Linode Nextgen: The Network
blog.linode.com
blog.linode.com
Its nice that they are now increasing the bandwidth cap, but it was on the low side to begin with. My takeaway from this is that "linode finally joins everyone else in network speed and bandwidth."
Don't get me wrong, I have used linode in the past and enjoyed them very much and never had any problems, and support was top notch. but their offering is not very impressive at all.
Edit: wow, thats a lot of hostility... didn't realize linode reached fandom status. I guess I should keep my opinions to myself then?
For hobby boxes, yeah, sure, use whatever is the most cost-efficient.
And based on their security incidents Linode is absolutely in the hobby box category as well. At least Amazon is PCI DSS compliant.
Regarding their support, I've submitted tickets at sometimes very odd hours and gotten responses back within minutes.
What I really find amusing though is that you follow up your complaint of "completely absent during outage" with a reference to Amazon.
Was that plural a typo or have there been more since the admin console phish that I missed?
Do you want their engineers bringing up the datacenter or answering up a bunch of e-mails with "we're working on bringing up the datacenter"?
Communication and coordination are important parts of incident response. Key engineers shouldn't be doing either. If an org doesn't have dedicated people to communicate with their customers and triage support during an outage -- especially one where a facility loses power -- they're doing something wrong.
When I was in a support role, I stayed up all night with the engineers during planned maintenance to answer questions, respond to tweets, &c. And if things went pear shaped, I'd already be up to speed.
Enterprise Hardware at 20 Dollars does not come cheap, and with their support unlike AWS or anyone else.. they are every bit worth-full
Things akin to "We're sorry your instance has gone away for no apparent reason. Thank you for writing."
This does not ever happen on Linode.
"Your instance may have been rooted. But we won't tell you what happened, whether it is fixed or whether it will happen again."
Direct contacts, very fast responses, phone support that picks up almost instantly and works with you for as long as it takes to resolve a problem.
I've been very pleased, and most of the time the issues have been our fault, yet they've always helped us resolve the issue.
I've used Linode too, no complaints at all, but you get a lot more power with the AWS tools, so there's really no choice for us.
However, their customer support has always been, at least in my experience, indifferent at best. It's often better to have a sherpa like EngineYard to help you through trouble spots.
1. There is no easy way to contact support. Seriously, this is a PaaS. What if I had down time or something urgent?
2. In a support forum, many people complained about my same issue (a year ago). The support stuff suggested that they try a few hours later (not sure if he was kidding)
And then you go and try those services, and realize how poor performance and stability is. Having been through several providers, I have personally found nothing that compares.
And during my time as a customer Linode was the worst out of all the VPS I had ever tried up until that point. Constant outages at Fremont and heard about the same at London DC as well.
Though I had one issue where I couldn't install 64bit image to the server. I sent an support ticket about it and in less than ten minutes the whole thing was sorted out.
I see that you're a DO fan, but if you've actually used them and aren't just promoting them out of undisclosed self-interest then I'll bet you even know which of those two descriptions fits them. Being buzzword-compliant doesn't make them a good provider.
Here's a benchmark on my VPS http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2012/11/20/UMLXH3qNTNOyfbGF
And here's a bunch of SSD VPS plans sorted by IOPS http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=IOPS+Seek+Benchmark&O...
I did give RamNode a try today after seeing them mentioned here, and they do indeed seem to do a good job of delivering on the SSD promise. I'll probably stick with Linode in NJ instead of RamNode in Atlanta (because the way I use my machine means that network latency to places near my home matters a lot more than disk performance) but it's nice to know that at least one vendor finally seems to be getting it right.
I am choosing between RAMnode and Digital Ocean. Both look pretty much affordable and recommended.
Any tips?
There are more things in heaven and earth, pavs, than are dreamt of in your vps comparison tables.
