Ask HN: Why is Linode way more expensive:D? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Linode way more expensive:D?

11 pointsahmedbaracat8 comments

I am comparing cloud providers (other than big tech ones AWS, Google, etc.) and I don't understand why is Linode is way expensive than the EU cloud providers.

I am benchmarking the closest dedicated server option to this • 2 CPU cores • 4GB RAM • 96 SSD • 4 TB transfer

Linode: $36, 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, 4 TB transfer limit, 40/4 Gbps

Hetzner: 45 euro, 6 cores, 64 GB RAM, 1 TB ssd, 20TB, 1GBit

OVHCloud: £50, 6 cores, 32 RAM, 1TB SSD, unmetered, 1GBit

Scalaway: 40 euro, 4 cores, 32 GB RAM, 750GB SSD, unlimited, 300Mbps

Seems that EU cloud providers provide much better value for money, but I don't see why is it the case.

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I only have partial information here - and that is that I’ve heard connectivity is generally much cheaper in the EU. And I can see why too: denser population, smaller distances between population centres, close to other continents.

But I’d be interested in any other reasons people can give.

I was going to add on here that I thought electricity prices might be cheaper as well - I swear I saw recently some EU country was basically fully powered by renewable energy for some period of time, so electricity costs basically went negative - but a quick search shows I'm completely wrong[0]...

[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=18851 - first .gov resource with relevant data directly on the page, that I found in ~30 seconds of searching. It is from 2014 though, so no guarantee how valid it still is...

Europe has by far the highest cost of electricity worldwide:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...

Additional thought: How competitive are the two markets? Does the USA have fewer second-tier cloud providers, and the market is just dominated by AWS/Google/Microsoft?

EU customers can naturally use those services, but there is a demand for local/EU-sovereign providers. Perhaps this demand provides enough fuel to maintain a robust & competitive ecosystem of smaller cloud providers?

I suspect Linode's cost of operation is simply higher.

I did some CPU and disk benchmarking of VPS'es 10+ years ago and found that vCPU effective performance varies a lot.

But that does not account for the difference in cost for dedicated machines, like you investigate.

Another guess - just comparing Linode and OVHCloud quickly, my guess is that Linode focuses more on multi-VPS systems, while OVHCloud has a larger fleet of dedicated servers. If you have limited rack space and an existing fleet of servers, my guess it would be easier to provide multi-VPS systems than dedicated; that's assuming and implying a _lot_ of history on how Linode has developed (and apparently been bought by Akamai back in 2022...), but could be one "practical" explanation for the different pricing for dedicated servers - VPS pricing between Linode and OVHCloud is much closer.

Because when traffic spikes on your VPS, they don't black hole all the traffic like some other services lol

Why is this piece of string longer?

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