11th Linode Birthday, $10 Linode plan | Hacker News Reader

11th Linode Birthday, $10 Linode plan

blog.linode.com

241 pointsljoshua133 comments

Compared to DigitalOcean:

                  RAM - Processor - HD       - Transfer
    Linode        1GB - 1 Core    - 24GB SSD - 2TB
    DigitalOcean  1GB - 1 Core    - 30GB SSD - 2TB

Very compelling pricing, I may actually migrate a pet project of mine to Linode because they have a more robust support system.

Now all they need to do is accept Paypal payments because I live in a third world country and do not own an international credit card.

Is there a meaningful difference in CPUs?

Both Linode and DO use a variety of CPUs, and make upgrades all the time for their host machines, and your individual speed can vary as other VMs on the host use more and less CPU power.

That being said, Linode gives you access to as many cores as available on the host. In my case, I have 8 cores available, while DO restricts the number of cores available to guests based on plans (starting at 1 core).

Another thing to consider is: If your jobs are typically CPU-limited, it's probably not best to use virtual hosting at all. Dedicated machines would be far more economical for you.

The blog mentions that these $10 plans are on the "new" hardware, which, AFAICT, doesn't allow access to shared [unused] cores on the host anymore, so you really do have only 1 core max. FWIW. They're said to be nice speedy cores, though I've never tried one myself.

Anyway, it's nice to see linode finally come down in their price point, thank goodness for competition, they're obviously responding to DO with this move. Unfortunately the $5 DO is good enough for me [SSD makes is so that swap time is less painful if I temporarily max out the RAM] so, alas, will be sticking with DO for now :|

How might the performance of the $5 DO or either of the $10 from Linode/DO compare to what I get from my ~$10 shared hosting? I'm probably going to try a VPS at some point, but was just curious about if I could get rid of the shared and move my sites over too.

From my experience $5 DO is more robust than most shared plans. However the trade off is that you have to setup and maintain everything yourself including security.

Yeah for me my $5 DO beats the heck [for a rails app] out of having to use fcgi and have them constantly shutting down my processes, (in this case--bluehost) disabling my account for having too many files, etc. It is much faster.

Linode CPU cores are aligned with plan sizes.[1] The last generation of plans offered 8 cores across the board.[2] The hosts have more than 8 cores.[3]

[1] https://www.linode.com/pricing

[2] https://blog.linode.com/2013/03/18/linode-nextgen-the-hardwa...

[3] http://ark.intel.com/products/75277/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...

I live in a 3rd world country too; but they accept my local card (mastercard)

I live in a 1st world country (northern-europe) and nobody i know owns a credit card.

Everybody considers them expensive, unsafe and just plain evil. You pay with money you have and you pay a fixed price per month for the service -- no transaction costs.

If you want to sell stuff to the world, please support payment gateways that are not evil and as insecure as, well .. a credit card, would actually be the example.

Companies smart enough to allow people in nothern-europe to actually pay: Valve, Apple. Companies dumb enough not to: EA, Google. Who is selling online and who is not?

Newsflash: If your sales numbers are less in Northern-Europe than they are in the US, it's because you are either actively blocking those customers (region-locks or refusal to ship) or you are not accepting n-european payment gateways.

Credit cards are the equivelant of saying 'i only want american customers and everybody else can go to hell'. Let's just hope your bussiness is viable enough in just the US to be this ignorant.

> Credit cards are the equivelant of saying 'i only want american customers and everybody else can go to hell'. Let's just hope your bussiness is viable enough in just the US to be this ignorant.

In the UK I do as much online shopping as possible on my credit card. I get the added protection of the Consumer Credit Act[1], and prizes![2]

[1] http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/regulation/section-75...

[2] http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/credit-cards/best-credit-ca...

I also live in Europe and I've had no problem paying Linode with a debit card.

Why are credit cards 'evil'? Honest question.

