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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I like Linode and use them. But 25% is almost an insult. Storage is absurdly expensive at Linode: literally 10x what Amazon charges for EBS stores (a little less, as Linode storage is local and there are no usage charges).

I really wish they were more competitive. Right now I have a tiny instance running my personal email, but everything else I do looks more attractive on EC2 or Rackspace.

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Storage is expensive at Linode ($1/gb/month as compared to $0.10/gb/month on AWS EBS), but you'll note that data transfer prices are comparable. Linode may be pricing storage to discourage you from using Linode as a storage service. If I were running a VPS-only shop with no real storage "product" and no desire to get outside the niche-in-which-I'm-crushing-it, I might do the same.

I emailed them about that once, they said that those prices are intentionally so expensive to encourage you to move to higher VM levels where there's less contention on the server.

Upgrading your VM entirely is actually cheaper per GB than just getting more space.

It costs more but it's important to remember that compared to ebs the performance are way better(1).

(1) check every benchmark performed on both platforms

Linode storage comes bundled with a virtual machine! The more you pay, the more RAM, network transfer quota, and better CPU contention you get - without any extra costs. It's hardly an apples to apples comparison.

No, that's not correct. EC2/EBS and Linode are actually almost the same pricing model: you get a base configuration with some amount of cpu/memory/storage, and can add extra storage on a per-GB basis. Amazon just happens to bill by the hour instead of the month for this stuff.

EC2 and Linode instances are actually pretty comparable in capability and price. But storage is way out of whack: again we're not talking about Linode being a little more: it's a full order of magnitude more. That's just not acceptable to me.

I used to have my camera archives on Linode until they outgrew the 20G instance. At this point they're going onto EBS (or S3, if I'm willing to write some code) as soon as I get the opportunity to do it. I don't see any value beyond inertia to staying with Linode.

Isn't Rackspace Cloud more expensive? Or are you just talking about storage?

I think for many people, RAM and CPU become an issue long before disk space.

Unlike Linode, Rackspace Cloud decouples the server pricing from the bandwidth pricing. A base server on Rackspace is cheap and it remains so if you use very little bandwidth. If you calculate the Rackspace cost using the maximum bandwidth bundled with a comparable Linode VPS then Rackspace is indeed more expensive.

Uh, I think one of us is confused.

A base server on Rackspace Cloud is already more expensive than a comparable Linode VPS, even before you factor in bandwidth charges.

1GB Rackspace Cloud is $43.80/mo plus bandwidth. 1GB Linode is $40/mo and it comes with 400GB transfer.

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/server... http://www.linode.com/index.cfm

Yes, it appears I was using Slicehost prices rather than Linode prices because I'm in the process of migrating from Slicehost to Linode. I did the Slicehost to Cloud Server comparison because Slicehost is forcing migration to Rackspace in the next few months. A 1GB Slice is $70 vs. the $43 for a 1GB Cloud Server. Sorry for the confusion.

Don't forget the flat $100/mo account fee for any month you have servers active too. Based on my reading of this fee, having a single server means you're paying several multiples of what an equivalent account with Linode would be.

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/server... " In addition to the hourly service fee of 12¢/hour per server, a $100 flat, monthly account fee will be assessed when at least one server on the account is active. The account fee is not reflected in the above pricing as it is not a per server charge but an overall account fee no matter how many servers are active on the account."

I'm pretty sure that fee is only for managed servers (meaning you are paying $100 for full support) and isn't charged just for your instance usage.

iirc they have raid10 arrays of 10k disks in all of their machines. Which explains some of their added costs. This review is a little old, but it shows some of the differences. http://danielmiessler.com/blog/disk-performance-slicehost-vs...

I think the overall value is very high in terms of CPU and bandwidth. However, I agree that the storage is a sticking point for many of my projects.

My solution has been to run my application on Linode, but I push uploaded files into an s3 bucket shortly after upload and redirect download URLs to the bucket url. Since one of my sites is a church with 50 GB of sermons on mp3, this saves a lot of money over getting storage on Linode.

I believe they used to call this "looking a gift horse in the mouth". Almost an insult eh? I hope you never encounter any real insults, you'd likely be traumatized.

How dare Linode insult you by giving you free service improvements for no reason. Damn them.

'Free service improvements' is pretty much what one ought to expect in a competitive market where one of the costs (disk space) halves every year or so.

You would think so but linode is pretty much still the exception with quality vps hosting.

The first year I used linode 2007 there was an insane amount of upgrades, maybe someday soon they will pass more of this on to us but I'm glad they are still doing it.

http://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/

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