High-Memory Instances and $5 Linodes (opens in new tab)

Delimiter has a clever solution for $10 a month. They call it Slot Hosting. You ship them a disk and they'll host it and attach it as additional storage on a VPS. https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/

I use it to host an 8tb drive that I then attach to a dedicated server I rent for $20 a month.

$30 a month and I have a server that I use for Plex (16 cores, 3.2ghz, 32 gigs of memory, and 10tb of total storage).

If you want disk, as in spinning rust, I think it's going to remain that way for a long time. For some reason cloud providers don't like to offer disk at a reasonable price. I suspect it might be because it's not actually a single disk but space on something like a RAID10 SAN, where costs are higher since it inherently requires more hardware.

Personally, I settled with colocation. I pay $60/mo + $2k one-off for the initial hardware + say $150/5y/4TB HDD, which, for 80TB of storage over 5y comes out to a total of ~$88/mo, or $0.001/GBmo. Even if I was to store 3 copies of everything instead of doing erasure coding, my costs are roughly half of what Backblaze B2 charges. And my disks are fully online block storage, not necessarily object storage.

"In the coming months we’ll be releasing into beta our new Linode Manager, RESTful API, and block storage service."

From the blog post you just commented on ;-)

DigitalOcean has their new block storage https://www.digitalocean.com/products/storage/

Slightly off-topic, but EC2 doesn't really scale independently if you compare it to GCE. We let you combine 24 vcpus with 39 GB of RAM, 3 partitions of Local SSD and a few GPUs, all independently (though the ratio of RAM to vcpu is currently bounded between .9 and 6.5).

One of our easiest pricing wins is against say the i2.* series ("Were you trying to buy more flash or more cores?") and now against their p2.* GPU series. It's pretty liberating to actually mix and match.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

I am in the same boat. Need additional storage for less random-access demanding data, like photos/videos. If you check the Linode forums, they have begun to work on block storage option, like Vulr/DO. But it is still early in the design phase and they don't have an estimate launch date yet.

I was in the same situation a year ago. Eventually found Vultr that allows attaching additional "disk instances". But despite that I would choose Linode for any resource-balanced project.

IwStack (by Prometeus) can be customized quite a bit storage-wise:

http://iwstack.com/price-calculator.php

DO isn't any better, just hasn't been targeted by any serious attackers yet.

until very recently, they didn't allow using a custom kernel (except via kexec hackaround) and were quite slow updating their kernel for security patches. they repeatedly gave random dates for implementation, then repeatedly pushed them back, then eventually just ignored users on this issue for years.

their images were also poorly sanitized, leading to the well-known problem of SSH host key duplication, which was the case for years.

We moved >1K$ hosting per month from them to StormOnDemand because of the lack of transparency on security issues, particularly the PagerDuty incident.

This was heartbreaking because Linode's value (performance, reliability, support, price) is almost impossible to match if your requirements fit their VM configurations.

But in the end, we did not want to risk another security or DDoS fiasco. We estimated that the risk was high that they would be targeted again, we could not believe their promises to get better at face value considering previous transparency issues, and we did not want to tell our customers that a company that had experienced security issues for the past three years had suffered from another attack[1].

They seem to have invested quite a lot in their networking infrastructure (kudos!), but I believe they still use their old coldfusion applications.

[1] Non-technical customers often ask us why we are not hosting on Amazon because they heard it's where serious companies host their servers (!). We used to explain why Linode was a more cost-effective choice, but Linode was not a nice name to google in early 2016.

That's just... ugh. Who thought ordinal numbers were a good idea for plan ids / instance types? Seems part of what you are paying extra for with AWS/GCP etc is competent engineering.

I have just created an account to say this: CHANGING THE ID OF THE PLAN IS INSANE AND CLEARLY A BAD-DEVELOPER CHOICE.

I bet there is a piece of code in Linode codebase that has the plan resources mapped in a table, with a list of ID attached to the various sizes. The genius developer decided that it makes sense to have the "growing number ID" match the "growth in resources" assigned to the plan. In other words, the bigger ID should always mean MORE resources.

This leads them to alter IDs if they have to introduce plan-sizes that are small.

Imagine if AWS did this: you would see riots in the streets!

Yep just got bit by this as well. We're heavy users of the API and this was a surprise. Would have preferred some notification about the change OR better yet, just create these instances with new plan ID's.

That's really not cool.

That sucks. Those PlanIDs should never change.

Those are legacy options and to the best of my understanding are not available on new accounts or after switching legacy accounts to hourly billing.

I've always felt that those options were mostly there as a stopgap while you migrate to a larger instance or figure out another plan. I don't think they want most users adding features a la carte as that would throw off their numbers and make it difficult to efficiently provision instances.

VM migration between the cloud hosting services is a big pain. I hope someone comes up with an app to do that.

I've been with Linode for a little over five years and a satisfied customer.

That being said - their policy for handling DMCA notices is abysmal. They will network filter out your Linode until you respond to the notice.

Rather than cut prices (I think $5 is low enough), I would prefer if they would beef up their specs. For $5, DO gives you only 512MB vs 1GB from Linode.

I don't get the whole VPS thing anyway. 5$ for playing around is great but anything that costs more is just not worth it.

60$/month for 16GB, 1CPU, 20GB disk for VPS... in comparison a root server with real remote console access, 16GB, 4 core AMD, 4TB disks, unlimited traffic costs me 30EUR/month (30$/month).

Or for 60EUR/month (60$) I could get a root server with 64GB Ram, 2x500GB SSD, i7-6700, 30TB traffic.

