Metered Billing (beta) | Hacker News Reader

Metered Billing (beta)

forum.linode.com

118 pointsmartey38 comments

This is great news and makes a lot of sense considering their new CLI (https://github.com/linode/cli).

I just want to say how happy I've been with Linode so far. Their prices are unbeatable if you're a decent sysadmin, and their support is amazing. I'm probably in one of the lowest tiers of customers as far as how much money I give Linode every month, but their support has never failed to be very responsive and make me feel like I matter to them. I once wanted to migrate from one datacenter to another, so I opened up a support ticket. Within two minutes they had it set up so all I had to do was press a button and my setup teleported a thousand miles with minimal hassle. Kudos to the Linode team, and if you happen to work for them and see this message thanks to you personally for making my life easier :)

Seconding all of this, and further noting, first, that I only need to log in to the Linode dashboard a couple of times a year, if that; second, that I love how, every time I do so, there's new stuff waiting for me. Just now, for example, I logged in to find that one of my Linodes is ready for a free upgrade that doubles the storage capacity and RAM available. I've been a Linode customer since 2004, and by now I can't imagine wanting to host my VPSes with anyone else.

My problem with them is they keep getting hacked and then try to hide it.

[citation needed]

Google it. They have a long track record of hiding incidents (not just security).

I will never understand why people act like they are some wonderful company.

I have Googled it. I found mention of a couple of compromises, both of which I already knew about and which haven't substantially damaged my opinion of the company. I have yet to find any information regarding Linode attempting to conceal either those compromises or any others, which is the sort of thing I'd expect would be all over the web. What do you know that I don't?

Here is an example I wrote about:

http://julianyap.com/2012/03/01/compromised-linode-vps.html

Really? There have been two _major_ security breaches at Linode, and both times they were extremely opaque and even hostile towards customers who asked honest (and reasonable) questions.

I'm a Linode customer, and I like them.

But everyone fawns over their support ("I got a response in 3 minutes!"), and while that sometimes happens, it often does not. I've found recently the typical response time is around 15-20 minutes. I've had other tickets (including one that was critical) go for over an hour with no response, and finally I had to call them to see what was up.

Not saying they are bad - I'm a customer, after all. Just saying their support, in my experience, is not quite as amazing as some make it out to be.

For comparison: Media Temple typically takes a couple of hours to respond to a ticket. So that's still not bad.

As does Rackspace, even with their manage server services. More times than not when I go to Rackspace Chat to speak with someone, there is a bit of troubleshooting but then a ticket needs to be opened and response time is usually 4-6 hours. Not ideal at all.

I'm on that boat too. Most recently had a ticket about their DNS servers not picking up changes. If I recall correctly the initial response was quick but every subsequent response was from a different person that would run through a script, one step of which was "disable your firewall completely," even though that had been shown to not be the issue not to mention just being a bad suggestion in the first place.

Ended up after a few back and forth replies it was escalated to the "DNS team" but they weren't around until the AM. It ended up being the next evening, after I followed up that I got any response. I ended up making a change on my side to at least get websites back online, but it was over another week before any real "answers" were given.

Of the two issues one was due to certain CNAME records not being supported/allowed by their servers (not documented anywhere) which took over a day to get a final answer on. The other issue, one of their servers connecting/disconnecting to mine (seen in my logs) but not actually doing anything was labeled as something to just be ignored. My logs still fill up with those errors.

I've been with linode a long time and do like them, but as they've gotten larger their support has increasingly gone the way of other large companies...largely useless.

> I've been with linode a long time and do like them, but as they've gotten larger their support has increasingly gone the way of other large companies...largely useless.

Yup, me too. Been with them since 2005 and the quality of their support has really tanked in the last 2 years. I think once a company becomes a certain size, it's very hard to provide support that's not just a bunch of drones reading from a script. It's very unfortunate.

Their support has been awesome the past 3 years when I started with them. There really is no comparison.

Can you clarify what kind of CNAME you're referring to? The only CNAMEs that aren't "supported" are CNAMEs on the root of a zone, which are a violation of the DNS spec, as CNAMEs cannot coexist with other records, which must exist at the root of the zone.

Response from support in less than in an hour is not amazing???? For anything non-critical such response is indeed amazing.

I once had an issue with Google and GAE on a corporate account. Spent 3 hours hunting down a contact form and had no response for 7 days if that makes you feel any better.

>> and while that sometimes happens, it often does not.

Try any other hoster for a year or more. Linode's Support is the best. It exceeds many companies today in the tech business or not.