People choose slightly more expensive hosting because it is often less oversold, not maxed out (you're sharing resources with everyone else on your server after all), they have libraries, example stacks, backups and extra services, and the support is better. If you pay $5 a month, you'll get $5 a month of support (or the provider will go out of business). How much of your time would $5 a month pay for?
I've used both slicehost and Linode, and a few other hosting companies who promised the moon and failed to deliver. Currently a happy Linode customer and have more important things to worry about than saving insignificant sums of money per month on what is a critical service for a web company.
I have a VPS I found on lowend box. $5/month for a 512MB OpenVZ. It's a pretty good deal, and it does what I need it to do; I have full control over it, I can give other people access to it, I can run any kind of website on it as long as I don't care too much about performance or uptime.
But there's no way I would run any service that was bringing in money on it. It basically has downtime every single month. Usually only for a few minutes at a time, and they tend to scrape by just barely exceeding 99.90%, but still. There also was one time when they emailed me saying there had been a power loss or some other reason that the rack my server was on went down, and I actually ended up having to go into the console to start my server back up and get everything working.
I've also found their support ... not particularly supportive.
Sure, Linode is 4x as expensive for the "same thing" (though to get Xen from my provider is only about 3x cheaper than Linode), but the amount of total money is negligible. $15/month. Maybe if I needed more resources it would be a difference of $100/month, but if I need a 4GB VPS for a service that's meant to make me money, that should still hopefully be trivial. For a service provider with much better uptime and support, that's a no-brainer.
Wow. That sentence makes 99.9% uptime sound really shitty.
Except maybe if those outages hit them at the worst possible moments of the month (just before a major announcement or something).
Now, managers would froth at the mouth hearing 45 mins/month is acceptable. But those managers are idiots.
I haven't seen any major site that didn't have those (and worse) outages.
5-6 hours a year? Heck tons of sites had those. AWS had them (and thus Heroku had them), GAE had them, Twitter had them, Tumblr (well they had one-two orders of magnitude more), etc.
45 mins a month represent lots of lost revenue to you? Really? If you're not Google or something, then what exactly do you do?
Shouldn't that be like 0.1% of your revenue? And that IF you sell online and IF we assume customers aren't gonna come back. Heck, you lose more because of random fluctuations in buyer preferences than that.
Might as well stop counting sysadmin screwups and hardware failures, at that point. 100% uptime! except when we're down.
The current balance of power is tipped, right now, so hard in favor of the attackers that if anyone wants to take /you/ out, well, it's pretty difficult (read: expensive) to stop them, and if you are some $20/month customer, your upstream is probably going to just finish the job and cut you off... but if the guy next to you gets attacked and you are collateral damage? You should count that against your service provider. There are usually things we can do (as service providers) to limit collateral damage, even in the cases where we are unable to protect the target. If nothing else, providers who tend to tolerate sites that get attacked often, well, they suffer collateral damage from attacks, generally speaking, more often than sites that are less tolerant. It's sad, really 'cause sometimes the targets are not doing anything really wrong, but you've gotta protect your network.
There is some advantage of scale here, too... The DoS that is hardest to fight is the pipe-filling attack. If the attacker can fill your upstream port(s), then there isn't really much you can do, besides blocking the target at your upstream, (I mean, assuming the source is random, as it often is.) The larger your upstreams are, the more you can absorb before you have a choice between cutting off the target customer and having all your customers cut off.
Also, Linode's SLA may be 99.9%, but I've experienced with two businesses, using Linode over the course of four years, about 45 minutes total of downtime (on any given server, not our entire infrastructure). I'd much sooner take years of past experience showing incredibly good uptime over a piece of paper meant to limit liability.
I believe Linode is an excellent choice for small-medium sized online companies.
This is especially true given that more often than not, within the first 5 times you use it, you'll experience some bug in your HA setup that leads to some complicated, slow-to-diagnose-and-fix failure.