I mean they don't go spend themselves, are protected 100% against fraud (in the US at least) and if paid in full every month, cost nothing to the card holder.

If anything, it is not a company's fault that Northern Europe has social/cultural hang-ups for a mode of payment!

Because credit card system is not sustainable without various hidden fees, overdrafts, default rates and so on.

Is it? I have never paid any hidden fee, or overdrafts. Set a reminder for every fifteen days, pump up the credit card and everything sails smoothly.

Merchant fees are more or less hidden: somewhere between 1% and 5% of your purchase does not go to the merchant.

That's the same no matter what method of payment you use.

PayPal charges merchant fees. Most banks charge fees for direct debit. Bitcoin has transaction fees. Western Union has transaction fees. Even if you only accept cash, checks, and money orders, it will cost you time and fuel to deposit them at your bank.

The percentages might differ, but as long as you let someone else facilitate your transactions, there's no way to avoid paying some sort of fee.

The parent said (emphasis mine):

> Because credit card system is not sustainable

and you say:

> I have never paid [...] and everything sails smoothly.

The parent is talking about the system as a whole, while you are talking about your individual usage/experience. Is it not possible that your usage is subsidized by those less financially organized?

You're going to have to actually provide real information to back up such an extreme claim if you want to come across as believable.

What is inherent about the credit card system, at even a modest flat rate of 7%, that makes it unsustainable exactly? An examination by logic says that it is very sustainable, banking history says that it is very sustainable.

It's absolutely no different in concept than a bank loan or line of credit, so long as the lending agency vets their customers properly based on the ability to pay. If you do that, it's an extraordinarily convenient and useful system.

Banks have been making money on 7% loans for centuries. There is absolutely nothing unique about borrowing money on the spot via a credit card based on a previously set credit line.

Serious question: Other than a credit card, how can you pay for things online? Paypal? Bitcoin?

Debit card

Can't debit cards generally be used as credit cards?

Yes, but without the credit part.

But I mean, in the context of accepting payments online, debit cards aren't really an alternative to credit cards, are they? The two go hand-in-hand. Merchants that accept credit generally accept debit, so you're fine in that situation if you prefer debit.

Debit cards are the same as credit cards, but without the credit, the protections, or the reward points. As long as you can maintain financial discipline, there's really no reason to be using a debit card.

A small niggle, because I see a lot of people say this: At least in the US, many banks do extend the same protections to both credit and debit cards. My wife and I both had our debit card info stolen in separate hacks over the past few years, and both times our respective banks just asked us a few questions, credited the money back to our accounts and sent a new card that automatically replaced the old card upon activation.

How long did it take for your bank to return the stolen funds? I heard it takes at least a couple of days in most cases.

The scary thing about debit cards is that when someone steals money with it, they're stealing your money. So if your account is drained and your rent is due tomorrow, you're in trouble. With credit cards, on the other hand, the thief steals the bank's money. Your money is safe the whole time.

For me at least, it was credited immediately, with the caveat that they would remove the same amount if an investigation showed that the funds had not actually been stolen.

Credit cards can cost more for merchants to process, sometimes they pass this cost onto the consumer with a credit card surcharge.

It's also easier to track your spending on a debit card as you can check the remaining balance at any ATM rather than waiting for the bill or going online.

Every place I've been to that surcharges credit cards also tries to do it to debit (see gas stations) so your line of reasoning there is suspect.

I don't have a source to cite, but I think in general, Debit cards swiped as credit cost the merchant the same or maybe more. There are some recent court decisions that may have capped these.

High fees for this stuff is the reason by so many banks changed their retail business model to things like Totally free checking(when you make 12 debit card purchases each month).

I have a Debit card that I just run as a credit card everywhere. I use it to pay for everything in the offline world (gas and food mostly). I use it online as well, but I prefer to use Paypal which is hooked up to my bank account.

I'm probably less protected against fraud, but I haven't had a reason to worry yet.

