From DigitalOcean's TOS:
"You agree that you will NOT use DigitalOcean's services to: violate any applicable state and federal law and regulation, including, but not limited to, any copyright, trademark, patent, anti-piracy, or other intellectual property law or regulation, or encourage or enable others to violate any such law or regulation. Transmit, distribute, post, store, link, or otherwise traffic in information, software, or materials that is offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental, including, but not limited to, those that: Are obscene, fraudulent, or discriminatory, including any containing profanity, or obscenities. DigitalOcean permits adult websites that abide by state and federal law and regulation. ..."
I think it's funny how they can go from barring any information "offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental, including, but not limited to, those that: Are obscene, fraudulent, or discriminatory, including any containing profanity, or obscenities" to specifically permitting "adult websites that abide by state and federal law and regulation."
In any case good, luck keeping your blog, blog, comments, or whatever else you host with them clear of all profanity all of you who decide to try their services, because you've just walked into a convenient TOS violation. Damn! (Oops. TOS violation. Goodbye HN. Ha ha.)
Thank you for raising this issue. We try to make our terms of service as fair as possible—we are not looking to censor any information or content on our customers' droplets.
As you have raised this issue, to make the situation clearer, the phrase referring to obscenity and profanity has been removed from our terms of service.
Yeah, I'm sure it's not anything unusual. Probably I'd have not even paid attention except that their TOS was short enough to breeze through to begin with.
For me the performance of Linode isn't the greatest factor, the greatest factor (and the reason I spend ~$300/m with them when I could get the 10 servers for 1/5th the price elsewhere) is that support is second to none. I have never experienced better support than I have with Linode. If I have a problem and submit a ticket (which is rare) it's answered within a few minutes, if there's a network or hardware issue they open a ticket with me before I've even noticed. No other provider I've used has ever had that quality of service.
I've been on Digital Ocean for around 6 months now and I have to say that their support is pretty awesome - very responsive when needed. I couldn't be happier with DO so far.
Good to know. I just set up a $5 a month server with a $20 promotional coupon code. That's 4 months free, yeesh. I love linode too, but my needs are modest as all I really do is host a few small traffic sites for friends and staging sites for clients. As much as I love linode, my next year of hosting will go from $240 to $40. And with their prices if I'm happy I now have a great affordable host to recommend to clients.
As a new user on Digital Ocean, I gotta agree, it took them less than 2 minutes to reply to a ticket I opened (so fast that I got a reply from two supporters on the same time) on a question concerning moving my server to the Amsterdam center since it'a a bit closer to me :)
Good support is not exclusive to Linode (_especially_ at that price range). For equally good support at cheaper prices look at BuyVM (NY/CA), Prometeus (Italy), Ramnode.com (Atlanta, if you need SSD/SSD-cached) and SecureDragon (FL). And thats just the ones I have used for my personal use.
I've been using BuyVM for about a year now, and I've had several instances of downtime, including one for half a day, and one due to hardware failure where I lost my data. Also, their support wasn't all that responsive when the server was down.
I'm considering switching to DigitalOcean just for the backups. Are these included in the cost?
I can attest to Linode's great service: One Sunday morning I was playing around with a Chef script, which meant occasionally wiping the machine so I could re-run the script from scratch. At some point the machine wouldn't come back up. I sent in a ticket, but I figured the rest of my Sunday was shot. By the time I'd made some tea and sat back down, I had a reply that the problem was fixed!
It'd be cool if one of these spammy hosting comparison sites actually did some work to do things like monitor downtime, support ticket response times, and so on and so forth.
Good support counts for a lot, especially when the shit hits the fan, but resources/dollar count too, and it'd be nice to know exactly what kind of tradeoffs you're making, or if a hosting provider is simply below the curve.
Going off on a little tangent here: Listings at hosting "comparison" sites are more or less universally based on how much of a kickback the site owner is getting from the host, and/or how good of a promotional deal they can give their visitors when they sign up for that host.
Compared to these sites, this article is chock-full of data. And I don't see a referral link anywhere. :)
Most of them are, I replied a few comments above you in this thread because my startup's goal is to fix the pay to play hosting review space. You seem to have experience dealing with it and I would love to hear your thoughts.