Why? DIgitalocean tends to be easier to use and more reliable. I'm ok with paying a little more given these factors...

Love seeing competition at work. Two times in a week, after the T-Mobile/Verizon rate plan wars :)

I probably wouldn't host a blog there. Their ToS[1] has, among other things:

- A prohibition against the propagation of data, images or sounds that may constitute defamation, an insult, denigration, or an infringement of privacy, image rights, good morals, or public order

- Users are required to use decent and respectful language

- Users are reminded that they must update software without excessive delay when a security failing is noted by the user or the software publisher or Scaleway

This reads like: If you might offend anyone by the standards of the French, or might use strong language, or don't run the latest version of everything, this isn't the service for you.

On the positive side, they lack the litany of restricted services that most hosting companies I've seen provide, and I don't see any prohibitions against using your paid for resources to their maximum, so that's good.

US customers should note that all of their prices are in Euro, so -- for exchange rate shenanigans and currency exchange fees on most credit cards. There's no selector to show prices in USD.

[1]: https://www.scaleway.com/terms/

Aren't they slow Atom C2750 cores though?

I use OVH. Their support is horrendous though. For example, I put in a support request at mid-day this Saturday to ask if their geo-ip feature where you can select which country you want an additional IP to appear to be from, meant that the IP address actually terminated in that country. They didn't get back to me until this morning (3 days later), and the response was a bit vague.

I bought some new IPs 4 hours ago for my VPS. I've had an automated response to say they've taken payment. Do I have the IPs? Not according to the control panel. I imagine I'll get them at some point in the next 24 hours. shrug If not, I'll put in a support request to ask where they are and maybe wait another 2 or 3 days for a response.

When I signed up a few months back, I purchased my first VPS on a Saturday. At no point did they tell me that my order needed to be manually checked. I eventually got my VPS on Monday morning.

Does anyone even work there on the weekend?

Amateurs

I'll say this as someone who's pretty happy being on Digital Ocean - Linode's support is amazing. If they had had a $5 price point for one-and-done projects forever ago, I would have never used DO.

OVH basically tell you not to use these for production applications. I have 3 that I use for as gitlab-runners and as a dokku development server.

I'm sorry, but this pricing doesn't put them anywhere near the bottom of the market. As someone that has been buying from the VPS market for almost twenty years now, Linode cannot in any reasonable verbiage be lumped in with the riffraff crap vendors at the bottom. I could rattle off a dozen or more companies run by thugs and thieves that truly define "bottom of the market" for VPS, and Linode, DO, Ramnode aren't even on the same planet.

I think it makes good business sense. It comes less than a year after they bumped the $10/mo instance to 2 GB RAM. They must have realized they were losing market share just by dint of there being no $5/mo option to compete with DO. Even though this is the bottom of the market, as you say, some of those "one-and-done" projects must hang around and need to scale eventually, and it's clearly easier to scale up on an existing platform than migrate to another. I know this takes away one of the two or three big reasons I ever have for using DO instead of Linode!

Appreciate the link, I have a $5 review up as well now :)

Since my posts are straight benchmarks, I don't touch on the support side of things typically (mostly because I only have had support interaction with the companies I use).

That said, I've had exceptional support from both Linode and DigitalOcean over the years. Always responsive and friendly.

Interestingly enough though, yesterday my Linode went down due to a power outage in the Atlanta data center. I'm a huge fan of Linode, but something like a power outage at this stage in the game seems a bit like amateur hour.

I've been using Linode for many years, long before DO was around. Very happy with Linode. I tried DO, but I didn't see them making a compelling enough reason for me to switch over. Linode has a strong track record.

I enjoyed that link to the $10 showdown. Linode's VPSs usually preform quite well. It did take Linode a while to get into the SSD game, but when they did, they got the IO right.

ColdFusion or not - Linode's hosting panel is one of the simplest and flexible management interface I've experienced. Digital Ocean's is too simple, and some other providers are too infuriating. Linode is that porridge that's just right.

Yup $5 shoot out between Linode vs DigitalOcean vs Vultr https://community.centminmod.com/threads/10437/ :)

Lightsail $5 plan has inferior specs to the Linode $5 plan.

I think that was a misprint. The floor on all plans are now 1000Mbits. :)

They just upped all plans to a min of 1000Mbps

In the current environment, I personally believe that it's safe to say that everybody has been hacked to some degree. Linode being open about it, even if not having the perfect response, strangely makes me feel better. Being a customer while this occurred and not feeling any impact makes me feel even better still.

Having to go in and change my password is hardly an exceptional event on today's internet.

That is why I stopped using Linode. It wasn't the fact they got hacked, as much as they minimized and lied about the extent of it.

database servers, redis and memcached I'm guessing. All of which are basically designed to take a memory-time tradeoff.

You can run a memory-based DBMS. That will easily eat all the RAM you can throw at it.

It's $5 USD, just like Digital Ocean. If Digital Ocean works for you there's no reason to switch back. They're equal cost now.

Unless I'm mistaken, per-use means you aren't billed for the server when it's powered down.

If the server is up, even if you use 0% CPU, you're getting charged.

Per-use is a lot cheaper for people that spin up servers to meet demand and kill them once things slow down.

I've used Linode since they opened and their pricing has been extremely consistent, it has never gone up or been randomly changed.

They introduced per-hour billing recently, that's the only fundamental change to their billing, and that was something you had to go out of your way to opt into if you wanted it for an existing account.

If you provisioned a $20/mo. machine then yes you will pay $240 per year for it. This is how math works.