There are plenty of VPS providers out there who are cheaper than Linode, including some with compelling SSD packages.
With Linode, I know that I am getting excellent support. There's the peace of mind of knowing that when I submit a ticket, someone will read and respond in short order.
A $5 SSD VPS sounds great, but I automatically wonder what kind of hardware I will be on (does it compete with Linode's RAID 10 configuration?), and how long my support requests will take to be addressed, and whether or not the low prices are a sustainable business model.
"With Linode, I know that I am getting excellent support."
To be honest, the poor support was one of the reasons we moved away from Linode. We were in the Newark datacenter for about 8 months with 12 linode boxes. Had frequent issues with their load balancer and most of the time when we told them there was a problem, they asked us to prove it.
A few times we had extended outages due to "unscheduled maintenance"
Prior to running my business on Linode I had a single VPS with them for 2 years for personal stuff. I had zero problems... so YMMV. Overall, I'd still use them again, but not for mission critical stuff after that experience.
> Had frequent issues with their load balancer and most of the time when we told them there was a problem, they asked us to prove it.
Probably was just a request for logs or other such evidence showing what went wrong so that they could diagnose and fix the problem? Might have been a misunderstanding
> A few times we had extended outages due to "unscheduled maintenance"
Hardware isn't magic.
It sucks that you didn't have a good experience, but this is highly anecdotal.
I handle customer support for us in a helpful and compassionate way. The support we were getting from linode sometimes felt like they didn't even read what we wrote to them.
I'm seeing 24 support threads listed in Gmail with them from 5/21 to 8/31 for various networking and uptime issues.
All hosts have hardware and network issues. What matters is how they respond to them and that's why I would hesitate to move anything that matters to a new host before I was satisfied with their track record for dealing with unexpected problems.
That's a BS argument, that's like saying Windows servers are better than Linux because they cost more. There's no reason to distrust them SOLELY because they are cheap. You're getting 1/4th the cores, that's why it's so cheap.
I disagree. Windows is a product, Linux is a project, so they're harder to compare when price is involved.
When you're comparing two businesses, you can safely assume that given the free market, most products with similar features converge to a similar price range. If a product offered by a company appears to be similar in features to another established product but does it at 1/4 the cost, it is completely valid to wonder what costs are being cut to achieve that price. Is it their infrastructure? Their support? Do they pay their team less? These are all valid questions, whether you are able to answer them given the available information or not.
This market is not established and is rapidly evolving. There's zero reason to assume pricing in the virtual computing market will stabilize anytime soon. Plus these services are not equal, he makes a pretty clear point that DO offers less in certain areas.
That is the question. They are the new kids on the block. I plan on moving some less critical projects to DigitalOcean. I'll be monitoring uptime very closely.
I am also one of the happy linode customers for more 3 years, but I also think we shouldn't judge by using the price tag only - constructive competition is always good for us.
I still remember the old days when I switched from slicehost to linode, 30% (360MB vs 256MB instance) cheaper and later 50% (512MB vs 256MB)..
I'm actually experimenting with DigitalOcean for a side-project, but we've moved our main site on to dedicated hardware so no plans to try DigitalOcean for that.
>VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?
You do realise that in the past user VPSs were rooted, Bitcoins stolen and Linode users had to find out from Reddit that their VPS was potentially hacked.
If you trust Linode (or any VPS really) with mission critical stuff then you are (being) an idiot. I am sorry but you are.
Edit: The idiot is a reference to behaviour not anything personal.
1) I don't think your comments labelling those who disagree with you as "idiots" is constructive or in keeping with the spirit of HN.
2) "Mission critical" to one person may mean something else to someone else. Depending on their requirements, those who consider something to be "mission critical" may be willing to accept varying levels and/or guarantees of uptime or security.
And frankly I can't understand how a VPS provider can act in this way and still have people acting like they have great support. As a customer I found out from Reddit before Linode. That's a pretty disgraceful effort.
I agree with everything you say, but if history has taught us anything it is that people want "cheap" and just expect great support regardless of price.
I mean the best example is airlines. For the longest time the big national airlines claimed that they would laugh last since their support/customer care was /so/ much better than cheap no-thrills airlines.
But look at what happened! The no-thrills airlines have been stealing market share year upon year, people are booking whatever is cheapest in the price comparison all other things be damned.
The same is true of retail Vs. the internet. Retails shops claimed that they wouldn't lose market share because people loved the one on one customer service and face to face interaction, but clearly they were mistaken.
In fact the ONLY company I can think of who has high quality customer care/support AND is actually growing is Amazon. But they also often happen to be the cheapest.
Well, the main difference that comes to mind is that in the airline business, the denominator in your "cost function" is probably going to be keeping $30-100 million dollar planes in the air all the time.
Whereas in low-end VPS services, the labour cost for Great, Responsive Service will quickly begin to approach your capital outlay.
Amazon makes a ton of money. They don't make profit because Amazon's horizon is 100 years from now. They are trying to slowly drive all other retails into starvation by forcing them to operate at unreasonable margins (margins amazon is only able to break even at because of scale).