Things I've experienced:
- being rebooted without notice
- poor performance (IO and / or CPU)
- provider being DDOSed
- provider moving to a new DC and telling people not to give out IPs (???) due to being DDOSed
- hosts running old virtualisation software which doesn't support recent versions of Linux, so I'm can't use an OS newer than Ubuntu 10.04
- provider being banned by PayPal then suspending my account being I couldn't pay then
- provider going out of business
I liken it to poor quality manufactured goods. Take the Android tablets you can get for less than $100. If you can afford it, you would never buy one just to save money, because it is much less hassle to spent another $100 and get something that works well.
It just isn't worth it, especially not for a business. I would love to see someone who can make a proper fault tolerant system that works on these type of machines though :)
I think you do make a good point if you are saying that for some projects the cheapest possible hosting makes sense.
Can you explain this to me? I'm not sure I understand. If it's domain management you're after, MarkMonitor's the usual choice IIRC.
You're aware that there's a difference between "go with the cheapest" and "go with the most expensive," right?
Many of the hosts are run by kids trying to strike it rich with barely a few months worth of experience.
Here's some of the things to watch out for.
- IOwait so high that it takes several seconds for ls to run.
- Complete data loss
- Random packet loss because of all the people sharing a link or getting ddosed.
- Hosts going bankrupt when they realize that no one is going to buy them out just because they have a bunch of customers obtained with their loss leading deals.
If you have a good experience with them you probably:
- Didn't stay on the node long enough for it to get overloaded
- Are extremely lucky
- Barely use the VPS
Linode is overpriced, but the deals on lowendbox aren't a great alternative.
ThrustVPS: bought it, selected Debian 6. VPS stopped booting. Then they tell me that it doesn't work so I get them to install Ubuntu instead. 1 week later it goes down due to "network issues". (probably for several hours, can't be bothered to login to look at the ticket again).
BuyVM: bought it to see how it was, VPS went down in the first couple of days. Never bothered to try it again. They are always out of stock. http://buyvmstatus.com/info/recent
They are entirely ping based so if someone gets a flood, ICMP will go to the garbage while a nullroute kicks in a second or two later.
We have an internal nodeping that monitors other services on the nodes that we're likely going to make public since more than a few people seem to get that idea about buyvmstatus.
We actually provided the buyvmstatus developer a read-only HTTP page he was able to pull off each node to get the current uptime of the node but he's yet to actually work it into the system.
Stock wise check back never week and we'll be reloaded on every plan in our Vegas location :)
Thanks for the interest and kind words,
Francisco
These kinds of comments have no place here, head back to Reddit.
You've been given a boat load of evidence and personal experiences that reinforce lowendbox is garbage, and yet you try to rationalize it away as 'fandom status'.
I also have a few sites on RamNode and BuyVM which were voted as the better low end providers. They're anything but low end. I am getting better performance SSDs, better CPUs), more resources for 1/2 the cost of a comparable Linode VPS. No problems yet, going on three months. Their control panels leave a lot to be desired compared to Linode.
This is true now (Linode is a premium vps provider) but it was not always true. Linode started out cheap, like almost everyone in our industry does. Linode was one of the first in the market; they've been selling VPSs longer even than I have.
>Its nice that they are now increasing the bandwidth cap, but it was on the low side to begin with. My takeaway from this is that "linode finally joins everyone else in network speed and bandwidth."
Eh, the way the industry works is that price pressure is applied by new entrants. Linode used to be that 'incredibly cheap provider' - but generally speaking? as you develop a reputation, you increase your resource allocations more slowly than moore's law would allow, and Linode has a pretty good reputation, so they get to charge substantially more than new entrants to the market.
So yeah, if the new entrants aren't a way better deal in terms of resources? something is terribly wrong (and that new entrant probably won't gain the traction they need to survive long enough to be able to let their prices rise to a higher margin level)
I mean, personally, I would think I have been letting my own prices rise (comparatively, I mean, by not increasing resource allocation) more than my reputation would allow me to... but I'm still gaining customers (though not at an awesome rate) - Linode announcing a network upgrade is putting /incredible/ pressure on me to upgrade my network. I can be okay with a new entrant flying below me, but Linode has a better reputation than I do; I have to provide more resources per dollar than they do.
