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Comment by rjknight | Hacker News Reader

It looks like Linode are still leaving the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market to DO. Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.

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As someone who has used both Linode and "low end box" services, both have their place. Two observations:

1) I feel like Linode offers a level of support that the others don't offer. There are lower end providers that do offer good support, but it's not as consistently good as Linode. Were they to start offering cheaper $5 or $10 a month plans, they would be challenged when it comes to continuing to offer that level of support.

2) Observationally, it seems to me that Linode customers on average tend to be more serious about their usage than those who are looking for a <$5/month VPS. Go to the IRC channels for each company and see who hangs out there. That said, this should only matter to you if you are concerned about who your neighbours may be on a VM host, if you plan on being part of the IRC community, or if you are concerned about how reputable your IP address looks given what block it belongs to.

I agree with this. I have a few DO accounts, a Linode and a few BuyVM accounts. The Linode is what I use for all of my "serious" production stuff, but I love the LEBs to play.

That said, I do think the performance of DO is quite good. It reminds me of Slicehost back in the day.

The BuyVM guys are just the best people ever, and I mostly maintain play boxes there just b/c I can get away with stuff there that might not fly at DO or Linode.

There's also the aspect of customer expectations. At Linode's price point I feel like no matter the size of my VPS, I am allowed to have the expectation of a certain level of support. If they were to take too long to address a ticket or fix an issue I would be more inclined to make a stink about it versus a provider that is providing me with a VPS for what turns out to be $3.00 a month!

And I would imagine that is very much by design. DO's model is to scale as much as possible -- they want to be all over the place and they have the funding to make those sorts of changes.

As a more established provider, Linode has to decide if adding more customers would be worth the incremental support costs. Given Linode's reputation for support, adding a bunch of LEB customers who aren't likely to renew at the same rates as people who pay more money - and are also likely to have more support requests - competing with that market doesn't make a ton of sense.

Plus, whether fair or not, having a minimum pricing point makes a service seem more premium -- more "ready for serious business." Now, obviously we've all been with expensive hosts that have terrible performance -- but you'd be surprised how many non-technical decision makers will choose a higher-priced offering over a lower-priced offering, on the supposition that "more expensive = better."

Yeah, my current Linode I've been running since it was a 512MB instance. I definitely don't need 2GB, I'd rather pay a bit less per month than get the upgrade. I don't think they need to go down to $5/month, but a $10/month plan similar to DO's would be very useful.

I use a tiny VPS provider that is actually $20/yr. For sites that get a couple thousand hits per month it is perfect. Although I do not see it as a requirement in this price range, the uptime has been on par with the big names (I have known of one 5 hour outage in the 3 years I have been using it). Even DO's $5/mo now seems a bit steep now for the "I just had a random idea" type thing.

Care to share the provider you are using?

There are always great offers on http://lowendbox.com/ - I'm very happy with the small KVM offers edis.at is offering.

Beware of super cheap VPS providers. A couple years ago I got burned by a provider called VBOX that was highly recommended on lowendbox.com. At first the service was ok, but a few months later my server and VBOX business were completely unresponsive.

Sure you'll save some money, but you might also waste hours of your time setting up a server that could one day disappear into thin air.

So long as you have deployment automated, and frequent backups, that shouldn't be a huge issue. One of the many advantages of not having to manually deploy a new box is being able to rapidly get off a bad provider.

Ramnode is fantastic and cheap.

http://www.ramnode.com

$2/month is enticing, but 128mb ram seems impossible. even 256mb is pushing it.

You can run a mostly static site on 64.

Debian minimal, with NGINX or some other light HTTP is easy on even 64 megs. On 128, you can do stuff like PHP and you can run whatever efficient web stuff you like. The web is light, if you're efficient about it.

As an aside, one of my friends has a 100 meg free VPS from one of the terrible free vps providers. He has managed to squeeze a Minecraft server on, and that can hold about 2 or 3 players! (apart from the terrible network, cpu and uptime)

It isn't (I have one, a whole $15/year due to some ridiculous sale some months ago). Consider that it's userspace only, so kernel doesn't count. I'm running a (light-duty) nodejs app, nginx to proxy it, tmux, and two irssi instances on mine right now, with memory to spare. Light PHP works fine too (haven't tried anything heavier).