You just transfer the money from your bank account to the bank account of the merchant. There are various methods to do that, I prefer giropay[1]. If it's a merchant you regularly use like amazon you allow the merchant to directly withdraw[2] the money from your account.

It's not like this is some weird highly advanced stuff. Surely that's possible in the US as well?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giropay [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronisches_Lastschriftverfa...

It is not generally possible to do this in the US. Amazon allows it, but most places do not because it's not a very in-demand service — using cards is safer and easier than giving out your bank information, so not very many people insist on the latter.

How could a bank transfer be less safe? I don't know the US system but if I give out my bank account number the only thing someone can use it for is to send money to me.

On the other hand if someone malicious gets my credit card number they can use it to buy stuff and I have to go through a lot of trouble to get a new card.

In the US, an account + routing number pair is basically the keys to the kingdom. Yes, it is kind of scary.

It's somewhat the opposite in the US. With your bank routing and account number someone can make out bad checks or EFT pull from your account. Halting or reversing this can be quite difficult and in some cases it isn't possible to get your money back.

With credit cards the liability is on the merchant that accepts the card to verify that the person presenting the card is authorized to use it. Card issuers will reverse charges and leave the merchant out the money in the event of fraud.

Didn't know this...I'm not in the US.

From my experience, getting your money back from a debit card hack is way harder then a credit card. That is why I travel and pay online with my Visa ...

Which country are you in exactly? Because AFAIK, in most Northern European countries people have credit cards (or at least debit cards).

I suspect that the two SSD are on different levels. Linode has higher standards.

I don't know if the following benchmarks are real, but if it is we're talking about really different hardware (780 Mb/s vs 250 Mb/s)

http://serverbear.com/2424-linode-2gb-ssd-linode http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean

Maybe someone with both accounts can do a quick benchmark to verify or deny this data.

Those are accurate numbers.

https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=10960#p63254

This could be something I am interested in testing. I just migrated to DO, however I kept a small credit on Linode hoping they introduced cheaper plans.

I also appreciate the fact that Linode hasn't deprecated Arch Linux images like DO has. DO also seems to be pretty bad at listening to users.

This is great news; I have, for the past few years, been moving all my lower-end VPSes from Linode to Digital Ocean. I recently told a Linode rep at DrupalCon that I would start moving servers back as soon as they had a lower-cost plan, and it looks like Linode has delivered.

Very few of my servers need more than 1 GB RAM, and the CPU and SSDs perform similarly across DO and Linode (for my purposes). I'll still be using a bunch of 512MB Digital Ocean servers for utility purposes, but I'm hoping that these Linode VPSes will continue the trend of being slightly faster/more stable than low-end VPSes from Digital Ocean and other lower-end/inexpensive hosts.

Since I now use Ansible for all my infrastructure management (and Ansible integrates easily with Linode[1] and Digital Ocean[2]), it's trivially easy to move individual servers between providers. This is not only nice to assist with using the best price-performance combo, regardless of provider, but also so I can move production infrastructure from provider to provider and benchmark them against each other more easily.

[1] http://docs.ansible.com/linode_module.html

[2] http://docs.ansible.com/digital_ocean_module.html

I concur. I use Ansible for my deployments on Digital Ocean. It would be trivial to move over to Linode because of Ansible's flexibility (which is actually something I consider every time DO has network issues). Hopefully this competition helps both services step up their game.

For the folks using Digital Ocean, have you considered Ramnode? $18 per year for their ultra-tiny plan, "OpenVZ SSD VPS (SVZ v2) - Atlanta - 128MB SVZ". I kinda love a company that constantly posts a 25% discount code on their own homepage. :)

I use many RamNodes for https://servercheck.in/ - the price is right!