Now, the big counterexample here is slicehost. Slicehost started out fairly expensive (compared to the industry standard at the time) and they went from zero to twenty thousand customers in like two years. It was incredible. I don't know exactly what they did, but they had a reputation for providing managed hosting level service for (premium) unmanaged hosting prices.
Now, how much of that reputation was marketing, and how much of that reputation was that their support really was that good, I don't know, but I do know that was their reputation.
They want three grand for a 1g peering link. And they aren't on any of the silicon valley peering exchanges (meaning I'd need to pay for a connection direct to them, on top of the three grand.) that is /per month/ He.net charges around $750-1000 per month for a gigabit of transit to the whole internet.
It's pretty irritating. I mean, I'd pay a couple hundred bucks a month for reliable connectivity to comcast only, even though, traditionally, peering is free, and it would improve both my network and theirs. I mean, it was their customer who complained to my customer who complained to me.
Also, nobody is going to give a shit about your three customers way out in the middle of "nobody cares" that can't reach your stuff 'cause cogent and at&t refuse to upgrade a peering link that is also in the middle of "nobody cares" - If I'm controlling it, I at least have a chance of doing something about it.
Also, the cost is 3x to 10x what you get direct from the super-low end big guys. Everyone fucks it up, and with two up-streams? It's my fault when it fucks up (and I can do something about it.) I guess having that preference is kinda stupid, but it is what it is; I am the network Engineer I've got... not the network Engineer I wish I had.
(that, and in my experience? competency of tech support does not scale with price paid. Neither does quality of routes.)
The opposite direction looks more problematic. Some ISPs will let you tag your routes with BGP communities that say ``when advertising to AT&T, prepend some extra copies of some ASN so that AT&T will be unlikely to send me traffic via this path.'' http://www.onesc.net/communities/as174/ does not list any communities which would affect how Cogent advertises routes to AT&T without affecting how Cogent advertises to all of their other peers. On the other hand, while 174:3001 is an extremely coarse tool, your traffic ratios may be sufficiently outbound only that sending most of your inbound traffic via Hurricane Electric might turn out OK, even with Hurricane Electric being only 1G and Cogent 10G (although this change might make your network less robust in the face of a DDOS attack, and you might want to drop 174:3001 when dealing with such an attack).
If the overloaded links are only overloaded in one direction, then you may only need to do one of these things, not both.
Hm. I need to learn more about bgp, specifically tags and communities, can you recommend me a book?
But basically, back in the days of 16 bit ASNs, communities were just 32 bit values that were attached to routes being advertised by BGP, usually expressed as the two 16 bit halves separated by a colon, generally with the ASN that defines the meaning of the community being on the left of the colon, and that ASN defining arbitrary values on the right side of the colon for flags that they want to recognize.
Then, there are route maps or whatever the router vendor wants to call them that use the data from the communities.
Typically when the router is deciding what route to use, it looks for the route with the highest localpref, and if there's a tie, then it looks at how many ASNs are listed in the path, and if there's still a tie, then the router may use MED. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_tech_note... explains how this works in the Cisco BGP implementation with all of the additional factors that are considered; Linux and Juniper BGP implementations may consider a slightly different set of factors.