A database server or similar wouldn't work, of course.

If you pay $2/month, you're a sucker; they've got lots of coupons (like the seemingly permanent 25 % discount on their website. If you look a bit further, you'll find even better discounts).

vpsdime is crazy cheap...

I use INIZ[1] 1GB for only $25 a year from a lowendbox special[2]. I don't use it for much so I can't speak with quality/uptime/anything beyond testing/experimentation.

  1GB-YEARLY
  3 vCores
  1GB RAM
  512MB vSwap
  50GB RAID10 Disk
  1TB Outbound BW
  1 IPv4 and 1 IPv6
  OpenVZ/SolusVM

[1] http://iniz.com/

[2] http://lowendbox.com/blog/iniz-yearly-deals-and-more-25year-...

OP here. I use Hostigation[1]. I know some people are concerned about many of the low end providers, but in this case:

1. It's 20 bucks... take a gamble!

2. The owner, Tim, has personally responded to every issue I have ever had within an hour. Pretty stellar, if you ask me.

[1] https://hostigation.com/

5c a month savings is worth keeping your Linode on old hardware with 512MB of ram?!??!?

The stuff I have there (mostly lightly-trafficked PHP sites) is not memory-intensive. Why rent a 3000 sq ft office when I only need a 1500 (or even 750) sq ft one? And yes, if I could halve ($20 -> $10) my monthly cost, it would most definitely be welcome.

If you're that cost sensitive, move to Digital Ocean. They have a better deal.

> Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.

Yes, this, the $10 plan is DO's most popular.

How do you know DO's $10/m plan is most popular?

(Please don't say it's because the pricing page highlights the $10 plan ass "most popular". You know that's just a classic up-sell trick, right?)

I have a feeling it's a bit of customer service / risk mitigation. Obviously there are numerous exceptions but the sort of people that execute a lot of fraud, DDOS'ing, or simply amateurs playing around are also the sort of people that'll use DO before Linode. I imagine there's a heavy cost associated with hosting those users relative to ones happy to pay $20/mo instead.

> the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market

How big is that market, really? I keep a small VPS around for whatever (I like Hetzner), and I'm sure lots of nerds are the same. But for any usage that's even a little bit serious, $20/month is peanuts.

Probably pretty big - look at how popular tiny VPS providers are.

A lot people don't need an entire server and just need a shell, some file space, and a small web/app server.

Even just 10 years ago it was very expensive to get a non-shared hosting account. Go back a little further than that, and you were elite if you had a real server out there somewhere. Back then a low-spec co-located server was $300 a month. And let's not even talk about how expensive bandwidth was!

What if you want to have several tiny boxes? For example, if you want to host a mail server as a separate box for security, that's another $20/month. Or what if you need to use a different Linux distro for something? Another $20/month. A few examples like that add up fast.

Containers, e.g. through Docker, are good for that kind of thing.

Not if you need them to run on separate physical hosts. [e.g. A galera cluster]

And I would say the market on that need is pretty small, as originally stated, not nonexistent.

Not with the tiny amounts of memory offered at that price. 2GB is very easy to burn through in short order. Anything less than 8 feels really claustrophobic.

I've always needed memory more than disk. Really wish I could pay some of these providers just for a one off increase of a few extra gigs of memory without tiering up which includes an entirely higher level of storage that I will not ever use.

Some types of sites need disk more than RAM, and that market is really weird right now too.

I run a service that could get away with only 8GB of RAM, but definitely needs at least 2TB of space, plus plenty of room to grow.

When numbers start getting up into that territory, I tend to look at the discount dedicated servers.

WholeSaleInternet for example, currently has a Quad-Core Xeon E3 1230 for sale at $49/month with 5 IP Addresses. 1GBPS connection with 10TB bandwidth with 8GB of RAM / 250GB of Hard Drive.

If that 2TB Hard Drive is really needed, you can compromise on the CPU and go for a consumer-grade AMD Fx-4100 (Quad-Core AMD) from Datashack for $55 / month, with 5 IP Addresses, 8GB RAM / 2TB of Hard Drive space, 10TB of Bandwidth on 1Gbps

Most web applications seem to be Disk heavy or RAM Heavy... I rarely see CPU-heavy applications. So the AMD Fx-4100 can be good enough (its far far better than an Atom, although it isn't as good as a modern E3 Xeon).

