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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone use them over DigitalOcean? What's the advantage? Am I missing out on something?

I'm a customer of both DigitalOcean as well as Linode. I use DigitalOcean for random experiments and side projects and Linode for production sites.

I haven't directly observed any practical differences in ways that affect me in terms of VPS infrastructure itself, but I've found Linode's support to be significantly better and I'm willing to pay a premium for that on "sites that matter". I don't want to imply that DigitalOcean's support is bad -- it's not, but I feel they're average when compared with Linode responses.

On the other hand, my impressions may be biased since I rarely have to contact support in the first place. I'd be interested in whether or not others have had the same experience in terms of customer support.

I wrote this a while back: http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons

Part of the problem is that it's very easy to compare on price, but difficult to compare on service. I think my conclusions may not be quite as valid today, because news gets around so quickly, but I think the concept is a worthwhile one to think about.

Anecdotally, I've been very happy with Linode's service: a few months ago, I had some kind of problem and things weren't booting. Panic! I sent in a support ticket, and went to their IRC channel right away. I started describing the problem, and one of the guys in the channel says "oh, I think I just answered that", and indeed, the support ticket had already been answered with real, helpful information.

My interaction with them has usually been quite positive.

I share pretty much the same experience. Although I have to say, DO support seemed to have improved in recent months and feels more solid. It's hard to put a finger on it, it's hardly scientific, but just a feeling. I'm at a point where some (smaller) production VPS are now hosted with DO, whilst the majority is still at Linode, just to "test the waters".

One more important thing however, network stability in particular seems way better with Linode currently. I keep getting random cron errors resulting from name resolution issues on at least two data centres of DO. To counter my own last point, Linode recently had quite a lengthy network outage at Dallas, so no provider is totally immune.

Bottom line: try to build an infrastructure where you can as quickly as possible migrate/recover onto a new droplet/linode/instance, ideally across different providers.

A couple of concrete things come to mind -

1. DO has no private network; all traffic between your nodes occurs via your public interface. In fairness, it looks like they're working on this (http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...).

2. Linode's NodeBalancers are super handy if you need load balancing, and don't want to run your own. There are certainly some things I wish they could do (alerting comes to mind), but they're a heck of a lot better than running my own.

I started to use DO but they use a funky custom kernel setup where you can't use your own kernel - so you're at the whim of DO for security updates and such. However it's hard to beat them on price/value.

Experience comes to mind. Linode has been in the VPS space for considerably longer than DigitalOcean. Just based on recent HN threads, it appears that many folks are simply kicking the tires with DigitalOcean but may be hesitant to deploy production sites there. Given the low barrier of entry, I can imagine they see considerably more churn and volatility in their customer base compared to Linode.

I've run some CPU benchmarks, and the $80 droplet is roughly equivalent to the $40 linode. But if you get lucky and no one else on the same host is using much CPU, the linode will be over 50% faster. Of course, most customers aren't running CPU-bound tasks.

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