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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at all the people still using Slicehost. They are good people, and run a nice service, but in terms of money, you are leaving it on the table when compared to Linode:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

I was with SH myself, and before I wrote that article, I dropped them an email asking about the 64 vs 32 bit thing, and was simply informed that they have no plans for 32 bit, so I went ahead and switched, then wrote my article and have been happy since. I sincerely hope the SH guys will get competitive again, at which point I'll gladly update my article.

Also, something that Linode was missing for a while was backups. They're rolling them out now:

http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/03/backup-service-enters-beta...

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I switched to Linode after reading your blog post. Also, Slicehost had some serious downtime last December.

The "community" section of the Slicehost website is really exceptional though. Insanely great.

Agreed. Their articles are a really great resource as well (and aren't Slicehost specific). They have a ton of step by step guides for OS setup, Apache, MySql, Postfix, etc...

http://articles.slicehost.com/

you are leaving it on the table when compared to Linode

In my case, the "left on the table" amount is about 1/100th of my sales. From last week. That doesn't exactly justify me dropping everything and spending my freaking expensive engineering time figuring out how to migrate without causing breakage or downtime.

When my credit card expired, Linode deactivated my account and never responded to my emails after that. If I had data that I needed on that machine, I would've lost it forever.

They're cheap, so I still use them for personal projects, but personally, I'd never trust my business with them.

Just another data point.

Wow. I just had the same situation with Slicehost. They notified me about the problem, said that there was a five day grace period, and that I could always contact them if I had any problems. They generally replied within the hour to all my e-mails.

not sure how long ago that was, but I'd be happy to look into it. service at linode.com

So do you (now) have a standard grace period when a credit card payment fails?

Yes, along with a few notifications via e-mail.

I use Slicehost, after looking at Linode's pages these features seem to be missing:

Bandwidth is pooled between all of your slices.

Money is pooled -- if you pay a certain amount, you get the "annual discount", but then you can use that for paying for whichever slices each month. And you can bring slices up and down whenever you want to, and pay a prorated amount.

There's a nice API so you can automate a lot of your activities.

On the other hand, Linode does seem to be a bit cheaper on RAM and a lot cheaper on bandwidth.

Bandwidth at Linode is also pooled for Linodes withing the same datacenter (of which they have 4). You can also bring up any number of Linodes and bring them down whenever you want. You will be charged for the full month but if you bring them down, they will give you credit for the unused portion of the month (rate is per day). Linode also has an API for their DNS service but I haven't really used it so I won't comment much on it. In short, Linode is a pretty good deal.

Perhaps it's not prominent on the site, but:

Bandwidth is pooled between all of your nodes (and it doesn't matter which data center you place them in).

We offer prepayment discounts: 10% for 12 months and 15% for 24 months. We also prorate all billing to the day (you only pay for what you use).

There is an API for the DNS Manager, with more to come.

I've use both Linode (personal) and Slicehost (picwing). AFAIK, Linode still does not have automatic backups, which is really simple on Slicehost.

We (Linode) announced a public beta of our new backup service in our NJ facility yesterday and hope to have it rolled out to all four locations shortly: http://tinyurl.com/db8tlf

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