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Comment by madsushi | Hacker News Reader

Why do I pay Linode $20/month instead of paying DO $5/month(1)?

Because Linode treats their servers like kittens (upgrades, addons/options, support), and DO treats their servers like cattle. There's nothing wrong with the cattle model of managing servers. But I'm not using Chef or Puppet, I just have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few services. And Linode treats that one solitary server better than any other VPS host in the world.

(1) I do have one DO box as a simple secondary DNS server, for provider redundancy

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I don't see that distinction at all. Both Linode and DO provide persistent local storage. Both let you resize your server. And now, they're competitive on price; Linode even has hourly billing. Granted, DO has lower-end plans than Linode. But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.

I don't think anyone's ever gotten good hard numbers, but just from having seen a lot of people's anecdata over the years, my general impression is that Digital Ocean seems to have more short-term outages and to oversubscribe their boxes a bit more.

that's probably due to the massive surge in growth and growing pains for DO

> But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.

I'm not sure "disposable" is a good word to describe DO's approach. We do know that they cram a lot more people per host machine, though. That may be where the "treat VMs like cattle" statement was getting at.

You need only fire up a few instances of comparable type, get some CPU load, and watch some basic metrics to determine this for yourself.

I suppose they do it because load on a typical instance is low. Probably $5 instances are mostly hosting services like low-volume blogs, personal home pages, ssh/vpn tunnels, etc.

OTOH the lowest ($20) tier on Linode is probably used by more serious projects that, on average, exert considerable load.

> OTOH the lowest ($20) tier on Linode is probably used by more serious projects that, on average, exert considerable load.

I'm not sure about that. For me, I pay the extra few bucks on Linode for the customer service, stability, and the consistent performance. I'm not running my VMs ragged, I'm just willing to pay a little more for a higher quality service.

Anecdotally, it's a quality thing for me. Digital Ocean = Economy car, Linode = A nice Hyundai sedan or a higher end Accord.

Your anecdotes (just like everyones) are meaningless. If you some evidence that DO is inferior at the same price level as Linode then you should post it.

I was with Linode and had to deal with constant outages (at Fremont DC) and went through two major hacking incidents where I found out through Reddit instead of from them. I've never been with a worse provider than Linode.

All these anecdotes make one wonder why these people aren't simply going to hetzner and ovh and simply get a dedicated server for just slightly more (meaning $25/month).

Or you can go with http://kimsufi.com and get a 2GB RAM dedicated server for $13 a month.

kimsufi is just OVH's budget brand (not that there's anything wrong with that, but your parent already mentioned OVH, so I thought some people might not know that they aren't really distinct)

Not if you're an American. Kimsufi servers, last I checked, are sold to EU residents only.

incorrect, I have had kimsufi servers before and I'm not an EU resident

For a while last year (at least several months), they only permitted kimsufi sale for EU and blocked PayPal payments from the US. You could only buy the 100$+ machines from OVH, not Kimsufis

Well for me, it's because although they're cheap and dedicated, servers, they aren't particularly good machines and the support is pretty much what you'd expect at that price (very basic).

That being said, I do think they're great value, and I have a reverse bidding dedicated server from Hetzner, that I use as a test and staging server. But I wouldn't dream of using them for production instances though - for the amount you'd have to pay to beef up support and get access to things like out of band console access, you might as well pay for a server from Bytemark.

Why not use this as an opportunity to make your server redundant ? If you don't have the time drbd + front-end load-balancers (e.g. on ec2, but just sending 403's, nothing else) , for example. Really interesting to setup, and there are plenty of cases where good support can't really help you either.

Because we're not all EU citizens? OVH's pricing for Americans starts at $50/mo.

Without anecdotes, HN would be mostly devoid of content. Let's not be silly.

> If you some evidence that DO is inferior at the same price level as Linode then you should post it.

I don't care to do this, I'm not out to prove anything. I'm here to share my experiences. Take them or leave them, I don't care either way.