IIRC, Level 3 generally sets localpref to 86 on routes heard on non-customer peer sessions, and 100 on routes heard on customer BGP sessions, but if customers want localpref to be 90 or 80 or 70 instead, they can send community 3356:90 or 3356:80 or 3356:70. If you had two links to Level 3 and wanted to use one as backup only, you could send community 3356:90 on your routes on your backup link, and potentially no communities on your primary link. If you had a really slow link to Level 3 that was backup only and some other ASN was your primary, then you'd want to send Level 3 3356:80 or 3356:70. I doubt you have any desire to set your upstream's localpref values in your configuration, but this may shed some light on why they offer it to their other customers. Also, if you ever have customers speaking BGP who want to use you as backup only, you need to offer some way for routes they advertise to you to have localpref less than what you set on routes you learn from your upstreams; typically this seems to be done by letting your customers send you a community so the customer controls this, but you could just have a special route-map for customers who are backup only that would just set all of their routes to low localpref regardless of the BGP communities, and just apply the right route-map to those BGP sessions.
http://www.onesc.net/communities/as3356/ mentions that Level 3 supports 65004:[ASN] for four prepends when advertising to ASN. If you were a Level 3 customer, and traffic coming to you via one of their peering links was overloaded, sending a community of that form would be a good way to discourage traffic from taking that link by making the path have a large number of ASNs and thus look undesirable. I say this mostly to illustrate the sort of thing that it looks like you might find useful for Cogent to support, though it appears that Cogent doesn't support that.
It's likely that Hurricane Electric and Cogent will recognize some communities that you could send them that will influence their routing, but as far as I know, their peers won't necessarily end up accepting any communities from you, so the key is to either find documentation on the web of what communties Hurricane Electric and Cogent recognize, or ask them for it.
You can also sometimes get geographic data about which major city is closest to a network block by recieving community data from an upstrem, but it's not obvious to me why you'd want that. It may sometimes be used when hot potato routing is not desired, or when a CDN is trying to identify which geographically close server to use.
bgp localpref
and at least skim some of the articles that come up there and some of the things linked to from those articles.
You may want to define communities to let your customers selectively decide to suppress announcements to each of your upstreams, and you may want to pass through the communties recognized by your upstreams in their official documentation if your customers send those communities to you, if you want to let your customers control their advertisements in that fashion. (The only reason I can think of you wouldn't want to let your customers do this is if it would let them move traffic from a link that's cheap for you to a link that's expensive for you.)
Typically, national backbones use hot potato routing when peering in lots of different cities. If you, in Northern California, on Hurricane Electric, have a video chat with someone in New York City, let's say on Verizon, and it turns out to really be peer to peer, what typically happens is that the computer in New York City will send the packets through Verizon in New York City, to Hurricane Electric in New York City, and then Hurrican Electric carries the packets to you in California. In the reverse direction, Verizon gets to carry the packets across the country.
A key point here is that the two providers are equally responsible for the hassle of carrying packets across the country. This is why providers sometimes care about balanced traffic ratios.
Exodus was mostly pushing traffic out, not recieving very much traffic, and so with hot potato routing, they were doing a lot less than what many would argue was their fair share in covering costs of hauling packets across the country, which seems to have been the basis for that dispute.
When traffic ratios are balanced, hot potato routing has the advantage that one network doesn't need to know the details of where another network's individual IP blocks are geographically, thus reducing the amount of information big networks have to exchange and keep track of.
If Comcast were to peer with you near your location, they'd have to eat the costs of hauling the traffic across the country.
http://he.net/peering.html is Hurricane Electric's peering policy, and basically, anyone who's comfortable with settlement free peering is likely already going to have a good connection to Hurricane Electric, and my impression has been that Hurricane Electric's backbone is pretty sufficient for whatever long haul traffic it has to carry.
(And for all that Hurricane Electric claims ``Hurricane Electric expects you to peer at all exchange fabrics we have in common if we peer with you via public exchanges or all facilities we have in common if we peer via private interconnect with you. In other words, if you are peering in the US, Asia and Europe at the same locations as Hurricane you must peer with Hurricane at all those locations. This is prevent problems for your and our US and European customers so that customer traffic does not cross the Pacific or Atlantic twice to return back to the same continent.'', if a lot of their customers are data centers full of web servers, it's possible that hot potato routing might get them out of a certain amount of ``their fair share'' of long haul transit.)