Those are OpenVZ

Correct, the ultra cheap one is OpenVZ (i.e. a container, not a VM). They do have a KVM option that looks like similar prices to DO/etc.

https://twitter.com/linode/status/478548938010939392 for 10$ promo code if you want to try out. DigitalOcean very often gives out credits for testing, first time I see Linode doing that.

It seems that one still has to enter credit card details and preload at least 5$.

Unfortunately, they only take credit cards, and not only that - I need to type in my non-existant card details in order to try out their free $10/month.

Have been a satisfied customer with Linode for 7 years. Now I can move my testing site to this new $10/m plan.

Meanwhile I'm slightly concerned about the future quality from Linode, as low-priced $10 plan will certainly get lots of customers, but it may also bring down quality from Linode. Popularity normally plays against quality, I hope I am wrong.

> Meanwhile I'm slightly concerned about the future quality from Linode, as low-priced $10 plan will certainly get lots of customers

They've had a $10 plan for a looong time. It's just recently that they got rid of it, and now it's back.

No, $20/month has always been their least-expensive plan. In fact, caker (their founder) was adamant for a very long time against creating a less-expensive plan.

(I've been customer for 9 years, and have occasionally hung out in their forums where caker also hangs out.)

You sure about that? I'm almost positive they've had a $10 plan before. When I signed up a few years ago I needed 1GB of RAM and the cheapest plan only had 512MB. I ended up paying $20 (well, $19.95 or whatever it was) and still do. Up until just recently my plan has always been the "one step up" plan from entry level. It was only with the "we doubled everything" announcement that they got rid of the plan below mine.

Been a linode user since 2009, they have definitely not offered a plan less than $20 in that time.

Quite sure. If I had a dime for every time someone asked on the forums for a <$20/month plan and caker replied "not gonna happen"...

I share your popularity vs quality concerns. I've been a customer for 9 years and I've noticed two areas where I believe quality has declined in the last ~2 years as a result of their increased popularity:

1. Their support, while still fast, has turned into script-reading drones and I've often been frustrated when trying to deal with more complex issues. They seem to assume everyone is stupid, which I think is a consequence of having many customers.

2. DoS attacks against other customers have gone way up, causing datacenter-wide network outages. I think this is a consequence of having too many non-professional customers who attract the wrong kind of attention. Creating a $10/month plan will certainly not help with this.

Linode has been a great company and they deserve to enjoy the fruits of their success, but it is definitely disappointing as a long-time customer to see quality decline as they grow in popularity.

I've been with them for 4 years and don't see any decline, at all.

I have just submitted a ticket to ask Linode about downgrading from my current $20 plan, since I host PHP websites only, and I use Ubuntu 32bit, and I don't want to take risks to switch the kernel to 64bit in order to take advantage of their recent free hardware upgrades:https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-...

I don't see any reasons they'll not let me downgrade, since there is no reason to pay $20 and use the $10 spec, right? I'll keep you posted about it.

it's pretty easy to change linode plans. click on the instance in the manager (https://manager.linode.com/) and then on "resize." Linode 1024 is the new one. The whole process takes about 15 minutes.

Their concern is that they'll get migrated to a server that doesn't support 32-bit linux, not that it's something they found difficult to do.

FWIW, I am in the same situation as you, but I did perform the kernel upgrade and it was quick and painless..

From the control panel, I can see the conversion process should be easy, but my concern is my VPS will have problem after the upgrade... I'm not a Linux guy and too busy to investigate into it right now...

I think the $10 boxes are on the new hardware and so you'll need to either wait for 32bit support on the new hosts or upgrade to 64bit to switch to it anyway.

I've paid for a year of the $20 plan and am wondering whether my expiry date will be pushed out pro-rata if I downgrade to the $10 plan. Any ideas?

Support answered my ticket within a few minutes. Basically my account is credited the delta, and my account will automatically renew at the new rate when the current period ends.

Basically, I don't lose any money.

Me too, it seems that the billing will reflect the chance immediately.

