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The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

blog.linode.com

211–220 of 289 posts

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#211
post #195

Linode's recent upgrades are awesome, but people are very quick to forget the period where they were being hacked left and right and didn't communicate with their customers until a defensive blog post weeks after the fact. No matter how good the servers may be, Linode should be a non-starter for anybody who cares about the security of their droplet; and, if you don't, why would you pay Linode's premium fee?

Ask DigitalOcean if they're wiping data on droplet cancellation and snapshot deletion yet. They've fucked that one up several times since the inception of the company and each time get a little more defensive about it. For a while there, I could spin up a droplet and get database passwords, keys, data, all day long from the previous owner. Then they told the guy that reported it that he was mistaken, and basically lied in a blog post and said no user data was at risk.

I'm told that's just the beginning of security faults in their platform, attributable to being a younger company and discovering these things for the first time; I have been personally shown evidence that DigitalOcean's platform initially trusted a hidden field called "userid" and allowed a user to operate on any other user without authorization, including restoring images, shutting down droplets, and so on. Their system at first had no protection against spoofed packets exiting a droplet, either, so ARP poisoning the gateway was (and possibly remains) a viable attack.

Linode is far more mature, obviously.

Every provider has security issues. It's how they rectify and move forward that should concern you. Watching DigitalOcean react to being informed that the issue they got burned on once had reappeared basically told me to never use their services.

Also, and I actually consider this very important and not a grammatical nit, Linode doesn't sell droplets. They sell virtual servers. You're asking for a Pepsi from Coca-Cola. You might consider this a minor nit, but it's actually a serious confusion issue that I already see happening.

Allow me to promise you -- not predict, promise -- that DigitalOcean will be compromised just as badly. It's going to happen. It's a matter of when and how they react.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#212
post #135

wow EC2 instance free plan : $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 35.8268 s, 30.0 MB/s

Yeah, AWS doesn't have the best speed to drive, though if you have money, you can specify how many IOPS you want... you just have to pay for your declared use every hour whether you're using it or not. It's also kinda hard to predict if you're not familiar with that kind of thing.

Note that on AWS your hard drive isn't on the machine running your VM. If you want to test local disk speed, do it in /mnt, where local disk storage is mounted... but remember that data stored there won't persist if you turn your instance off.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#213
post #49
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason Linode doesn't offer "tiny boxes" is that they, like other companies, are worried about running out of IPv4 addresses.

This is not true. Linode allow you to attach additional IPs to your Linode at $1/month, for example, I have one Linode which has 6 IPs attached for only $25/month. I still can't find a company has this kind of flexibility.

Bytemark, based in the UK, with their cloud product Bigv (http://bigv.io/)

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#215
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share the provider you are using?

There are always great offers on http://lowendbox.com/ - I'm very happy with the small KVM offers edis.at is offering.

Beware of super cheap VPS providers. A couple years ago I got burned by a provider called VBOX that was highly recommended on lowendbox.com. At first the service was ok, but a few months later my server and VBOX business were completely unresponsive.

Sure you'll save some money, but you might also waste hours of your time setting up a server that could one day disappear into thin air.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#216
post #195

Linode's recent upgrades are awesome, but people are very quick to forget the period where they were being hacked left and right and didn't communicate with their customers until a defensive blog post weeks after the fact. No matter how good the servers may be, Linode should be a non-starter for anybody who cares about the security of their droplet; and, if you don't, why would you pay Linode's premium fee?

Ask DigitalOcean if they're wiping data on droplet cancellation and snapshot deletion yet. They've fucked that one up several times since the inception of the company and each time get a little more defensive about it. For a while there, I could spin up a droplet and get database passwords, keys, data, all day long from the previous owner. Then they told the guy that reported it that he was mistaken, and basically li…

I don't see why your (agreeable) sentiment about Digital Ocean affects the fact that Linode is bad at security and customer interaction. We can always avoid both.

I didn't mean to use the word "droplet," so I'm sorry for the confusion.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#217
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask DigitalOcean if they're wiping data on droplet cancellation and snapshot deletion yet. They've fucked that one up several times since the inception of the company and each time get a little more defensive about it. For a while there, I could spin up a droplet and get database passwords, keys, data, all day long from the previous owner. Then they told the guy that reported it that he was mistaken, and basically li…

I don't see why your (agreeable) sentiment about Digital Ocean affects the fact that Linode is bad at security and customer interaction. We can always avoid both. I didn't mean to use the word "droplet," so I'm sorry for the confusion.

That's certainly your prerogative, but avoiding a provider simply based on security issues will eventually leave you with nobody to host your services. Nature of the game. You simply mitigate and plan accordingly.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#218
post #5

It looks like Linode are still leaving the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market to DO. Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.

The type of people that will be buying a $5 server are the type of people that will be sending in 10000000 help tickets on how to do X on that server

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with the tiny amounts of memory offered at that price. 2GB is very easy to burn through in short order. Anything less than 8 feels really claustrophobic. I've always needed memory more than disk. Really wish I could pay some of these providers just for a one off increase of a few extra gigs of memory without tiering up which includes an entirely higher level of storage that I will not ever use.

What? With Linode you can easily add more ram. It's an awful deal ($5 per MB), but you can do it if you really needed.

Sorry, it was $5 per 90MB. Forgot to add the 90

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#220
I would love to see Linode going to large HDD drives option for storage as well. I am dying to find really inexpensive cloud provider with cheap data space (SATA is fine), reasonable bandwidth but low cpu and ram and Linode style support/caring. Give server with ~500 GB hard drive, 2 TB outgoing transfer, 1 core and 1 GB ram for ~$20-30 and I am all yours.
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