Make it transparent. It keeps me honest and let's you verify. Also using tons of data. I've got somewhere near ~130,000 reviews in my database. Once it's setup, it runs itself, the costs are quite low. The marketing is honest reviews. Something nobody else can really claim, if I cheat, I lose my only advantage. Take a look at the linode page and tell me what you think http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/24/linode
I will be clear, I am not profit maximizing at all. The amount of companies trying to buy placement is staggering. It's very easy to understand why my competitors would do it. I could probably make 10x the money if I accepted their offers. But I don't plan on just doing web hosting forever, my goal is to scale the technology and review lots of things. If I sell out my brand now, who would ever use it later?
The trick is to do both. Create one site that's honest and pure (like you have), and a completely separate site where you sell higher placements to companies. You then don't care about what people think about the profit making page.
...and by so doing, make the world just that little bit worse off by making it harder for people to find and identify genuine information. Would that fewer entrepreneurs were totally okay with that.
We've actually considered ticket response times, a lot of hosts use WHMCS to manage their nodes - which we could make a plugin for. But a large amount of the more established hosts use a custom system.
Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality. Anyone could respond with a "We're looking into it" within 5 mins & not get a resolution for a few hours.
Thank you for ServerBear, I use it all the time and send others to it often.
Can I give you a feature request? Can you track terms of service or somehow summarize them? I would love to filter/find hosts based on how liberal their terms are.
See also this comment/response from armored_mammal re: DigitalOcean's ToS:
That is a pretty good idea, I'll pop it into our roadmap. We've got a chunk of time allocated this month to work on some stuff & that's an easy quick win :)
> Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality.
I didn't say it would be easy... you'd have to have a somewhat subjective metric of "did a person answer?" and "did they tell me something useful?". Maybe you could use Amazon's mechanical turk or something like that...
I feel your pain and while my startup doesn't exactly monitor those issues, I try and monitor them by proxy. How? I am tracking what users are saying about the company, I also break it down by type of comments - support, uptime/downtime, price. I am trying to avoid that 'spammy' feel by making it transparent with all the data being publicly collected and sourced to social media. I'd love to hear your feedback because avoiding the 'spammy' label is what I am trying to fix in that industry.
Hi there. I tried your Hosting Helper at that link, and couldn't get it to give any different results no matter what I entered in the various fields, or how big of a budget I selected. It always recommended shared hosting, with the same list of five recommendations. Is it supposed to do that?
Honestly, it needs a lot of work. It will recommend VPS/Dedicated stuff as well if you mark any of the check boxes. It's been a big issue trying to figure out how to automatically recommend what type of hosting someone needs. The majority of the visitors to the site need shared hosting and don't know it. So it caters to them for the most part. The underlying assumption is developers know what kind of hosting they are looking for on a macro level and can get straight to the data. But maybe that's not entirely true?
I am very open to new ideas and suggestions to improve it.
I've used VPS on dreamhost and glesys for a couple of years now and I don't see when you really need support.
One time I had to reset a VPS but in the end it was due to a mistake I made as root.
Generally I treat VPS like any other co-location hosting operated by a 3rd party. I make sure to have redundancy and backups managed seperately.
The only other situation I can imagine is site-wide issues, which you can do nothing to help with anyways so just sit back and wait for them to get their stuff together.
In other words, if you know your way around the shell and your server OS, the need for support becomes very insignificant.
On a few occasions, the machine has gone down because of some maintenance or some issue that comes up. I was not notified of this and had to submit a ticket myself, after which I was told that the techs had taken down my machine. After asking why I wasn't notified, I was given no direct response.
I haven't had too much experience with using the support at Digital Ocean since they're pretty stable but I don't think it is as fast as Linode. I've had the same experience with Linode too--everything gets responded to in under 5 minutes. Digital Ocean is good to checkout though, they seem to be committed to providing good service and added Arch Linux :)
Well, you can see the benchmarks here. As you'd expect, Digital Ocean does better on IO-bounded tasks (because it uses SSDs) while Linode has better peak CPU performance (because it offers four cores instead of one).