If you are using DO and you like it, then stick with it. I've personally been happy with DO (for the price), but feel like you get what you pay for in this regard. Sometimes over-provisioned host machines, erratic network and disk IO, frequent maintenance windows, slow and hurried customer service.

>I just have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few services. And Linode treats that one solitary server better than any other VPS host in the world.

I use DO for this and have used many others in the past and I have never had any problems with DO...

Anecdotally, I get notifications of maintenance outages every month with DO in NYC1 and NYC2. These are exceedingly, exceedingly rare with Linode's Atlanta DC.

Also, stolen CPU on my DO boxes is super high, whereas this is very rare on Linode. You have less neighbors.

Most of the notifications are about "short periods of higher latency and packet loss", which I can totally tolerate. The last "5-10 minutes disconnect" happened in November 2013.

If it were just higher latency, I'd agree. But packet loss is a bit different.

Packet loss is high latency when you are dealing with TCP. So unless you are streaming something over UDP or rely on ICMP for something like monitoring, you are fine.

My experience is the reverse. My $5 DO server running almost identical software responds much faster than my Linode server. The Linode server is far, far closer to me geographically.

I have put this down to the DO SSDs. It will be interesting to see if this is true. I've been considering migrating from Lindoe to DO because they were faster and cheaper.

I've had 2 DO VPS for about 6 months, and never had a problem with them.

> My $5 DO server running almost identical software responds much faster than my Linode server.

Faster how? This doesn't tell us anything.

> I have put this down to the DO SSDs

Linode now uses SSDs, too. And server-grade ones at that.

In the last two months there was 3 maintenance outages and 1 unscheduled at Atlanta. 0 at NYC1.

http://status.linode.com http://www.digitaloceanstatus.com

I don't know about Linode, but I do know that DO does not report most of there outages on there status page.

With 3 out of 4 outages or 'troubles' at Digital Ocean, there is no report on there status page. Even when tens of people complaining about it on twitter and they replied on the tweets that they have an outage, there is nothing on the status page.

So I would not recommend comparing there status pages.

Last month DO rebooted my droplet (I received an email notice of this), it came back with all my config files filled with just @@@@'s... They were not helpful at all, after 5 emails they offered to help migrate leftover data to a new droplet but there was nothing that wasn't in my backups, my site was down for a day.

Not exactly a fair comparison, you'd want to compare similar plans, 2GB Linode VPS and 2GB DigitalOcean VPS are both $20/month. Some benchmarks between the two posted at https://blog.centminmod.com/346. Linode fast disk i/o than DO but DO faster cpu than Linode :)

Just a side node, I occasionally use SSH tunneling to get through the evil local government Internet censoring, so I have a linode a DO (just sever months), and linode's SSH tunneling is much much more fast and stable.

That could be caused by the routing, as well, though -- are the servers in the same approximate geographical location?

well, I'm not sure, but since the difference is huge, I'm not sure if routing can cause that significant difference, I'm really not sure about that.

I moved from Linode to Digital Ocean because of the price and I've noticed no change in level of service. And the support, which I've used several times at both has always been incredibly quick, accurate and useful.

I was however happy to have a viable alternative to Linode. I found their handling of the two hacking incidents to be completely disrespectful to me as a customer.

Unfortunately, DO vs. Linode, DO is the only one that can provide me a "reasonably fast box" [cpu, ssd] for $5/month, so I'm cattle, but cheap... :) [pingdom shows 5min worth of outage in the past week (a 99.96% uptime) which may or may not be OK depending on your money vs. uptime pain threshold :) ]

DO?

Digital Ocean - https://www.digitalocean.com/

yeah DO = DigitalOcean

i'm a happy DO user (30 droplets at the moment) and I agree with your cattle analogy. I am not surprised to see multiple droplets spontaneously rebooting on occasion (even when system maintenance has not been announced)

however, I have no experience with Linode so I can not say if they are "kittens" as you say.

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