linode does not is server management which can be useful but I don't really mind sysadmin at this point in time so I can't really review that.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#13Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2 but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.
It depends on your application. Every provider has their own stack running in the back, their own policies, and a unique set of existing users. This translates to unique environments that are more or less suitable for certain needs.
My experience with EC2 is that you get more RAM for the buck when compared to Rackspace and others, but IO to disk and CPU is sub-par. As a result, I tend to prefer Rackspace who are also big players in the open source space.
Keep in mind, regardless of any advertising, there is no such thing as guaranteed performance in the cloud. Ever. Every provider oversubscribes ... they do not expect and cannot handle 100% utilization by their subscriber base. Behind the scene, a VPS is sharing all of its resources, always. If your provider does its job right, you'll never experience a drop in performance. Everything will be consistent. But there is no way for that provider to guarantee that. They can experience an unexpected jump in resource usage at any time.
With dedicated hosting, that's not a possibility. It's your hardware. You're the only one using it.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#14Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2 but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.
Are you sure that's the right move to make? Do you no longer need the resources of even a single dedicated server? At even 2-4GB RAM requirement, you would not be saving money buying a VPS over renting a server.
A Linode 4096, where you're sharing CPU and disk IO with all the other users on the physical server, is $159.95/mo.
For $159/mo you could rent a Xeon 3230 quad core, 4GB RAM, 2x250GB HD server from Softlayer with more than 4x the bandwidth allotment and a better data center with a larger support staff.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#15Anyone care to follow this up with a brief article on the more expensive VPS providers? (such as A Small Orange) Are those of us on Linode, Rackspace Cloud, and Slicehost missing out at all?
I used ASO's shared web hosting for a long time. Their support at that level was amazing and I really enjoyed them.
I'm sure their VPS support would be just as great.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#16Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2 but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.
I'm enjoying it. No downtime since I started with them. I'm at the Atlanta datacenter, with the low plan (20 usd or something).
root@linode:~# uptime
13:50:03 up 118 days, 5:10, 1 user, load average: 0.09, 0.10, 0.13
May I ask what you are running in those servers? Are your services bound to CPU, bandwidth or memory? All three?
I've had good times with 100tb.com, but the price is prohibitive for me (The dollar is not my "native" currency and I have to work my day job very hard to reach the 200usd it costs)
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#17Good article. I disagree with a few remarks. While there is certainly a huge amount of fanboyism surrounding buyvm, most of it comes from the stock scarcity. I personally run 3 vps' with them (first three plans) and the performance has always been far more than acceptable. I run an adult tube site that has exploded in popularity due to a fun domain name and being one of the first to post a leaked sex tape for a latin…
I agree. I wouldn't completely write off those smaller servers and I think it serves as a very good entry point for learning Linux and server administration. If you're just starting out with Node or Rails its great.
I would recommend someone a Low End Box over a free Amazon Micro Instance any day, just because the CPU they limit you at is just bad. You start Apache or Nginx on those things or do a big yum install/apt-get and the terminal slows to a crawl.
Running a Production server off any low end box is definitely risky depending on who you're hosting with, but that goes without saying. I'd second BuyVM and Xen, I had a VPS with nordic and my cluster just died one day and was unrecoverable. They gave me a free small instance for half a year, but I opted to just switch instead.
My other recommendation is definitely Rackspace. Their low end service is only around 10 dollars a month, their chat support service is pretty good, and its fast and easy to scale. Database transactions on the cloud are still shit however. :( Really want a dedicated server if you're a larger or badly optimized site.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#18Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2 but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.
I've run all my personal services (email, web sites, screen sessions etc.) off two Bytemark[1] virtual machines with 500MB of RAM each and the only problems I've experienced have been one or two 'high up' problems such as two core routers going down at the same time - i.e. nothing to do with contention. If you need more RAM, you just pay the extra monthly/annual fee for the next plan up and reboot the machine.
I pay £15/month per VM, which is probably $15-30/month each depending on where the exchange rate is.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#19Good article. I disagree with a few remarks. While there is certainly a huge amount of fanboyism surrounding buyvm, most of it comes from the stock scarcity. I personally run 3 vps' with them (first three plans) and the performance has always been far more than acceptable. I run an adult tube site that has exploded in popularity due to a fun domain name and being one of the first to post a leaked sex tape for a latin…
"ALWAYS make backups!"
To be fair, that applies to any hosting, cheap or expensive, virtual or dedicated. I've only once had to restore data due to the fault of the host, but I've lost track of the number of times that I've had to get things back because of a user error. :)
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#20Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2 but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.
It depends on your application. Every provider has their own stack running in the back, their own policies, and a unique set of existing users. This translates to unique environments that are more or less suitable for certain needs. My experience with EC2 is that you get more RAM for the buck when compared to Rackspace and others, but IO to disk and CPU is sub-par. As a result, I tend to prefer Rackspace who are also…
>> My experience with EC2 is that you get more RAM for the buck when compared to Rackspace and others, but IO to disk and CPU is sub-par. As a result, I tend to prefer Rackspace who are also big players in the open source space.
Seconding this. And I'd recommend a hybrid solution if it's possible. Dedicated db server with some cloud webheads for your front end. I really think that's the best bang for your buck. Has anyone tried the Amazon RDS or the RackSpace R2 servers? I'd really like to know if they provide any advantages over just straight up hosting your database on another cloud instance.