61–70 of 289 posts
I notice that Linode talked a good bit about their bandwidth and included outbound bandwidth in their pricing model which DO does not. I wonder if DO has a similar model or if transfer capacity the only thing you have control over.
I'm actually a little unhappy, it looks like they reduced the CPU count for my $20/mo instance. At this point there's basically no reason to stay with them now.
tl;dr: If you had 40 VMs on 8 cores before, you have 10 on 2 cores now. It is the same ratio of VMs:Cores but with stronger processors. Long version: "If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all. We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. W…
If your hosts have, say, dual 4-way CPUs, and you're giving your VMs 8 vCPUs, then a single VM can execute per clock cycle since a VM needs all of it's vCPUs made available to the guest OS. With 8 VMs, that means one VM is executing every 8th clock cycle.
If you "downgrade" those VMs to 2 vCPUs, then 4 VMs can execute per clock cycle, and that VM can now execute every other clock cycle instead of waiting 8 cycles. More work gets done, even though the amount of CPUs has gone down.
Since most VMs are probably executing work that only has 1-2 threads, then there's no loss from lack of parallelism. Remember, a VM needs all cores available, regardless of how many threads need to be executed.
Of course, some workloads do need that many threads, and so balancing number of cores vs. available execution time becomes a little more tricky. but based on what you shared, it sounds like Linode took a closer look and came to the same conclusion.
I forgot to benchmark the disk before I upgraded but here are some simple disk benchmarks on an upgraded linode (the $20 plan, now with SSD) $ 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, 1.31593 s, 816 MB/s $ hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 19872 MB in 1.98 seconds = 10020.63 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 2558…
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, 13,6791 s, 78,5 MB/s
hdparm -tT /dev/xvda
/dev/xvda:
Timing cached reads: 3580 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1794.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 336 MB in 3.01 seconds = 111.75 MB/secEarlier quoted context omitted.
I use a tiny VPS provider that is actually $20/yr. For sites that get a couple thousand hits per month it is perfect. Although I do not see it as a requirement in this price range, the uptime has been on par with the big names (I have known of one 5 hour outage in the 3 years I have been using it). Even DO's $5/mo now seems a bit steep now for the "I just had a random idea" type thing.
Care to share the provider you are using?
It looks like Linode are still leaving the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market to DO. Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.
One reason Linode doesn't offer "tiny boxes" is that they, like other companies, are worried about running out of IPv4 addresses.
I know that's not a big price difference, but some website really don't need a lot of resources. they work well on D.O's 5$ server, and I have really a lot of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you want to have several tiny boxes? For example, if you want to host a mail server as a separate box for security, that's another $20/month. Or what if you need to use a different Linux distro for something? Another $20/month. A few examples like that add up fast.
Containers, e.g. through Docker, are good for that kind of thing.
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.
I notice that Linode talked a good bit about their bandwidth and included outbound bandwidth in their pricing model which DO does not. I wonder if DO has a similar model or if transfer capacity the only thing you have control over.
I do not understand the difference between outbound bandwidth vs the transfer. Can you explain a bit please?
Its like downloading a 1 GB file to your computer using a 56k modem or a cable modem... the transfer amount will be 1 GB either way, but the cable modem will be a hell of a lot faster due to the increase in its bandwidth. As you upgrade your plan with Linode, your "modem" gets faster, however DO doesn't mention the speed of their "modem" or if its speed is affected by the price level you select.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ ? Seems to be working at the moment.
I am really sorry. I had Ghostery running, it took out the entire plan block so I was only able to see the FAQ.