I don't have a lot of experience with DO's support, but my one request was solved in under 10 minutes. Other than shared hosts, I've had this type of support from all hosting provides I've used. If a provider took more than 15 minutes to respond to an urgent request (eg server down) I'd find a new provider.
Depeds how you define quality. Quality as in for developers? Sure windows is not preferred. Quality as in "Lets me do my things the easiest way when I want to browse internet, watch movies and most importantly, have a GUI that even my grandma can use". Windows wins hands down.
After I got my retina macbook, I disabled the 3G on my Cr-48 running Ubuntu (with Unity) and let my 10 yo daughter use it. At one point, all kids got all their screens confiscated, and it sat in my dresser for a few weeks. A week or so later, she started using my old white 2008 MacBook. It's got an Intel SSD and 4GB RAM: far superior to the Cr-48, minus the 3G radio.
While re-arranging the garage, I found some USB speakers and ran across the Cr-48, and set it up for some music in the garage. My daughter immediately wanted it back. She prefers Ubuntu with Unity to OS X and prefers the Cr-48 even though she agrees it isn't as snappy as the MacBook.
The FUD surrounding Microsoft Windows is misplaced. Microsoft Windows is a quality product. It is the desktop computer with the Apple OS at far distance. I can understand Win3.1 and Wind95 were frustrating. I regularly saw the blue screen of death because screwed it up with several game installs. I never had an issue with WinXP or Win7. It looked decent, the apps worked. For XP, I have seen others that go several viruses. They were regularly on suspect porn sites. They never received the security updates. They never setup a username password and they installed any application they could click on. Is it really Microsoft's fault that some dumb users ruin their experience because they trust any website they visit? Plus, that was mostly Win95, maybe WinXP and never Win7.
McDonald's isn't a quality product even though it is mass produced and a lot of people like it. Why isn't quality? Because analysts have questioned the quality of the meat in their products. Is meat? People who overeat the food might develop illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. That is a low quality product.
Microsoft Windows is a quality OS. A lot of people like it. A minority don't like. They have the top leaders of UI design and OS engineering working on the product.
If Windows is not a quality product? Then how do you define quality?
I just switched http://jsonip.com from Rackspace/Slicehost to Linode about a month ago. I was a multi-year Slicehost customer and couldn't have been happier. It was only a matter of time after Rackspace aquired them that I was expecting problems. That occurred about a month + one week ago. (Sorry for the downtime to any users that might be reading this.)
I've since migrated the service to Linode and holy shit, it's such an improvement. The support is great, but even more their admin interface is excellent. Gives me so much more info than I ever had before. It's even a little cheaper than the plan I had with Slicehost.
Just to throw some numbers out there: jsonip.com is a node-based app that supports upwards of 6-10 million requests per day. Lets just say that I couldn't be happier with Linode.
Note to Linode: Do not ever sell out to Rackspace or else I will be forced to go live in the woods somewhere. Thanks.
Yes, I know. nginx is pretty awesome and I use it a lot in various servers. jsonip started as a node.js side-project for me a few years ago, and its scaled beautifully as traffic has grown. Its my preferred server environment these days, and I prefer to see how far it can be pushed. So far, I've yet to hit the limit on what it can do for this kind of high-traffic application.
In the future, if it started capping out, I'd look at alternatives. But I'm not there yet, and I like to continue experimenting with node. =)
A new broom sweeps clean. Results even with VPS depend on who else is using the equipment and what they are doing.
Easy to spin up a machine with no usage and get great performance if there is nobody on it. That doesn't mean this data isn't correct of course but keep in mind the OP is making a comparison between 1 machine at Linode and 1 machine at Digital Ocean at a given point in time. Same equipment or different equipment at a later date could yield different results as the equipment gets filled up or depending on who else is using it. We had VPS's at Media Temple that would literally stall periodically for a few seconds. We then migrated to a different machine at a different data center and it hasn't happened since.
I've been using digital ocean for a minecraft server and vpn. Network reliability has been a problem. Some days I get frequent disconnects, and other days it is fine.
I will continue using linode for my servers that matter, and digital ocean for toys and experiments, just because it's so cheap.
During my resrach for performance / $ I recently discovered a host specialise in Minecraft hosting that offers one of the best performance for its price.