Have you concluded that both Hurricane Electric and Cogent have trouble reaching those Comcast customers, and have you discussed the issue with Hurricane Electric and Cogent? It seems like they'd have better economies of scale in upgrading connectivity to Comcast than you would have going directly.
Or is the problem in the direction of Comcast to you, which is harder for you to control?
AFA HE.net pricing, the reality is HE.net does not sell "their" network... they sell other ISPs network via their peering. Their costs are far lower as they don't carry the traffic more than 1-2 router hops.
HE.net does this so much that their peers are feeling that the relationship is no longer "fair" and are not interested in upgrading capacity to enable this business relationship. If HE.net had to pay as much as their peers for the network costs, the prices would be similar.
You get what you pay for....
My complaint here is that comcast charges as much for peering as for transport (with full routes) - I mean, if that's the case, why advertise paid peering services? Every time I've bought full routes I've had the option of asking the provider to only send me customer routes, or to filter on my end for customer routes. Hell, most people will give me a feed with customer routes, and another with full routes, so I could use them as a de-prioritized transport provider of last resort as well as gaining all the benefits of being a peer if I bought transport from them, so yeah, advertising paid peering at transport prices is just silly.
My second complaint is that they aren't on any peering exchanges. Peering exchanges are important because individual interconnects in a datacenter are expensive; the data center charges you a hefty monthly fee for every connection you have to other people at the same datacenter (like half what you'd pay for a shitty but local room in a shared house) /and/ then if you use direct interconnects both parties need to maintain a switch port.
With a peering exchange? you maintain one switchport for all your traffic that goes over the exchange. There are even route servers you can subscribe to if you want to automatically peer with everyone else on the route server at that exchange, making peering a nearly zero work, zero cost thing.
(Of course, if you are sending a /lot/ of traffic, then a individual link probably makes more sense, sure, but I'm not sending a lot of traffic.)
>If HE.net had to pay as much as their peers for the network costs, the prices would be similar.
But they are similar. after negotiation, he.net is more expensive than Cogent. to the tune that commits on he cost the same as overages on Cogent.
HE.net, for me, is actually pretty competitive with Cogent, who I think is their closest competitor, quality-wise. After negotiation, Cogent was slightly cheaper. (The interesting thing about he.net was that they started with a number that was fairly reasonable and stuck with it. It was clear that I didn't have to spend three months dicking around to get the real price, which I appreciate.) Cogent started off asking about as much as I'd expect to pay for L3 after negotiating well, but came down hard.
>You get what you pay for....
If you believe that... well, I've got some Premium VPS here for you. just $100/month per gigabyte ram. They are "premium" - way better than the regular stuff. I'll even wear a suit while I provision you.
People are always willing to charge you more for a shitty product. Always. Professionals spend huge amounts of effort getting you to pay more for the shitty product. (More for the good product, too.)
Hell, in the bandwidth world? It's completely normal to end up paying 1/5th the asking price after negotiation. Yeah, 20% of what the salesperson initially quoted is about what I normally end up paying for transit.
Do you think service is different for people who pay the asking price vs. people who negotiate down to the real price?
I mean, sure, buying transport from L3 is going to get you better connectivity than buying you transport from Cogent, and L3 is generally going to cost you more than Cogent. How much more? with my negotiation skills, about 10x more, but I only got L3 down half from their asking price, and I got Cogent down to 1/5th their asking price; I spent considerably more time on Cogent because I thought that was, well, more realistic, and at the time, Linode, the people I see as my competitors to beat, were mostly he.net, which, quality-wise, is on par with Cogent (I think he.net may be a bit better, and there is some argument if cogent or he.net is slightly better, but I think most people would agree that they are both near the bottom of the pile.)
So yeah. uh, I guess there is some relationship between "real price" and quality... but it is not nearly as close a relationship as people say.
Cogent has a fairly substantial network directly into random office buildings (though if you have an office in a random office building, it's almost certainly not one of the ones they've lit), and it's not clear to me that they do as good a job at peering with other networks as Hurricane Electric does.
