Serious question: why would I want to use Linode over GCP or AWS? Asking as someone who hasn’t really dabbled with smaller cloud providers. Is it cost? Support? Developer tooling?
Last time, I checked GCP costed me $26 (+ hidden charges) for the same I could get on many other places for $7. Some of them provide instant customer support too and are better because it's not an outsourced customer center in India or other places.
Check out:
vultr: https://www.vultr.com
Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/
OVH: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/
DO: https://www.digitalocean.com
Some prefer managed infrastructure and want to write code. Though, you can do that via GKM but prefer more straightforward approach.
Nanobox: https://nanobox.io
Heroku: https://www.heroku.com
LastBackend: https://lastbackend.com
ML/AI
Paperspace: https://www.paperspace.com
Flyodhub: https://www.floydhub.com
Colocation for those who have big infrastructure needs and developers will cost them less.
Equinx: https://www.equinix.com
Datafoundry: https://www.datafoundry.com
Disclaimer: not associated with any of them. Have used some of them and for others, heard great things.
You can easily go lower for less support and most likely a shit interface with some reliability issues.
They seems to be working hard [1] with 10! more DC planned in 2020. The entire Hosting market is growing like crazy!
[1] https://upcloud.com/blog/upcloud-secures-18-million-funding-...
This! i don't want to spend my life navigating the maze of options and hidden costs of AWS et al, this is important to most projects for two reasons - time and cognitive load... Until things get truly massive scale, it's not worth the brain drain and time is more precious. Navigating the interface of Linode is actually pleasant and takes minimum effort.
If anyone needs a reason not to use AWS for your boss in a nutshell: employee sanity.
(I am just a customer)
Instances of comparable power are somehow more expensive on both AWS and GCP.
Also, simplicity; AWS IAM is mightily complicated, things like Cloud Formation are totally non-trivial, etc. You can get going more easily with simple and moderately complex setups on Linode or DO.
Of course, AWS, GCP, and Azure have much bigger infrastructure, several availability zones, a lot of managed software (object storage, various databases, queues, email gateways, docker hubs, etc) which smaller players don't provide, or can't provide at the fault tolerance level which big players are able to offer. Something like AWS Aurora is hugely internally redundant to withstand link problems, node outages, etc transparently. If you want a thing like that, managing it yourself takes serious chops, and money.
Unfortunately I've noticed that their "unmetered pipe" offering is quite a downgrade, as it's only 10 Mbit.
EDIT: Sorry, I'm wrong. All dedicated servers have 1 Gbit unlimited uplinks. I'm not sure why I keep getting confused on this point, their support has confirmed this fact many times to me.
When a company has a room to care to the detail like this, you can feel they're not crushed by support requests which may mean they're doing things right.
I can tell that - many people in this thread are using “AWS” as though it’s synonymous with “EC2”.
I build things with consideration to platform and vendor lock ins. Kube, containers, etc have resolved many deployment issues for me. For other things like authentication, logs, database, analytics, cache, search etc. There is parse, elastic/solid, postgres, redis, logio, ackee etc
Obviously, there are still many spaces left which AWS cover but most applications don't need them. Compliance is a big hurdle for businesses which they pay for. For individuals experimenting, not so much.
It took me a while to even find GCP's cost calculator and the AWS one required me to make an account before using it. I spent days looking through documentation an learning all the nomenclature ("elastic beanstalk - seriously??") so I could even start to understand the calculator. Their structure is incredibly convoluted (compute+load balancing+database+database storage+block storage+content delivery+container managment...), making it near impossible to know how much I would end up spending. Not to mention that the prices and performance vary wildly (reserved vs hot vs cold compute).
My rough estimate would've put me at around 3x the cost compared to Linode and I'd be living in fear of the bill every month. Linode told me exactly how much of what I would be getting and how much I'd have to pay - in words, not ec2_t2.micro_us-west_reserved.
I keep everything directly user-facing (ie, must-be-always-available) on GAE. Which is expensive, but nobody has to wear a pager.
Basically for small, simple applications, Linode or DO are great. They’re simple, the pricing is simple.
For more complex applications with lots of components, service buses, microservices etc, bigger cloud services offer you lots of features, but it gets difficult to operate if you’re just one guy (IME).
Very predictable how much you'd pay by spinning one up as bandwidth is a pooled limit among all your machines, so you won't pay until you exhaust the pooled monthly limit, and they don't charge you for disk IO and performance/cost ratio has been better.
You'd question why you'd pay more for less performance.
