Not to me; if you have a problem which NodeBalancer can solve, then it's likely that you already have multiple Linodes and an additional $19.95 will be a relative drop in the bucket, especially given what you get from it.

Let's compare with Rackspace cloud load balancer for one month (30 days * 24 hours) = 720 hours. (From their pricing page: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/loadba...). Linode is allowing 5000 simultaneous connections. Rackspace charges for balanced bandwidth. Let's pick something modest 1 TB up, 5 TB down. Rackspace cost: $1530.80/mo.

So, I'd say linode's price seems quite reasonable. :)

Twenty bucks a month is nothing. It's pretty hard to find any hardware load balancers for less than $1500 each. At my last job I wrote a hardware proposal that called for redundant $80K load balancers. Though I'm sure that the NodeBalancer can't match the feature set yet of the high end machines I sure like this trend.

You are also paying for 1) their software work involved and 2) running on multiple hosts, which is a must for any non-trivial environment

If your stack requires a load balancer, you would have to pay $19.95 for a dedicated 512 node that you would need to then configure and manage your own load balancer. This new service is also managed, distributed, and has an API. $19.95/month seems like a steal to me.

$20/mo is a trivial amount of money to spend to not have to manage it yourself.

Compare $20 to the cost of

1. working out how to do it yourself

2. ironing out any kinks in your homegrown solution

3. worrying about it 2am.

Totally worthwhile.

(edit: formatting)

No.