Linode Introduces $5 VPS with 1GB RAM | Hacker News Reader

Linode Introduces $5 VPS with 1GB RAM

linode.com

34 points_Chief18 comments

Previously post and discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13645213

For reference, DigitalOcean's $5/mo droplets have 512MB memory [1]. This will crash if you're building a golang projects like gogs or C extensions in node or python. YMMV, but I had to bump on DO droplets to 1gB memory for installation, even if 512mB could do it while running.

Linode is top tier. Support is great. Interface makes sense. Instances are fast. One of the things that led me to DO was the $5/mo instances though. It's hard to resist a cheap personal server you can host all your legacy projects stuff on.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#droplet

+1. You can't compile node on 512MB of memory. You need to allocate swap to do so.

As someone with 5-10 active Go projects in production, may I ask why you're compiling on the server? I use cross-compilation to build locally then sync to the server. Am curious to understand other use cases.

> I use cross-compilation to build locally then sync to the server.

I don't have a lot of prod code in golang. It's just a gogs server, the rest of is in other languages. All of which the best practice is pulling down requirements (some of which build c-extensions against headers which versions differ) on the server.

As a side note gogs has been really great. For those who don't know you can grab it at https://gogs.io/.

Scaleway offering €2.99 2GB ram VPS, you can also check them out. Though their servers are hosted in Paris & Amsterdam.

It was also a pleasant surprise seeing a Brad Fitzpatrick testimonial on their homepage https://www.scaleway.com/

The difference in price is also a difference in reliability, scaleway doesn't use ECC memory, but linode does.

How much of a problem is that in practice?

Well I don't know of any statistics, since the server market don't normally use non-ecc memory. And it get more complicated when these errors aren't noticed before its too late.

I've seen this issue twice myself, so I'd say it's probably more common than we'd want it to be.

> YMMV, but I had to bump on DO droplets to 1gB memory for installation, even if 512mB could do it while running.

Alternatively you could just add a swap file.

> Linode is top tier. Support is great. Interface makes sense.

Should be mentioned though that it hasn't always been this way. Before they rebuilt their management infrastructure they were hacked a couple of times and their response was... Not great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756

They've made a lot of progress since then but they were also DDoSed quite heavily recently which brought a lot of downtime.

Can anyone comment what kind of throughput a VPN can do on one of these? I assume it is CPU limited.

I like the idea of a private, personally controlled VPN for $5/month, but if the CPU limits it to 10Mbps, not worth it.

If you use softethers own VPN, you can get at least 100Mbit even on a box this small. (tested on OVH smallest VPS)

Unless you're using an abnormally CPU heavy VPN, you should be able to saturate the NIC without issues. Linode has 1Gbit NICs though peering, like always, is a potential problem.

though peering, like always, is a potential problem

Would you mind to explain? I am not sure what you mean.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering.

Grandparent's point is that, depending on where you're trying to send or receive traffic, you might be limited by Linode's (or the hosting data center's) peering agreements, rather than the 1gbps NIC speed.

Thanks - I understand peering and BGP. My question was meant to ask if Linode has any known peering issues.

The internet can't really be treated as a single homogenous network. It's made up of many many smaller networks which connect to each other ("peer"). If you want to get traffic from say a residential connection in the US to a residential connection in Europe, you have to go through the US residential ISP (say Comcast), at least a few exchanges and then through the European ISP. The connections between these networks don't have infinite capacity and can definitely become congested. The network you're on determines the route you can take and hence whether/where you get congestion.

In my experience, it's usually not too big a problem with any major server provider and major ISP in the US until you get to about 100Mbit. At 100Mbit on Comcast, I start to have issues with Europe, depending on the particular AS over there.

Worth noting though that Linode has diverse set of peers so if there are issues they're more likely to be with the ISP on the other end than with Linode: http://bgp.he.net/AS63949

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