Does anybody have a good comparison or story of why Linode is "more reliable" than DO? I've read the simple "Digital Ocean vs. Linode" stuff posted here, but it never offers any quantitative insight as to why people find Linode more reliable. Anecdotes encouraged :)

http://status.linode.com/

vs.

https://status.digitalocean.com/

I don't trust people's opinions unless either of them get caught outright lying on their status pages. ;)

Anecdotal: I've seen ~5x as many VPS restarts due to host issues on DO than Linode.

I've saw restarts and networks issues frequently on DO months ago. They seem to have stabilized in the NYC datacenters where I host https://minimalreader.com/ but overall, the stability always seems to be on the edge of collapse. I'm not sure if that's because they are growing so quickly they cannot keep their network and hosts up with the demand, or what.

Not a useful metric unless both use absolutely identical criteria for posting.

DO pretty much never seems to post anything on their status page unless it affects a lot of their customers -- I've had support tickets with them where they say a problem is affecting "some" customers, but they pretty much never posted it on their status page. Whereas Linode seems to post status problems far more frequently, and pretty much none of the problems listed have ever affected any of my nodes.

Of course, this is all anecdotal, but Linode really does seem to over report on their status page. And DO perhaps under reports.

to be fair Linode also only posts when outages are DC-wide or otherwise affect large numbers of users.

This. My experience has been that Linode is very transparent about status messages, and I'd even go so far as to say the most transparent I've seen. Usually if an external service reports a timeout to me and I visit the status page there is often an investigation notice posted regarding network latency.

DO will take your site offline without even telling you the reason why. Have done it to me multiple times, and only tell me after I file a support ticket. They seem to be disorganized and make decisions separately/randomly.

I've had five 1GB VPSes running on Digital Ocean for the past year, for http://www.hostedapachesolr.com/. Of the five of them, three seem to have 5-10 minute downtimes about once per week as measured by https://servercheck.in/.

On Linode, I stopped using their 2 GB VPSes for the past year, but before that, I had 3 of them. One had about 5 minutes of unscheduled downtime over the course of a year, the other two only had a few scheduled restarts where Linode emailed me a day or so before it happened.

Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, and I've been extremely happy with both providers (Digital Ocean has been very good, much better than any other sub-$20/month provider until today's news)—but when push comes to shove, I would rather have my more critical VPSes on Linode.

I have only good experience with both. My linode (internet exposed) server has been running for almost 7 years now. My DO server (also internet exposed) is ~2 years old. These days I would spin up a DO by default because I am sucker for SSD. I might switch back to defaulting to linode with this new pricing. linode has a fantastic irc channel. Plus linode has IPv6 support which DO has promised _years_ ago. Just hop on and the linode guys help you out immediately.

I don't think you can go wrong with either for medium sized companies (< 100).

Linode recently converted to SSD as well.

Any newly created Linode will land on a host with full SSD storage.

I can only give you anecdotal evidence on two Linodes we use:

  root@web1:~# uname -a
  Linux web1.netstock.co 3.9.3-x86-linode52 #1 SMP Mon May 20 09:32:28 EDT 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
  root@web1:~# uptime
   15:29:46 up 328 days, 13:16,  4 users,  load average: 0.30, 0.15, 0.12

and

  root@li346-160:~# uname -a
  Linux li346-160 3.7.5-linode48 #1 SMP Thu Jan 31 14:40:54 EST 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
  root@li346-160:~# uptime
   15:31:11 up 487 days, 11:10,  6 users,  load average: 0.17, 0.09, 0.07

My server had 1000+ days uptime before it had to be restarted (migration/upgrade).

Do you never patch the kernel for security updates?

