Hacker News Reader

Comment by cloudhead | Hacker News Reader

Summary: Time to switch to Linode.

Not necessarily. This article ignores the "neighbor" factor. That is, performance might be highly dependent on what the neighboring VPSes on the same compute node and storage node are doing. It could very well be that on Linode he was placed into a underloaded system that did not have other active VPSes on it or even have been filled out to capacity yet. It's not possible to tell. It may just reflect a better allocation system than the other providers, assigning compute nodes in a round robin fashion, not in order.

So, it's a little unfair to do a benchmark when 95% of the system's resources are taken up by an unknown factor.

(Note: I don't host with any of these guys, so I'm not defending Slicehost or anyone else. In fact, I run my own hosting company and I'm working on our own cloud offerings right now.)

One thing a lot of people have seen with Amazon is high instance to instance variation. Generally if one starts up a batch job of 10-100 odd instances all doing the same work, you'll see up to a 10x difference in throughput between best and worst instances.

I'd speculate amazon has many different generations of hardware deployed and the EC2 Compute Units do not really capture the differences between these, particularly when it comes to memory bandwidth.

As a matter of fact I ran the benchmarks on one instance in EU and one in US before I started a week long run on one US instance. I simply could not believe the numbers I was getting from what should be a larger share of physical CPUs compared to the other providers and many times more RAM.

I think you might want to go back and run a web application benchmark like you did last time; the benchmarks you used this time apparently do not benefit from having more ram, and this is, uh, rather different from most (but not all) real-world loads.

You should put your hosting company website in your profile. Personally, when a user on HN says something intelligent, I like to check out their company.

He runs http://asmallorange.com. :)

I did some similar benchmarks a while ago:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

Looking more at memory and price, and Linode is a winner there, too.

It's a pity that Slicehost doesn't offer a 32bit system, as that would negate most of the difference, and they are good people with a good product. But I don't want to pay extra money for fat pointers.

Main reason I switched as well. Memory usage on slicehost was immense. Couple that with the huge bandwidth overage costs compared to Linode, and there's no comparison.

Wow, that makes a lot of sense suddenly. I hadn't thought about that, but the 64-bitness is probably why I'm tearing through my 256mb slice so quickly on tasks that shouldn't really take up that much space.

It's a complete killer if you have a large number of smallish objects floating around. (Which was my case).

I switched from Slicehost to Linode and haven't looked back. Their management GUI is complicated but way more powerful.

How so? (I've only used SH)

Do they have good DNS tools like SH?

You can get a good look at the linode control panel at http://www.linode.com/features.cfm

The fact that they still have pages running in ColdFusion surprises me.

The DNS tools are considerably better IMHO. Take a look at the screenshots on their site. It's pretty cheap so if you have a significant amount of hosts with Slicehost it's worth picking up a linode for a month just to test yourself.

One thing scares me about Linode: I can not find any information with regards to availability guarantees at all. Even when they talk about their "datacenter availability", they're talking about which image slots are available in which datacenter.

EDIT: Ok, I just found some availability information in their FAQ:

http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm

"What we can boast about is our commitment to resolving these issues in the quickest fashion possible. Most customers will tell you the last time they rebooted was to take advantage of a plan upgrade. 99.9% uptime, or your lost time is refunded back to your account. "

This essentially means it's worthless: they're only backing it up with paying you back the time your server was down (they'd better do that!). Looks like they don't have much confidence in themselves in that area.

sorry, but I don't think I've ever seen any virtual server hosting provider that went further than this. most don't even mention paying you back for lost time, and instead will just give a 99.9% figure without saying what the rolling time on that % is. To be fair, neither are linode, but at least they offer your money back, most don't.

Slicehost's "SLA" is even sillier than the 99.9 percenters:

Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong.

SLA's are pretty silly and useless, as a rule. :) They're really only worth caring about if they can get you out of some long term contract. They'll never be good enough to counteract the losses you'll suffer from downtime.

SLA's are not useless, they are just useless for commodity hosting.

If (say) the NYSE was negotiating for a host, they would make sure they had an SLA that gave massive damages if the host failed.

But for commodity hosting, the provider writes the contract. There is no way they are going to expose themselves to your losses other than a fixed refund for the time you lost. Not just because of the costs, but because the costs would be a PITA to calculate. If Twitter goes down and alienates its customers, how would you calculate the damage?

Agreed. However, I'd use a different example to emphasize the point considering that Twitter's fail whale stories are legendary. I'd stick with NYSE.

Even "SLAs with teeth" are pretty useless, speaking as someone who's been involved in negotiating them (on both sides). Like I said, the most useful thing you can get from an SLA is a contract out. Even the NYSE is never going to recoup anything close to their real costs from an outage.

You don't ensure uptime with SLAs, you pick good providers and go for redundancy.

Additionally such agreements (essentially "insurance" against downtime losses) are only as good as your willingness to enforce them. Likely you'll be going to court over anything significant, and paying $100/hr or more to your team of attorneys.

but at least they offer your money back, most don't.

Well, my point is that this money back is basically worthless: say, at some point, your server was down for 4 hours, and you pay $100 / month. This means you would get $0.55 refund for 4 hours of downtime. I'm sorry, but to me that sounds like "we guarantee this amount of uptime, and we back it up by absolutely nothing!".

Not that I expect my damages to be repaid, not at all, but a webhost's availability guarantees are only as good as the money they put in to back it up. If they would, for example, promise to pay back a month of service fees, it would not recover my damages, but at least shows they're a lot more serious about the guarantees they're giving.

Anyway, I do not have anything against Linode, not at all: it's just that I'm wary whenever a webhost is this unclear about availability guarantees. I probably had a few too many bad experiences in the past.

While I'm obviously not every Linode user ever, I've had 100% uptime on my ~9-month old slice. It's been an absolute dream.

Are you a linode or slicehost user?

Slicehost calls their VPS instances slice, so it seems he is a slicehost user.

I think he's a Linode user... He used "slice" which is SliceHost's trademark but I see that term used for a lot of different companies.

No one has any cast iron guarantees. I've been on linode for about a year now, and only had 1 or 2 outages (Power failure, and one issue with a host update).

I've had a linode for 2 years and never had a downtime due to them.

they had system-wide (cross data center) downtime (as low as 1 hour, others several hours) on October 7th.

It didn't affect all hosts.

I had clusters of hosts running in multiple data centers (to be certain of staying up) and they broke them all at once and did not email me. It drove me nuts. That said, maybe they will be extra careful making system-wide software changes in the future.

to be fair to linode, this is what nearly all providers do, if you complain, they refund you for the time you were down. To my knowledge, nobody in this price bracket has a real SLA. (at one point I had a pretty tough one myself, but I've weakened it to the point where it's not much better than normal.)

If you are designing a high availability application it is probably prudent to assume a single cluster will provide roughly 99% uptime (if the operators are good). So multi-homing across several locations and providers makes a lot of sense even for a small player.

They also have seriously good support #linode on irc.oftc.net

Do you believe everything you read on the internet? I'm not saying the figures are out but before you jump ship you should really try things out for yourself. Many other posters have said Linode has a 7 day trial period; maybe try that with one of your sites before switching completely (I probably will).

edit: Sorry, someone below has said similar thing.. should of read the entire thread first!

Very low storage, poor memory/$, unestablished company, but good results in a less than scientific performance comparison by a blogger. Yeah, lets switch right away. (Linode is awesome, but the reasoning is poor)

unestablished company? uh, Linode has been around longer than I have. (And I've been around longer than slicehost.) If any of us VPS providers are established, Linode is. (johncompanies has also been around a while.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com