Linode increases price of compute plans and more • Hacker News Board

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#101

Post by winrid » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #60

winrid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hobbyists will use the $5 machines which are not changing, though.

I've been using Linode for more than a decade. I advise hobbyists not to use the cheapest VPS option and neither do I. Its noticeably less performant and just because you are a hobbyist or whatever doesn't mean you can't spend $10-20 per month. In the United States, people regularly spend more than $10,000 per year on hobbies.

The $5 machines work fine for a lot of tasks. I have some services in production that people pay for running on $5 machines and they aren't anywhere near capacity, lol.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#102

Post by hinkley » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

csnover wrote: post #34

The message being sent to customers claims that they “remain more aggressively priced than our peer providers”, which is nonsense as far as I can tell—unless they now consider their “peer providers” to be the likes of AWS, Azure, and GCP? Hetzner Cloud’s price is ~40% of Linode’s new price[0], OVHcloud ~50–60%[1], and Vultr ~80%[2]. Of the big-name VPS providers, I think only DigitalOcean is more expensive now[3], an…

OVH had a data center burn to the ground just a couple of years ago, due largely to owner error. I’m not in the market for a European data center but that would give me substantial pause.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#103

Post by hinkley » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:50 PM UTC

karlshea wrote: post #70

corobo wrote: post #20

> Akamai faces the same macroeconomic headwinds of growing costs for data center space, energy, and hardware as other providers. We resisted making any changes to our offerings for as long as we could. Bro it's only been 2 weeks

Since the name change. To be fair, they bought Linode a year ago.

Can we just stop pretending that everything a buyer tells you in the first year has any relationship to reality?

Stop being surprised. You’re being lied to. You know it, I know it, everybody knows.

They always change things for the worse in the second fiscal year. And unless they bought the company at a discount they always will. The old owners cashed out. They took the money out of the company, and that money needs to be replaced from somewhere. Which means customers and employees are getting bad news.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#104

Post by landemva » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

schemescape wrote: post #84

markstos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been paying the same price for my Linode server for about 10 years. This seems fair.

Have the server specs changed? If not, then I’d expect it to get cheaper, just like the hardware. Edit: other comments imply they’ve been improving the provided specs, so my comment might not be relevant.

While hardware should cost less over time, cost of electricity and support people increased in last decade. Moore's Law can't outrun the money printers.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#105

Post by wiredfool » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

ethicalsmacker wrote: post #86

dan1234 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the ticket I got, the VPSes are going up 20% but the backup price isn't changing, so your new bill will be around $696/mo, an increase of $1,152/yr. The main alternatives in the budget cloud space are Digital Ocean, Vultr, OvH etc - they're all similarly priced for the equivalent servers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they all start increasing their prices to match - DO especially as they recently laid…

Thanks-- at least they are not increasing the backup costs.

Which is good, because their backups for large servers are troublesome.

(short answer, too many inodes are bad. too many is low single digit millions.)

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#106

Post by wiredfool » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

jll29 wrote: post #59

linuxdeveloper wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, when did backups go from $2/month to $5/month per linode? What a joke.

When backups got more expensive (to $5/m.), ironically, I more often than before got backup errors than before.

Backups are their worst feature.

80% of the tickets we've had in the last year have been their auto-generated "Your backup has failed 2x in a row".

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#107

Post by antoineMoPa » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 7:20 PM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #96

antoineMoPa wrote: post #32

That's a really anti-hobbyist move. With CAD losing value compared to USD, it means I have been paying more in the last year already. As a tiny hobby developper who has almost no traffic, lower egress fees mean nothing to me and the higher pricing means I'll just kill my projects. I guess they don't care about losing loyal customers and are shifting towards entreprise. It's a bit sad to sell your business to people w…

After more than a decade of never increasing prices and improving the hardware for free, charging $12/mo instead of $10/mo means all hobby projects will die and Linode hates their customers. I think you're being a bit dramatic.

It should have been something that happens before acquisition or years after. What I dislike is the message that this increase sends. My bank account can absorb this increase, my heart can't accept that Linode changed.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#108

Post by cfiggers » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 7:23 PM UTC

LinuxBender wrote: post #87

cfiggers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would definitely read a blog write-up of any length on this, if you either already have or would be interested at all in making one.

This is probably not the answer you are looking for but I don't have a blog on this. For what it's worth there are existing blogs that talk about managing instances on multiple VPS providers with Ansible. I would actually defer to the proper devops people here that probably have their favorite write-ups on this topic since I basically fumbled my way through it. Some VPS providers have written Ansible plugins that int…

Your non-expert/non-specialist perspective is precisely what would be most valuable to me, a fellow non-expert/non-specialist. Your use case is similar to mine. You sound like you have a low threshold for extraneous BS that might nerdsnipe a prosumer, just like me. And when you say "fumbled my way through it" I hear "I dunno man, I just want it to work," which is exactly my viewpoint. All that means that whatever you might write would come at a subject I find intriguing from a perspective very similar to my own, and would therefore be more readily applicable to my interests, and probably require less flailing to make useful, than something written by or for "proper DevOps people".

No pressure intended, though, blog writing is work (unpaid work no less, for the overwhelming majority of people who aren't trying to make it their whole deal).

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#109

Post by j45 » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 7:47 PM UTC

As a long time time Linode user I was hoping changes might first happen to improve innovation and the products, before the pricing.

Since the cloud is ultimately someone else's computer, I'd love to learn what setups and providers (other than DigitalOcean) folks are using, including cloud agnostic, or hybrid cloud setups, as ridiculous as it might seem for personal or SMB projects.

Dedicated servers are not the top of mind for me at this time - spent enough time with them and I know what's available to me. Although, one could run their own hypervisor like Proxmox on it to have their own personal Linode pretty easily.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#110

Post by j45 » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 7:50 PM UTC

csnover wrote: post #34

The message being sent to customers claims that they “remain more aggressively priced than our peer providers”, which is nonsense as far as I can tell—unless they now consider their “peer providers” to be the likes of AWS, Azure, and GCP? Hetzner Cloud’s price is ~40% of Linode’s new price[0], OVHcloud ~50–60%[1], and Vultr ~80%[2]. Of the big-name VPS providers, I think only DigitalOcean is more expensive now[3], an…

A major difference about Digital Ocean (A long time user) why you may want to mindfully avoid them:

- DO intentionally does not let you easily download your disk images for backup or DR easily - which Linode and others do without issue to increase lock in. No need to reply with linux commands on how to do it. :)

- DO has a catastrophic flaw in their infrastructure where they will fail to charge a valid credit cards on file and proceed to delete all servers and backups automatically, and irrevocably.

They should not be trusted with anything in production that can't be mirrored to another cloud.

Appreciate some of the other links.