What’s a good alternative for Linode these days? I just want a vps where I can install Debian, be root, and have a web and email server. A 4gb Linode has been enough for my needs for years.
DigitalOcean offers solid uptime, a more professional operation, and typically better performance than Linode in benchmarks (https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/screener). It has confusing marketing, but a good account dashboard and good docco/service. They're more in line with Linode, and will probably be the big winners if Linode/Akamai continue losing steam.
I wouldn't go with OVH, and I would use caution with cheaper providers, unless you're comfortable with the risk of hiring people who would willingly build wooden data centres with no fire safely. There is such a thing as "too cheap". (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-fire-rep...)
I recall seeing headlines here about the fires, but I didn't know their construction was this bad.
DigitalOcean seems about on-par; OVH and Hetzner are cheaper but seem less reliable, etc. Much depends on your exact needs of course.
Who will know what Akamai will do in the future, but you can say "who knows what $anything will do in the future?" too. It's been a year and nothing has radically changed as near as I can tell. A naming rebrand is rather superficial.
If you had a 4GB/2-CPU Linode for $30, you could get an 8GB/2-CPU from Hetzner for €21.85 (~$23.45). If you were using Linode's shared-CPU nodes, that $20 4GB VPS would be €7.55 on Hetzner (~$8.10) or even €5.35 in their European data centers (~$5.74, their European data centers offer both Intel or AMD processors so you can get a 4GB/2-CPU intel box there, but in the US they're only offering their AMD servers which include 3-CPU so it's a tad more expensive due to fewer options).
The downsides to Lightsail are highlighted in their article: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/light...
The one single issue I had 10 years ago was fixed within minutes of opening ticket too. So you're basically trying to advertise to a bunch of customers happy with service that's also cheaper than your service and offers more options (hosted databases, object store, DNS hosting)
Namecheap lost all my 'loyalty' when I started tracing where all the SMS phish sites I was getting were hosted.
Finding out this was Namecheap didn't sour me. Finding out they don't take the sites down quickly enough* to be worth reporting put the wheels in motion to move all my domains off them.
Unfortunately I can no longer find what ticked me off in the first place as search engines are full of blogs writing about their recent email breach.
* The NSC seems to agree with me rather than my expectations being too high (PDF, page 8) https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/Active-Cyber-Defence-ACD-The-F...
> Looking specifically at the number of campaigns hosted by NameCheap against its monthly median attack availability, we see that by mid-year the median takedown times were consistently in excess of 60 hours. This undoubtedly made NameCheap an attractive proposition to host phishing and may explain the rise in monthly hosted campaigns that followed for UK government-themed phishing.
I depreciated like $15/month of Vultr VPSes last weekend by switching to their offerings. It's not the fastest but damn, it makes me wish it wasn't an apology for their crimes against FOSSmanity.
If anybody cares to know, the single biggest annoyance I have with them is this: you can't launch a VPS that comes up with an ssh key pre-configured for passwordless ssh access, at least not the first time around. Unless they've changed it recently anyway, the option to specify an ssh key only appears in the menu for re-installing an existing VPS. For a brand new one, your options are:
1. Turn around and immediately re-install it, so they add the key for you
2. Receive the password for the newly created instance in an email, and use it to login, upload the key, and configure passwordless ssh.
I wound up writing a script to do the latter, so all I do is wait for the email to come, paste the password and IP into my script, and fire it off and it copies the key, and makes a few other small tweaks, then does sudo dnf -y upgrade, and then a sudo reboot.
Once all that finishes I use Ansible to do everything else. By and large it all just works and is fine, but not being able to have the VPS come up with the ssh key already configured initially still bugs me a bit.