Talking about amazon as if they're a charity is not apt. Amazon makes a great deal of money and judiciously reinvests it.
>They are trying to slowly drive all other retails into starvation by forcing them to operate at unreasonable margins (margins amazon is only able to break even at because of scale).
This is not true in the hosting arena, at least.
Amazon is like everyone else in this industry; when they came out, they came out with very compelling prices.
Well, costs fall with moores law. Amazon prices (especially bandwidth prices) have not.
There are... a lot of new entrants to the market, and they /all/ have prices that are dramatically cheaper than amazon.com. hell, most of them make me look overpriced, and it wasn't so long ago that I was the unreasonably cheap option.
They're a publicly traded company. However you want to characterize their strategy – and I think everyone agrees with your summary of their strategy – as a shareholder I'm not interested in 100 year time horizons because I will be dead by then.
The argument goes, no other company gets such a free pass from their shareholders. Amazon could be amazingly profitable right now; in real terms, shareholders are subsidizing their current strategy in ways that Apple or Microsoft or Walmart could never get away with.
So why are you a shareholder? Or why haven't you attempted to change the policies from long term thinking to quarterly thinking like most companies these days?
>Whereas in low-end VPS services, the labour cost for Great, Responsive Service will quickly begin to approach your capital outlay.
begin to approach? You need... dramatic scale to spend more money on hardware than on support, even when you have pretty minimal support. I spend rather more on labour than on hardware.
I'm so far removed from hardware pricing these days that I didn't want to pretend that I knew how that business functions while pontificating about it on the internet.
Also, to be fair to airlines, they have immense labour costs.
>Also, to be fair to airlines, they have immense labour costs.
yeah. I also think that it's a good example of how some things? you can skimp on, while other things? not so much. I mean, if the airlines show that you can eliminate (or charge extra for) in-flight meals without disturbing anyone too much. You can even pack 'em in tighter (though, some people will pay extra for a little room.) - but yeah, you've still gotta keep the planes in the air.
Another interesting bit is that I'm not sure that it'd be cheaper to maintain airplanes to a lower standard, even without the customer backlash.
That's the thing; sometimes, the cheaper part is just as good- (for example, I think going supermicro is just as good as going dell, assuming the person assembling uses ESD protection.) - but other things? non-ecc ram, for instance, in my unscientific opinion, usually ends up being more expensive in terms of downtime and technician hours than ecc ram.
Of course, airlines are also almost all unionized; The hosting market is almost the opposite. Generally more is expected for less pay in the hosting market than of the same technical roles in other sectors. Traditionally, this means that many people start in the hosting market, then move up (certainly in terms of pay) into a corporate networking or corporate sysadmin role.
> In fact the ONLY company I can think of who has high quality customer care/support AND is actually growing is Amazon. But they also often happen to be the cheapest.
Not sure about the US, but when buying electronics Amazon is usually somewhere in the middle, price-wise. They are almost never really the cheapest and if so, this is usually due to a Amazon Marketplace seller, not Amazon themselves.
Lack of sales tax is US-specific, too which is, for me, quite strange. Amazon here pays 19% sales tax just like every other online and offline business and they end up somewhere in the middle of the spectrum (using price-comparison websites).
How long will the prices stay low? $5 is low-end, not mid-tier.
"Investors are really looking for a couple of things... At DigitalOcean, we were able to differentiate ourselves by focusing on the mid-tier market, and catering to the needs of individual developers that were being completely ignored by the larger cloud hosting providers."http://www.forbes.com/sites/danreich/2012/09/19/startup-ceo-...
You raise prices, in this industry, by not lowering them as hardware/bandwidth prices fall, so it's pretty reasonable to think that prices are not going up.
If it helps, I moved a mail server that's been running on a 2GB Linode vm for the last two years over to a 4GB DO vm and so far (~4 weeks in) it's been problem free (in the Amsterdam DC).
"but I automatically wonder what kind of hardware I will be on" that is actually a good point. Is the underling hardware server grade?
You can easily achieve good performance on some common desktop hardware (or some cheap home-built server) and some SSDs, but obviously, no one would host nothing more than a personal blog on it
lowendbox.com - best VPS deals. Companies are shady sometimes, mostly dedicated boxes that are divied up. Some good providers - buyvm.net has a proud following and are very stable, others not so much.
I'm not sure I'd call buyvm "stable". I experienced a hardware failure while I was with them that resulted in multiple days of downtime (with poor communication - I had to go into their IRC chat and ask to figure out what was going on. They didn't reply to my support ticket).
More recently, their network has been the target of DDOS attacks, etc. I'm guessing this is partly due to their clientele. Also, all of their Las Vegas servers went down earlier today.
The lack of backup options are making me consider switching to DigitalOcean. We'll see if their reliability lives up to the hype.
With Linode, I know that I am getting excellent support. There's the peace of mind of knowing that when I submit a ticket, someone will read and respond in short order.
A $5 SSD VPS sounds great, but I automatically wonder what kind of hardware I will be on (does it compete with Linode's RAID 10 configuration?), and how long my support requests will take to be addressed, and whether or not the low prices are a sustainable business model.