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Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

blog.linode.com

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Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#41

Post by nkassis »

paraschopra wrote: post #19

Congrats on the anniversary. To provide a balanced perspective on this thread, let me share our experience. We (Visual Website Optimizer) are hosted on Linode since beginning but have experienced degradation of service lately particularly around network availability. There is at least one minor outage every month in their Newark data center (planning around network outage is much harder). While their support is respo…

How regular and how long? They don't provide 100% uptime guarantee. A few hours a month of downtime is what 99.99% uptime. That's not bad at all.

I personally haven't had issues with the network in the Dallas DC.

Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#42

Post by epo »

ajross wrote: post #5

I like Linode and use them. But 25% is almost an insult. Storage is absurdly expensive at Linode: literally 10x what Amazon charges for EBS stores (a little less, as Linode storage is local and there are no usage charges). I really wish they were more competitive. Right now I have a tiny instance running my personal email, but everything else I do looks more attractive on EC2 or Rackspace.

I believe they used to call this "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Almost an insult eh? I hope you never encounter any real insults, you'd likely be traumatized.

Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#44

Post by Macha »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #25

Disk space was the one thing that made Linode feel a bit cramped, for me. Yay! Thanks, Linode. Incidentally, for those looking for an easy way to free up a little extra disk space on your VPS, look into localepurge. On Debian, it's a piece-of-cake install, and it automatically removes unneeded language and locale files from packages every time you run apt.

I'm using 2/16GB (2/20GB now I guess) on my Linode. RAM is always the pain point for me.

Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#45

Post by paraschopra »

callmeed wrote: post #27
paraschopra wrote: post #19

Congrats on the anniversary. To provide a balanced perspective on this thread, let me share our experience. We (Visual Website Optimizer) are hosted on Linode since beginning but have experienced degradation of service lately particularly around network availability. There is at least one minor outage every month in their Newark data center (planning around network outage is much harder). While their support is respo…

If you have 25+ servers, aren't some of them in other data centers and configured in some sort of high-availability setup? What's your technology stack? (FYI, I'm asking purely out of curiosity)

We have a backup set of servers at a different data center as well. But routing traffic via DNS change to different data center isn't the best approach as some ISPs cache DNS and would still send traffic to old data center. A solution to this would be to have a round robin DNS to different data centers but that is still plagued if one data center develops a network issue.

The only real solution to this is BGP routing which is complicated to setup and VERY expensive (only big guys do it). Here's some excellent answers on SO: http://serverfault.com/questions/153576/global-high-availabi...

Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#46

Post by rmah »

nkassis wrote: post #41
paraschopra wrote: post #19

Congrats on the anniversary. To provide a balanced perspective on this thread, let me share our experience. We (Visual Website Optimizer) are hosted on Linode since beginning but have experienced degradation of service lately particularly around network availability. There is at least one minor outage every month in their Newark data center (planning around network outage is much harder). While their support is respo…

How regular and how long? They don't provide 100% uptime guarantee. A few hours a month of downtime is what 99.99% uptime. That's not bad at all. I personally haven't had issues with the network in the Dallas DC.

There are 30*24 = 720 hours a month. If a "few hours" is 2 hours, then that is 718/720 = 99.72% uptime. This means 0.28% downtime vs 0.01% downtime. IOW, almost 30x worse than a 99.99% uptime promise (if that's even what Linode promises).

Math FTW!

Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#47

Post by gwern »

jsprinkles wrote: post #12
ajross wrote: post #5

I like Linode and use them. But 25% is almost an insult. Storage is absurdly expensive at Linode: literally 10x what Amazon charges for EBS stores (a little less, as Linode storage is local and there are no usage charges). I really wish they were more competitive. Right now I have a tiny instance running my personal email, but everything else I do looks more attractive on EC2 or Rackspace.

How dare Linode insult you by giving you free service improvements for no reason. Damn them.

'Free service improvements' is pretty much what one ought to expect in a competitive market where one of the costs (disk space) halves every year or so.

Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#48

Post by paraschopra »

jsprinkles wrote: post #30
paraschopra wrote: post #19

Congrats on the anniversary. To provide a balanced perspective on this thread, let me share our experience. We (Visual Website Optimizer) are hosted on Linode since beginning but have experienced degradation of service lately particularly around network availability. There is at least one minor outage every month in their Newark data center (planning around network outage is much harder). While their support is respo…

My Linode in Newark has not had network issues since last year. Acquaintance has a large deployment there with 100.0% availability. Positive this is not problems with your stack or monitoring?

No, it isn't. In addition to using Pingdom, we are continuously monitoring availability from multiple different locations (these scripts also do DNS switching). Every time we detect an issue, we contact Linode and many times they confirm network issues (sometimes internal, sometimes upstream).

Just two days back they confirmed one internal outage. See this screenshot: http://imgur.com/jYzuD

Almost every time we contact them about an outage, we get this drup response: "Apologize for inconvenience" which is okay, but they should at least upgrade their infra or take steps to avoid it.

Maybe your acquaintance is not monitoring the deployment with higher frequency. We monitor our stack multiple times every minute.

Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#49

Post by paraschopra »

nkassis wrote: post #41
paraschopra wrote: post #19

Congrats on the anniversary. To provide a balanced perspective on this thread, let me share our experience. We (Visual Website Optimizer) are hosted on Linode since beginning but have experienced degradation of service lately particularly around network availability. There is at least one minor outage every month in their Newark data center (planning around network outage is much harder). While their support is respo…

How regular and how long? They don't provide 100% uptime guarantee. A few hours a month of downtime is what 99.99% uptime. That's not bad at all. I personally haven't had issues with the network in the Dallas DC.

Network outage for us even for couple of seconds can be bad because we are serving about 1300 requests/second at peak which can mean a number of users getting affected.

Re: Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

#50

Post by jsprinkles »

paraschopra wrote: post #48
jsprinkles wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Linode in Newark has not had network issues since last year. Acquaintance has a large deployment there with 100.0% availability. Positive this is not problems with your stack or monitoring?

No, it isn't. In addition to using Pingdom, we are continuously monitoring availability from multiple different locations (these scripts also do DNS switching). Every time we detect an issue, we contact Linode and many times they confirm network issues (sometimes internal, sometimes upstream). Just two days back they confirmed one internal outage. See this screenshot: http://imgur.com/jYzuD Almost every time we conta…

Pingdom is notoriously unreliable and I base this on personal experience and experiences of others. False positives are the norm and it is garbage.
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