I've never had the need for it, but since Dedicated Servers often come with 5 or 13 IP Addresses, and they can be as cheap as ~$60/month realistically... I think its better to just install Proxmox on a single dedicated box and spin up your own private VMs if you are honestly going to need multiple VMs.

Exactly, for that situation, I ended up going with an entirely overpowered dedicated server with an E5 and 32GB of RAM. I shopped around, but was very conscience of network quality, quality of support I'd get, and was still able to get away with paying about $250/mo, which is very reasonable compared to any kind of cloud offering.

Thanks for pointing that provider out to me. Those are some of the best prices i've seen this side of Hetzner.

Huh? Containers are quite lightweight; you can run several of them in 2 GB of RAM.

I was referring more to the applications within than container overhead.

What? With Linode you can easily add more ram. It's an awful deal ($5 per MB), but you can do it if you really needed.

Sorry, it was $5 per 90MB. Forgot to add the 90

I bet its a lot bigger than you think. For example, you can handle a ton of views on something like WordPress or Ghost with DO's smallest offering. Especially if you use it in combination with caching and and a reverse proxy like Cloudflare.

There's a bit of getting what you pay for. That said, Rackspace are in the same sort of market tier as Linode, and in my experience of both Linode are just ridiculously better. I would heartily recommend Linode to anyone.

One reason Linode doesn't offer "tiny boxes" is that they, like other companies, are worried about running out of IPv4 addresses.

This is not true.

Linode allow you to attach additional IPs to your Linode at $1/month, for example, I have one Linode which has 6 IPs attached for only $25/month. I still can't find a company has this kind of flexibility.

Right, but they provide additional IP addresses only if you can provide evidence that you need them (e.g., SSL certs).

Don't almost all web servers/browsers use SNI now? I don't see why you'd need multiple IPs for running multiple SSL sites nowadays. I have done multiple SSL sites on one IP for years.

IE on XP and Android 2.x are the notable things that don't support SNI. Some people still care about these.

what are the range of ip addresses like? are they just like

    23.23.23.24
    23.23.23.25
    23.23.23.26

Bytemark, based in the UK, with their cloud product Bigv (http://bigv.io/)

I doubt that's true. More likely it's because lower tier users are almost always disproportionally more demanding of help than higher tier ones. If you're going to make, for example, $1,000/m you're better off getting it from two competent, $500/m customers that don't need much help, rather than 100 $10/m customers who all need their hands held constantly. In Linode's case fewer users also makes contention less of an issue - the fewer VPSs per physical box, the better.

> I doubt that's true. More likely it's because lower tier users are almost always disproportionally more demanding of help than higher tier ones.

it's called "skin in the game", and those with very little skin in the game do not truly give a shit about their own problems, so they expect others to give a shit for them.

every business learns this lesson at some point. basically all these cheap hosting providers are trying to make money by automating the problem away - we'll see how it works in the long run for hosting. the jury is still out if you ask me.

$2 boxes are ripe for abuse and billing fraud.

The type of people that will be buying a $5 server are the type of people that will be sending in 10000000 help tickets on how to do X on that server

Shit, I should probably move to DO. I've been running a Linode for like two years, and have only ever used it once, yet I keep getting billed.

Well, if you're truly not using it, you could delete the instance and not be billed, then redploy when you need it.

They introduced hourly billing like a week ago :)

As long as you have a Linode provisioned, you'll be charged for it even if you're not using it. The hourly billing is just a simplification of their old system, where they would charge a prorated amount when a server is created based on how far into the month you are and issue a credit when a server is deleted based on how far from the end of the month you are. The net financial impact for a given server setup is about the same (+/- a few hours' worth of usage).

(Just to be clear, Digital Ocean works the same way. They're charging you for the resource allocation and associated maintenance. If you choose to not actually use the allocation you're paying for, that's your business.)

Oh darn, Rackspace has the same problem. I hoped it would be like AWS, where you pay for storage on S3 when not using, and hourly running costs when it is.

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