See: http://bgp.he.net/search?search[search]=Linode&commit=Se...
With Linode I can at least sleep in peace, even if it costs a bit more
Sometimes, yes. In this particular case you were comparing apples to oranges.
Take for example your opening line: "I never quite understood the love for premium vps like linode".
The statement is absurd -- even if one includes the part about low cost VPS being faster.
The idea behind "premium VPS" (or premium whatever) has to do with support, reliability, them being around a while, etc.
Some cheaper VPS offering "more bandwidth" or "faster cpus" is not the same thing at all.
Now, if you had said "there are cheaper VPS just as reliable and with good support as Linode, and on top of it, faster also, so why _pay_ a premium", that would make sense. If you could also support it.
But a statement like: "I don't understand premium X" in general?
Linode is in a position to seriously consider SDN and they shoot themselves in the foot with one of the most stagnant companies as it applies to new and innovative product for pushing packets. I'd have been far more impressed with Juniper in the hot seat here. At least they're more cost competitive. You can get a full non-blocking 10Gb L3 switch (480Gb backplane) for less than $20k fully loaded up with 10Gb SRs out of their EX line if you're looking to play it safe in 'standard' networking.
The good part about software is there's far less vendor bias. This just smells of a Cisco blowhard touting the wonders of a fully vendor locked network. And software people seem to be less informed of the reality that is how the current norm of the networking realm works.
Good luck to them. I've put in plenty of ASR and Nexus gear in the past few years. They'll need it.
I have a hard time trusting them because they specifically gave very little information. I would have expected a followup with a better response, like Google or Facebook do when they get compromised: "the attacker used exploit X on this developer's workstation, therefore we are doing Y to prevent this from happening again".
They can work on increasing performance all they want, but if I do not have basic trust in the security of their infrastructure, this does not matter. I expect top-notch security especially from a "premium" VPS provider!
Nextgen sounds cool. Extra bandwidth is great. I also hope they add more RAM and provide some kind of a storage pool to store images/snapshots/virtual-disks between different linodes (similar to cloudfiles or EBS).
My linode IP ended up on an email block list because of someone else on the subnet. I was on vacation so I wanted a quick solution and I asked for an extra IP for a week. They wouldn't do for any amount of money. I had to set up an extra server and redirect connections instead.
However, it's so easy to fire-up another linode, shut down the host, move the disk image to the new linode, assign it and turn it on. You get a new IP, and can get rid of the old one. And all this via their web interface and with no need for support...
Not bashing linode, because I think they do a fine job - I have two servers with a year and a half of uptime. But I don't think the support is a valid reason for them charging more than their competitors.
trunking an additional vlan into their virtual pool just for you would have constituted a major production change in probably 2 or 3 core switch layers.
the operational risk and expenditure for this kind of change easily goes into the thousands of dollars, possibly tens of thousands if they screw something up.
what exactly is "any amount of money" to you? because to them and other service providers, it means tens of thousands of dollars, not another 50 bucks.
It was a whole subnet that was blacklisted. That said, they offered me a new IP from a couple different subnets as replacement, so I don't think it was too hard for them to do it. They would let me have an extra IP, but wouldn't let me run the two IPs concurrently for more than 24 hours.
This was especially frustrating since the subnet was blacklisted due to linode using generic PTR records by default. I needed a solution that didn't eat into my vacation time, so I ended up setting up a second server in the same datacenter and making it forward connections. That effectively got me a new IP for $20.
Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about it. I think they handled it fine. But I wouldn't hold them as some bastion of support perfection.
you got lucky though, most of the time the entire network of shared hosting providers is blacklisted from sending mail. they may have just rolled out a brand new subnet or something
Drooling @ http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/eg_64g_ssd.xml
[1] http://blog.linode.com/2012/08/28/linode-makes-2012-inc-500-...