Check Out Simplenode. ( I am not related to them in anyways )
One of the many reasons I pay for Linode is the "good neighbor" aspect the price point brings.
I'm not saying that DigitalOcean suffers this problem but the cheaper a VPS provider is the greater chance of it being used by folks running bit torrent, warez downloads, etc and/or folks who think they need to smash the (shared) resources out of server to get their moneys worth.
Paying a few dollars extra for a Linode instance (and I have 100's of them, so it adds up) is worth the peace of mind of being unattractive to these kinds. IE 'bad neighbors" who will pee in the pool.
Support is also top notch (although I rarely need it).
I need to introduce you to a site called http://lowendbox.com - where scriptkiddies, 12 year old "web hosts" (like, a web host run by a 12 year old) and just weird (sorry, but I just don't get the personality type) people seek out to spend as little money on VPS's - often debating the merits of switching from one to another in order to pay $3.50/m instead of $4.
They then try to eeek out every bit of performance they can from the accounts they "collect". It's a curious sub-culture.
That's a presomptuous (and unnecessarily aggressive) you are making here. I certainly don't want to pay more than 3 euros a month for the use I am making of my VPS (it's still very useful, don't be mistaken), and LowEndBox was incredibly useful in finding a good provider for that price range.
People certainly have different uses than you (and your expensive 100's of hosts), that doesn't make all of them script kiddies and 12 year old hosts.
I've found they're very useful for running scripts I wouldn't normally want to have an impact on my own production VPS. A few times I've had people asking to run a trial of a new webapp (forum system, blog, cms), and these work perfectly for the task.
Heh, that's not entirely untrue - the majority of people on lowendbox and lowendtalk seem to have some sort of strange fetish for running things on as little resources as possible. I've seen some people there that actually use the LEBs for things like cheaper redundant hosting, etc., but they're the exception.
No, definitely not. If your top priority is performance per dollar, then no rational person would choose Linode. As a result, Linode attracts people whose top priorities are reliable support and good uptime. People who are worried about uptime don't run their boxes at 110% all the time.
Fremont is a terrible DC for linode and it sucks if you are not aware of that when you buy a vps from them but I use the Dallas DC and haven't had any major problems to speak of in quite a long time (at least 5 AWS outages or more).
Apparently Fremont is their oldest DC and seems to attract the lion's share of the downtime. I've had 8 linode's running in their London DC for almost 3 years now and can't remember any DC related downtime. The only hiccup I've ever experienced is a host machine having disk issues once which meant they needed to move one of my vms. From being alerted of the problem to having the vm back up and running took ~45 mins with no intervention on my part.
tbh I have no idea as the London DC has been rock solid for me. On the odd occasion I've learned of Linode DCs having problems (usually here on HN) it seems to frequently be Fermont that's mentioned.
As for alerts, maybe they only automatically create tickets and alert users when there's a problem with a vm or the host it's on. Agree with you that doing the same for DC issues would be a good idea.
Fremont is by far the outlier here, its easily their most error prone DC. I'd highly recommend you move to another DC, all of which are much more stable.
Disclaimer: Customer for ~4 years, VPS in all DCs but Tokyo.
I fail to see how anyone can create a repeatable objective benchmark between different VPS providers.
I respect the fact that the author tried hard and didn't bias the results, but I fail to see where he even repeated the benchmark over a number of days to attempt to eliminate variations in what the other guests were doing while the benchmark was running.
As I see it, the only way I would trust a benchmark of this nature was if it was somehow ran over multiple hosts and was able to sample a large fraction of the physical boxes over a large period of time. As you can image, that's impossible to do on S3 and any of the other larger VPS providers
Even if somehow someone did manage to pull off a benchmark like the above, I still wouldn't trust it because it would only be valid until the provider added "Joe's Cheap Video Encoding Service" as a client that's sharing my box. Or someone else who's running a benchmark just like you are?
With all of the above said: I'm sure that there is differences between the VPS providers in how they allocate CPU and IO resources and Digital Ocean may indeed be much better on average. I'm just not sure how you can measure it objectively to make sure they are or that they will continue to be so even 5 minutes in the future.