Every time I hear/see these crazy high uptime entries I cringe a little at the security implications. Unless you're applying updates to everything but the kernel, but still there have been at least 2 local vulnerabilities in the past few years.

pingdom reports a 99.98% uptime for my DO box (8min of downtime in the last month). To a commercial user that may be unacceptable, but it's great for a $5 box for me :)

Thank you guys for the replies, this is the stuff I was looking for :)

Been running on DO for a while now without any downtime:

18:39:03 up 249 days, 4:57, 1 user, load average: 0.18, 0.20, 0.24

Moved off of Linode since we were down fairly often (to be fair it was Linode's Fremont DC) but we'd also have our dev server go down every month or 2 in Dallas.

Honestly I think it's probably hit and miss and depends a bit on luck and the server your VPS gets setup on.

DO's network speeds and latency are not very consistent for me. I can make a ticket and 'noisy neighbors' are moved to another node but the problems always come back.

I was considering getting a vps with them (since DO is dropping support for arch) but $20/month seemed like too much of a commitment for some hobby work. Now I'm sold. :)

I wasn't aware of this but found https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-will-h...

One of my big reasons for having a few DO instances was the price + having Arch--many of the cheap providers don't provide Arch images. This new Linode plan will be a good option for the lower-end needs.

Linode is taking up the fight with DigitalOcean! With Linodes great reputation I'm sure a lot of people on DO will be trying their service in the coming weeks.

As a consumer I should enjoy the "race to the bottom" of hosting pricing, but as one who wants to make my own *aaS apps, it's sort of troubling!

I have a VPS with DigitalOcean and for some reason, logging in over SSH takes disturbingly long. I may decide to switch over to Linode with these new prices.

Yeah no kidding why is that I wonder...

I have experienced this too. I never inquired but it seems worse on NY2.

Turning off UseDNS as suggested by user grey-area did the trick for me.

Sweet. Thanks, that did the trick.

This may be an issue with ssh trying to resolve reverse DNS on your server - you can check by turning off UseDNS in ssh settings and logging in again.

Hey, thank you very much. I did as you said and now login is much much faster :D

Use promo code LINODE10 and you'll get $10 off - ie one free month! You'll be charged $5 on your credit card, but your account will then show a $15 credit.

Feel free to use my referral code 9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7494470 or link https://www.linode.com/?r=9ed7a90501142890c1c8cfca43f1c872e7... so that I benefit from it too :-)

I'm new to linode. What is their outgoing bandwidth policy?

I mean, is it possible to automatically set up a throttle, to avoid charges when going over 2TB? (or do I have to fiddle with iptables to find a way to do that).

Also, do you know if it's possible to get a /48 IPv6?

On https://library.linode.com/networking/ipv6 they only mention /56

I'd hate to run a HE tunnelbroker just because they don't support that :-/ (I love HE.net and tunnelbroker.net, but it would just be wasteful)

EDIT: /48 make running multiple VPNs very easy - that's lazy, but IPv6 are not scarce resources!

EDIT2: just got an answer - they can't do /48 :-(

What use case do you have for requiring a /48 on one server? That's 65536 /64s.

You can get a /56 - which should still be sufficient for most users needs.

I filed a ticket for a /48 and their support set it up for me. I didn't use it heavily but it worked very well; I basically made my own personal tunnel broker. :) A /56 still gives you (64-56)^2 = 64 /64's, and I wouldn't think you'd want to run more than 64 tunnels through one box anyway.

How does this compare to Hetzner's servers? Lets say http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq12

The only correct answer is: benchmark according to your specific application's needs, since your demands may be different than mine or someone else's.

For more general benchmarks, this is handy: http://serverbear.com/

But really, spin them up and test for the things that your usage case most needs. My stuff doesn't hit the disk at all, so the fact that Hetzner doesn't (at a glance) appear to be SSD-backed wouldn't bother me, but might not be OK for someone else's usage case.

And there goes my DO plan. This is what Linode was missing, and I'm so happy it's here. Thanks, Linode!

Really, this is excellent news. I just deleted my $20/month Linode last week, because I only got it to do some proof-of-concept stuff at work. But the $10 price point will probably persuade me to start it up again, and I can always upgrade later if I start needing the premium resources.

