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Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

blog.linode.com

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Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#141

Post by weaksauce »

lsc wrote: post #118
mr_luc wrote: post #92

This is a coincidence. I had a funny experience with Linode just today! I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago. "Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all." So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for…

It's unfortunate, but I don't think linode was in the wrong here. probably more than half of my customers who cancel do so by not paying any more. If you want a 'free two months' at the end of your contract, well, they are going to have to start charging more up front. Maybe another option would be to charge the customer an (optinal) up-front deposit and say "when we shut you down, we'll upload this to S3 with the fo…

I don't think it is unreasonable for them to shut off access to the data after x days. What I don't agree with is the deletion after y days where x << y does not hold.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#142

Post by bbatsell »

weaksauce wrote: post #139
bbatsell wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record: The Planet will cut your server, wipe it, and reassign after 5 days of non-payment. That's standard operating procedure at every server host I've ever used. I'm honestly surprised that Linode gives you 20 days; that's very generous in my experience.

They didn't give him 20 days. He checked it after 20 days. Who knows the grace period for an expired card? I think that deleting the data is a bit harsh for a late payment. How many accounts really get to that point of late payment to where it would be costly for the company to just shut off access to the data until the plan is paid for. A customer oriented policy would be having a grace period of 3 months where the…

According to his post, he discovered it between 1 and 2 months afterward, and the grace period was definitively 20 days.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#143

Post by spicyj »

lsc wrote: post #122
joeyh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too.. I'd be happy with 128 mb at my current level of use. But I suspect they might lose money at that price point.

unless their costs are radically different from mine, (and if anything, their automation is better, so their costs should be lower) the small instances are quite profitable.

(None of this takes into account semiyearly/yearly pricing discounts.)

The difference is that they sell their boxes with prices proportional to memory so that doubling resources costs double (25.6MB RAM per dollar), whereas at prgmr, you charge a flat $4-per-guest fee and then charge linearly for space on top of that (64 MB per dollar).

Bonus fact: If you both were to offer a 173 MB size, the costs would be almost the same (~$6.70/mo).

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#144

Post by lsc »

weaksauce wrote: post #141
lsc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate, but I don't think linode was in the wrong here. probably more than half of my customers who cancel do so by not paying any more. If you want a 'free two months' at the end of your contract, well, they are going to have to start charging more up front. Maybe another option would be to charge the customer an (optinal) up-front deposit and say "when we shut you down, we'll upload this to S3 with the fo…

I don't think it is unreasonable for them to shut off access to the data after x days. What I don't agree with is the deletion after y days where x << y does not hold.

yes, I like having some time between shutting it off and deleting the data as something of a last-ditch contact effort... It's just if that time is long, the expense needs to be paid for some how.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#145

Post by catch23 »

JshWright wrote: post #94
mr_luc wrote: post #92

This is a coincidence. I had a funny experience with Linode just today! I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago. "Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all." So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for…

tl;dr; Didn't back up data/config files, expected hosting company to store data for free

They could have shut off the host, but kept the image file. I just can't see 16GB of storage space worth that much to a hosting company. It's likely that most of that space is empty space anyway. $110 for 2TB on newegg -- that would store 120 customers who may have accidentally have expired credit cards. It's not that expensive for Linode and the word-of-mouth value is probably worth so much more.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#146

Post by catch23 »

nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #120
mr_luc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I tried that about 5 minutes ago. They answered my questions like they deleted my linode: as fast as possible. :( I had no idea my bank card was going to expire while I was down here; I´m kicking myself. The only thing that bugs me is that their support emails said that they DO warehouse some linodes, if there´s "some indication" the person will pay. Wah? Gah! It´s an expiration. For personal accounts, there ha…

I'd imagine most customers aren't on vacation for three weeks at a time.

And why not?? This would be the biggest reason I wouldn't go with Linode. Their Linode 512 instance only consumes 16GB of disk space, why couldn't they just compress the data and store it just in case the customer returns? 16GB is not a lot of money these days... a 1TB hard drive is around $60 and they could store 60 customers on one of these drives. The drive doesn't even need to be running for archival purposes.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#147

Post by lsc »

jules wrote: post #65

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?

this lack of a 'bulk discount' is something I've given a lot of thought to. I do give a bulk discount that can seem pretty dramatic, in part because I assume the same amount of support on a $8 VPS as on a $68 VPS. -

What I've found is that this is not what many customers assume. Many customers assume that if they buy a larger, more expensive VPS from you, that they will get a higher level of support, even if ram/cpu/disk is deeply discounted on that large VPS vs a small VPS. So from that point of view, adding in a 'bulk discount' doesn't make any sense, because you end up spending just as much money supporting one large (and very demanding) customer as many tiny, undemanding customers, so from that point of view, Linode is doing the exact right thing.

Now, I've tried to tackle this by being more explicit about the "you are paying $4/month for support." bit. I'll be opening orders for large customers again later this month, I hope, and we'll see how well that works.

Another possibility is that Linode sees support costs as fixed... in many ways, they are. You need to acquire a good team, train them in customer service, and then have enough of them that at least one is on line at any time (I'm not quite to that last part yet, which is part of why I need to insure that my prices fly beneath Linode's.)

You need to have enough people to handle peaks, and support is very peaky, so unless you queue it up (causing latency and customer dissatisfaction) much of the time, many of your support people are going to be idle (or working on non-support stuff)

even so, the greater your customer's support demands are, the higher your peaks will be and the more support people you need, so I think the former is far more likely than the latter.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#148

Post by catch23 »

weaksauce wrote: post #141
lsc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate, but I don't think linode was in the wrong here. probably more than half of my customers who cancel do so by not paying any more. If you want a 'free two months' at the end of your contract, well, they are going to have to start charging more up front. Maybe another option would be to charge the customer an (optinal) up-front deposit and say "when we shut you down, we'll upload this to S3 with the fo…

I don't think it is unreasonable for them to shut off access to the data after x days. What I don't agree with is the deletion after y days where x << y does not hold.

Or implement the deletion policy like a LRU cache would. Have a fixed size storage for customers who haven't paid and just delete the image of the oldest customer in storage when the disk fills up. Send emails to the oldest 10 customers in that disk that if they don't respond, their data will be deleted.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#149

Post by kanwisher »

johnswamps wrote: post #97
mr_luc wrote: post #92

This is a coincidence. I had a funny experience with Linode just today! I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago. "Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all." So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for…

For comparison, my experience with slicehost: I lost my credit card and got a new one, so the charges from slicehost were bouncing because they had my old number. They sent me several e-mails about it but I wasn't checking the e-mail account they were sending it to, so this went on for about 2-3 months past due. Eventually I logged onto the e-mail account and found out about it -- I hadn't even noticed anything was w…

I had a similar experience with slicehost. I canceled cc and thought they would delete but they didn't and I paid it back and they kept me as a customer for years afterwords.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#150

Post by natfriedman »

Linode has been fabulous, and this is great news. But I've never understood why their storage pricing is so high:

Additional 1 GB Disk Space - (add $2.00/mo)

Additional 2 GB Disk Space - (add $4.00/mo)

Additional 3 GB Disk Space - (add $6.00/mo)

Additional 4 GB Disk Space - (add $8.00/mo)

Additional 5 GB Disk Space - (add $10.00/mo)

Additional 6 GB Disk Space - (add $12.00/mo)

About 20 times higher than Amazon EBS.

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