The per-hour prices are actually very competitive with DigitalOcean if you're after compute power. All Linodes have access to 8 CPUs. So for $0.12 an hour you get 4GiB RAM and access to 8 CPUs on Linode, vs 8GiB RAM and 4 CPUs on DigitalOcean. Of course right now you're often on a server with very light utilisation meaning you get much more burst access than you're paying for on Linode. Presumably the hourly instances will be on different servers to the monthly and you're much likely to have neighbours who are actually doing something rather than idling and serving a page through nginx every half hour.

It looks like after beta, all billing will be metered, so I doubt they will have metered nodes on different hardware.

Only if you're a new customer. From the linked forum post:

It will become the default for new customers. Existing customers won't be forced to change (but they'll be able to on their own).

The only big difference is the SSD.

Linode had SSD hybrid in beta. Unknown release date at this point. https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10406

It's expected in Q1, they tweeted a picture of a large shipment of hardware last week.

Tell me you're joking ?

You're actually comparing virtual CPUs between two providers.

I just wish utilities worked like this. The constant rise and increase in actual service costs for gas/electric/water is down right criminal. Even with residential / corporate programs for curtailment and decentralized energy reduction during high yield periods is nuts - http://www.ecsgrid.com/, http://www.enernoc.com/

I don't think those two are comparable. Computing is known to be cheaper over time due to Moore's law, but you can't equate gas/electric/water the same way as there are other factors (population, demand, supply) that weigh in. Hopefully more innovation into alternative electricity (solar) will help with part of it. Another factor is inflation such as employee wages to maintain water supplies could increase the end cost to consumers.

Well the difference here is that a utility is a natural monopoly. It's not under market scrutiny except for regulators. Linode is under intense pressure and it's been lagging behind competitors for a while now

I've found Linode rock solid in all the time I've used them. But I've also found them a bit slow in adopting features that are important to me (this and SSD storage)

This billing system probably wouldn't work if all of Linode's customers tended to spin up more servers at exactly the same time, which is what utilities deal with when e.g. it's a heat wave. They need the infrastructure to support the peak load, even though it's quite a bit higher than the typical load.

Unfortunately, I learned the Linode Metered Billing doesn't work this way (see my comment above). Basically, you're billed for the number of hours that a server is on your account, not your actual usage of the server. So, the more or less you use of a specific server doesn't affect billing. It would only affect billing if changes in usage meant changes in the number of servers on your account. Maybe obvious to some, but wasn't to me.

The analogy for electricity (with Linode Metered Billing, in comparison) would be adding or removing electric supply lines and/or meters vs. actual usages as measured in Kwh.

Cool service. At first I didn't understand how this worked, but basically you are charged for the number of hours that a server is on your account, not the number of CPU hours you use. So if you have a server on your account, and it sits idle for a whole month, you'll still be billed for the whole month. This metered billing service is for folks who are regularly putting up and taking down servers for different reasons, like test servers, increasing / decreasing capacity, and that sort of thing, and especially for folks who use the Linode API to automatically do that. It's in place of paying for these in advance and then getting a refund/ credit when you remove the servers. I'm sure that's obvious to the majority of the folks here.

I'm probably a dork for not realizing that, but it's worth stating the obvious for folks like me who thought at first this was metered billing based on CPU usage, not based on # of hours a server is sitting in your account, used or not.

Kudos on this!

We do metered billing at Balanced [1], essentially "grossing out fees" and charging the merchant at the end of the day for one lump sum, rather than "netting out fees" which would require us to take our fee out per transaction. We've gotten a some praise from customers who call it "super clean [2]."

[1] https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees [2] https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-...

I contacted Linode about this, since one of my Linodes has an annual discount applied (https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-di...) and I was not sure how switching would affect it. They responded:

"Unfortunately, at this time if you have any Linodes that you pay for annually or biennially, enrolling in the metered billing beta will remove your discount, and the process of changing over cannot be reversed."

Very cool. People were really whinging about Linode's lack of metered billing the other day when the Linode CLI was posted. I just entered a ticket a few minutes ago and they've already updated my account to join the beta. The support rep did note that the change is irreversible; if you're worried you won't like metered billing for some reason then you might want to hold off.

I don't think cloud hosting will reach it's panacea until I can just upload a site or application, and be billed for what I use. No calculators, or intervention needed. Are weekends slow? It automatically drops a node. Get front page of Hacker News? Scales up automatically. Hosting that "just works".

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk ?

The adding a node or dropping a node isn't really a problem. The problem is that most applications can't handle that type of environment. So until all applications are written in a way that can handle that, don't hold your breath.

Have you looked at App Engine? It's been a few years since I've used it, but that's roughly how I remember it working.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com