What does everyone use these low-end plans for? Seeing the interest in this thread has gotten me curious.

Personally I run a Ventrilo server on a free-tier AWS. Better than paying for a lifetime server with only 5 slots, considering mine is unlimited, free for the first year, and probably under $5 a month after that (plus it's always good to know I have an always-available Linux server outside my LAN for various reasons, so that makes the $5 a month worth it when the free plan ends).

database replication, elasticsearch, log repositories, headless workers...

I spin up a lot of these low end instances for testing and small projects.

A minecraft server so that my kids can play with a couple of their friends.

I'd be interested in this - how easy was it to set up, is there an image or something that one can use so I don't have to worry about iptables rules and things but can just spin up an instance and go?

Proof-of-concept project for work -- ported a Weblogic Java web app from work server to JBoss on Linode -- worked beautifully.

I closed my account a few days ago when I realized I hadn't touched it in a couple of months, but the $10 will probably lure me back. It's nice having an extra vps or two for testing/backups etc.

VPSes with 1 GB of RAM are more than enough to host a couple of web apps (depending on traffic of course) with Python, PHP, or similar setups. When Linode started out, their bottom offering was actually 512 MB if I remember correctly, and SliceHost (later Rackspace Cloud) had 256 MB offerings.

From a quick peek at their announcements from long ago, it looks like they used to run 64MB as the smallest size, but this was, of course, back in 2003/2004.

Until 2008 or 2009, they were also still using UML, instead of XEN.

A staging environment replicating on one box what runs on four in production. It's only using 650MB of the 1GB RAM so the 2GB box it was on was more than required.

CloudLix $10 1.5GB - 1 Core - 50GB SSD - 100Mbps 'unmetered' http://www.cloudlix.com/nuolaida;1bb1f52aa5 (thank you).

Note, DigitalOcean has a $5 plan, and works quite fine for my case where I host tons of small traffic websites and background tasks.

Agreed. Funny timing as I was just checking back to look at Linode pricing yesterday after having made the switch to DO over a year ago and was amazed they're cheapest plan was $20. Good to see they've lowered it further but even that $5 difference is a big deal if you're using a lot of vms and simply don't need the extra memory from a $10 a month plan. They need to at least reach parity, otherwise there really isn't any incentive for me to switch to pay $5 more a month per VM that I know doesn't need the extra resources.

I've been using linode for +3 years now, and it's been great. Top notch support, and they have Gentoo images!

Just downgraded to this. Half the price of the $20/m plan. Never really needed all they were giving me. Woo hoo!

I've just downgraded as well. While the server itself is invaluable, I've only ever used a tiny fraction of its potential each month.

However, at this price point, I'm considering spinning up a second server just to tool around with (which is what this server was originally for before I and all my friends started relying on it as a proxy/gameserver/URL shortener/IRC persistor).

Very nice. I can't seem to find it anymore on the site; is the discount on yearly prepayment still valid?

for all new customer accounts, no. You can still get the discount if you're still on the legacy prepaid billing accounts.

You just need to hunt for it a bit, https://library.linode.com/prepaid-billing

Edit: I don't know who downvoted me, moderators fix please?

how does Linode compare to Amazon AWS?

Apples to oranges. AWS's main appeal isn't VMs (EC2), it's the huge portfolio of other services you can make use of.

Linode is more of a VM host with a few also-ran services that they are experimenting with (Load Balancing).

If all you need is somewhere to host a cheap VM, go Linode. If you want to make use of a larger collection of services (that you don't have to maintain) to build applications on, AWS may be worth a look.

You can use Linode for not cheap VMs too. A good use case for Linode is high bandwidth sites, Amazon's data transfer charges are horrendous.

http://perks.coderin90.com (we wanna join in on the fun!!!!) learn to code and get some perks

Stop spamming your site on every tangentially-related article.

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