Will ec2 ever be able to boot into recover mode easily? Linode allows you to boot into recovery mode by attaching your disk and also easily access your console from browser in case you screw up networking or firewall to lock yourself out.
They provide easy daily/weekly backup instead of making you write script to take ebs snapshot manually.
Maybe my AWS knowledge isn't caught up but AWS feels like everything is for you to manage.
Also they don't do weird stuff like GCP resetting the hostname on every reboot but things are how you'd expect.
DX/UX/UI
Fit small to medium business (i.e. better resource management decision. Yes, that imaginary scaling thing)
Price predictability
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Launching a production on DO: 1 LB + 2 droplets + 1 managed PG. That's pretty much to cover a huge portion of problem space you are solving for customers. Mostly enough for a sustainable business.
For really simple providers (just a VM; in AWS, just EC2) you can still write all your own Ansible/Puppet/Chef (I recommend Ansible) to setup your servers for you. You can do your own databases, but there is complexity in scaling, multi-read only workers, etc. Managed solutions are nice in how they handle that for you and you really only need to do off-site backups. But the advantage is, once you have it all written and figured out ... you can move it anywhere.
As a startup, you want to get everything fast. So you're going to get locked in (most likely). That's fine if you start making money. If you want to start cutting costs later, it's not really going to matter who you originally started with. You're going to be rewriting a lot.
There are a TON of tradeoffs going in either direction. Linode/Vultr/DO really appeal to people self-hosting or startups that have infrastructure people from day one who can stand up things, platform-independent, from day one.
DO has started offering managed databases and load balancers. Now we see Linode offering DDOS (maybe saving you money from paying CloudFlare)? Everyone wants to get to the point where they can at least offer the minimum AWS/GCP/Azure stack (web + DNS + load balance + firewall + database .. maybe throw in some managed k8s like DO is doing now?)
It's really all about tradeoffs. What time do you want to put in now so it's easier to migrate later?
Sigh, you don't know what you're talking about.
Everything past "make VM" is lockin. Firewall rules, be they security groups, NACLs, or what have you are different for each platform. Each service you use is lockin. Even the build scripts themselves are lockin. The users within the console, and all their associated permissions are lockin.
Do you want load balancers? AWS - so.. thats ALBs, or NLBs, or CLBs? Or did you want to spin up a bunch of dinky ec2 haproxy dockers? Does your application use sticky sessions or have session data? That limits you in a bit of ways.
There is no neutral way to talk about network, compute, storage, and api assets that don't involve lockin of a great deal.
I work for Cloudflare, and we do not charge you money for our DDoS protection. It's free and included on every plan level including our free level, and the protection you get is equal to the protection our enterprise customers get.
In other product features we have we also work hard to make sure we do not charge you for any bad traffic, i.e. our HTTP rate limiting product has the pricing structure designed so that you aren't paying for the traffic stopped by it.
Pricing really isn't the issue here, but where Linode and other hosts adding DDoS protection helps is in the scenarios where your origin / host IP or provider is known. In those scenarios attackers may directly attack the host.
Just as elsewhere in security, you are as strong as your weakest link, and I am really pleased to see hosting companies expand their DDoS protection.
The various disclaimers: I am the engineering manager for DDoS protection at Cloudflare, and I run a little farm of machines at Linode :) I'm happy on both fronts with this announcement from Linode.
Currently, since I use caching, I never see what consumed the bandwidth, so I don't know what file people are downloading so much.
(P.S. Hey David, long time! I hope everything is going well)
Mind if I put them in touch with you?
And hey again, long time no speak... if you're in London let me know. Otherwise one day I'll make it to wherever you are in the world now.
I will let you know next time I'm in London, it's been a while. I'm still in Thessaloniki, let me know if you're ever around!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3654110 Compromised Linode, thousands of BitCoins stolen (2012)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3655137 Linode Manager Security Incident (2012)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756 Linode hacked, CCs and passwords leaked (2013)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7086921 An old system and a SWAT team (2014)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10825425 Linode DDoS continues – Atlanta down for 16+ hours (2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10998661 The Twelve Days of Crisis – A Retrospective on Linode’s Holiday DDoS Attacks (2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 Security Notification and Linode Manager Password Reset (2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806686 Linode is suffering on-going DDoS attacks (2016)
> why would I want to use Linode over GCP or AWS?
If you include dedi providers like OVH into this comparison, you probably just wouldn’t.
Stuff like Terraform works just fine with OVH dedicated servers, so that can’t be the problem either.
They’re not really cheaper, their hardware isn’t better, and they’ve shown a willingness to toss security out the window. Doesn’t strike me as deserving of “a chance”.