It's also important to note that if the billing system stays the same, each instance you purchase increments your account-wide bandwidth pool. For example, if a Linode 512 has 2 TB worth of data and you have two of them, you end up with 4 TB for all Linodes on your account. It's not bound to the individual Linodes.
http://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml
I realise that people have mixed feelings about OVH, but I've yet to have a problem and 100% uptime. Plus I can max out 100 mbps on the server pretty easily.
Another 2 providers that probably have a better reputation than Linode are BuyVM and RamNode: http://buyvm.net/ http://ramnode.com/
A 512mb is less than half price there and they use SSD's.
But the main thing I'm seeing now for commercial sites, is why don't you use Jekyll and host your site on a CDN like Cloud Files or CloudFront? I'm suprised how cheap it is now to use a full on CDN to host your site. While it's not for everyone, most business sites are just a landing page and a wordpress blog, which would be much more resource efficient if it was hosted on a CDN, plus your pretty much guaranteed 100% uptime.
So for under $20 you can get a SSD VPS and your site hosted on Akamai's CDN or just a $20 box from Linode :/
After initial setup you may want to change the grsec kernel to something else (according to preferences, it's not bad), and by default they have root ssh access to your box (key-based auth), which you may want to revoke.
Ovh has one data center in Canada, but that's in Quebec, not west coast.
--
It's great that Linode is passing these improvements to their customers free of charge. A while back they increased RAM allocated to all users without increasing prices, which was a great surprise. Things like this make me happy to host my multiple projects with them.
Lots of people have been complaining about network speeds recently:
http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8339/very-bad-performan...
Had they actually decided to offer SSD based instances to compete with the likes of DigitalOcean then we would have something interesting.
Also this is a terrible way for a company to earn trust. It should be earned based on their behaviour during the bad times. And we know how appalling Linode handles those.
Everyone chant with me: price war! price war! price war!
But I have sites that choke on quite modest I/O. I waited for Linode to install SSDs, then waited, and waited more. Last week I gave up and moved to DigitalOcean.
I was running Gentoo at London DC without any issues, my major gripes with Linode was how hard was it to get additional IPv4 addresses without lying about your reasons - i.e running services on different IP addresses or separating your business/personal websites (and very easy if you lied, I know someone who did). Another thing was that I paid them by a virtual CC and always put there just enough money for transaction every month, it's dedicated for internet pay only and prevents cc fraud, but every now and then they'd get the card declined at the beginning of the month cause I didn't put the money in yet, like 2nd or 3rd day and always always there was this template threatening ticket put in by a person in my account. I was paying them every month for years, so what if I have outstanding balance on the 2nd or 3rd, is that the reason to threat deleting my stuff? That felt really alienating.
Digital Ocean, while don't hand out IP addresses at all, costs so little that it's $1 + damn good reason at Linode or $5 and a VPS on top for the IP at DO.
The support at DO is nor fast, nor technical, I had issues with my Gentoo builds basically where after reboot /dev/null would come up being a text file with junk in it, you can mknod it but it wouldn't survive reboot. I've raised a ticket and they've removed Gentoo from selection, but I doubt it's fixed and and I'll have to work some ugly hacks to work around this if it happens again.
They use a kernel loaded from below, so you won't really have latest and greatest Arch if you use that, kernel upgrades are in pkg ignore list and even if upgraded it won't load.
I might return to Linode sometime in the future if DO messes up my Gentoos again and Linode does better at matching DO's offer.
At the moment, if you don't need to scale a lot (it's not as convenient at Linode, $20 vs $5 starts to hurt as the number of boxes go up, also Linode doesn't bill you by the our) and just want a personal server for your website I'd still go with Linode, especially after increased transfer quotas.
Hopefully Nextgen v.2 adds RAM for the same price.
http://www.ctistore.com/catalog/cat/prod,574258.html?gclid=C...
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Cisco-Nexus-7000-Series-32-...