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

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#91

Post by reaperducer » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

elforce002 wrote: post #61

reaperducer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital Ocean already increased its prices recently, then laid off a bunch of people. So the meager support it used to have is now gone. Word on HN is that it's getting bought by Microsoft. If that's true it makes sense that DO would go away entirely.

Really?!! We're planning on using their spaces and kubernetes offering for our video hosting division. Where are you getting these news?

It was mentioned in the HN thread when Digital Ocean laid people off a couple of weeks ago.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#92

Post by nextaccountic » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

winrid wrote: post #35

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…

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

$5? That's tad expensive in most of world. It's often better to use free tiers (https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev) or $1 / $2 VPS (https://lowendbox.com/)

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#93

Post by bityard » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

I know Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore, but conventional wisdom has always been that hosting prices should go _down_ over time, due to compute, memory, and storage getting denser and cheaper, plus competition in the marketplace. This seems to not be happening anymore, except for cloud providers switching to ARM64.

Hosting providers typically make _some_ profit marking these up somewhat at deployment time, to pay for all of the surrounding infrastructure like real estate, power, racks, networking, personnel, etc. But their cash cows are customers who buy a certain plan at a certain price and then stay on those plans for years and years. Even if there are newer, cheaper plans that would work just fine, it may not be worth the time and cost of migrating. ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it.")

I once worked at a hosting provider and noted that we had a handful of truly aged VPS hosts that kept losing RAID disks and the occasional power supply. They were running a newer version of cPanel but almost everything was close to a decade old. I noted that we could replace all of these with one beefier box that would take up 1/10th the space and power but the exact words of the owner were, "Why would we replace those? They paid for themselves in the first year and are almost pure profit at this point. We won't decommission those until they die completely or customers stop paying for them."

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#94

Post by ethicalsmacker » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:07 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #88

ethicalsmacker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could do with fewer cores, but the memory (and most importantly, the disk space) has been critical for me). When I compare alternatives, it seems pretty bleak.

Smaller instance + block storage?

That's an option, but seems to be only slightly cheaper (at Linode at least). I am also unsure of the block storage speeds and reliability (for example, use as a data directory on a database).

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#95

Post by thaumaturgy » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:08 PM UTC

elforce002 wrote: post #61

reaperducer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital Ocean already increased its prices recently, then laid off a bunch of people. So the meager support it used to have is now gone. Word on HN is that it's getting bought by Microsoft. If that's true it makes sense that DO would go away entirely.

Really?!! We're planning on using their spaces and kubernetes offering for our video hosting division. Where are you getting these news?

The only reference I could find to this on HN was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805414, which was somebody's gallows humor joke.

Good grief, that's a terrifying thought though.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#96

Post by dahfizz » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

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.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#97

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:12 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.

> In the United States, people regularly spend more than $10,000 per year on hobbies.

There are some people who spend that much, but its way in the high tail of the distribution.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#98

Post by dahfizz » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #93

I know Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore, but conventional wisdom has always been that hosting prices should go _down_ over time, due to compute, memory, and storage getting denser and cheaper, plus competition in the marketplace. This seems to not be happening anymore, except for cloud providers switching to ARM64. Hosting providers typically make _some_ profit marking these up somewhat at deployment time, to pay fo…

It does get cheaper. The problem is your needs grow in lock step with the growth in CPU & memory.

The $5 linode instance is both way cheaper in real terms and way more powerful than the $5 linode instance 10 years ago.

1 modern vCPU, 1GB of modern RAM, 25GB modern SSD would be enough to host a large website 10-20 years ago. Now, its basically useless because of software bloat.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#99

Post by daedalus_j » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

elforce002 wrote: post #57

Well, We switched from linode to Vultr because we needed all VPS to talk to each other. Vultr pricing is also a plus since they have the most affordable vps offer amongst linode and DO.

How has their stability been? Last time I tried a vultr $5 node they had periodic network problems and it would see really high packet loss for 10-20 seconds every couple hours, as well as some unexpected outages.

Re: Linode increases price of compute plans and more

#100

Post by JonChesterfield » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

Alternatives mentioned here are vultr, hetzner, ovhcloud, digitalocean. I'm reluctantly coming to terms with the idea that my decade(s?) old linode instance is not going to survive the acquisition, mostly based on the increasingly corporate/incoherent emails I get about it.

Does it matter hugely which of the above I change to? I want them to bill me automatically and boot the server after outages, basically set and forget for admin.