Which is a shame, because an objective metric that was trustworthy that compared all the different providers would be absolutely awesome.
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.
My favorite site for finding all kinds of VPS deals (some for as little as $15 a year) is http://www.lowendbox.com. It's great for finding a VPS nearly anywhere in the world for your SSH tunnel, offsite storage, or just to tinker with.
That's ok for some, but it kind of annoys me. Where's the equivalent index for people want a VPS to do real work? I'd love a site that would let me compare pricing for say, 4GB/4 core machines.
LowEndBox is a great site, but the hosts that tend to advertise there are ran by kids (literally).
It is also the recommended go to spot that is linked from a lot of "hack forums" for information on where to find VPS providers who don't have solid abuse handling in place yet.
DigitalOcean is promising, but they should probably hire a lawyer to fix up their Terms of Service. I notice they've attempted to appease adult content websites by removing the restriction against nudity and adding a statement that adult sites are expressly allowed if legal. But, they've left in a prohibition on profanity? That seems a bit backwards.
Inappropriate content is also disallowed, what does that mean? It's not a legal term of art that I'm familiar with. Why does a sentence begin with "Transmit"? And please, consider using bulleted lists.
Since their US servers are based in New York, what are the state's policies as far as sales taxes? I believe there was a issue with Linode's Texas hub that any sales to Texas residents required you collect sales tax. Does NY have a similar issue where a server constitutes a physical presence?
The article says Linode has "predictably greater CPU performance". Am I missing something? It looks like Digital Ocean is the winner in every single benchmark other than Apache Static Page Serving.
The X264 encoding graph shows "frames per second" and if it's higher then it's better. And probably he measured the other encondings the same way but mislabeled the graphs.
Last I had to work on a video transcoder using ffmpeg, most codecs were not easily parallelized. That's what might have happened here, even though Linode has 4 cores, core vs core comparison it gets beaten.
spyder is correct, the x264 graph was mislabeled. I've updated the label. It should have read "Frames per Second" not "Seconds". However, the mp3 and flac graphs are correctly labeled. DigitalOcean still outperforms Linode on mp3 and flac, but that's probably (guessing) because the processer are not waiting for the disk and the x264 encoding is using multiple cores where mp3 and flac encoding is only using one core.
For some of the media encoding, presumably higher is better. x264 for sure: when talking about frames encoded per second, more would be better. the rest of the benchmarks are all "higher is better" so perhaps the same is true for seconds of (mp3|flac) encoded in a period. they are certainly ambiguous though.
My thought exactly. Unless I'm misunderstanding, the only benchmark in which Linode came out in front was the Apache static page one and that was the closest of all the tests. Based on this DigitalOcean is a run-away winner which is a bit surprising.
For a while, I was pretty happy with another low-price host (ChicagoVPS)--but I had to switch away (to Linode, as it happens) due to something not mentioned or measured in this article at all: network throughput volatility. Someone or something was regularly burst-saturating the physical pipe going into the machine, such that it would seem to all the rest of the world that my website would be down for random 90-second periods every few hours. This is really bad when you're trying to run a realtime game with persistent connections :)
I'm not sure quite what it was--whether malicious user behavior, a lack of separation in bridge-interface setup making network traffic on the box un-QoS-able, or maybe someone on the box I was on bearing the brunt of temporary, persistent DoS attacks--but I didn't care to roll the dice on another box from the same host, when I knew that this kind of thing "just doesn't happen" with the major providers.
Still, if there was a low-end host that specifically mentioned stable network throughput in their SLA, I'd love to try another one. $7/mo sure does buy a lot of horizontal scaling and High Availability, once you can ensure each node can hold onto the little bit of traffic you send it. :)
I recently switched from Linode to a dedicated server from Hetzner as I found I could get better specs for only a few quid more / month (than Linodes 1GB package).
Linode was a great provider, but now I can manage my own VMs using Xen myself.
Not to answer for the OP but I'm both a Linode and Hetzner customer. The Hetzner machine has been solid and their network is great. But.. I keep the most important stuff on Linode because if a piece of hardware in the Hetzner machine blows up, I could be off the air for $indeterminate_time whereas with Linode, the worst case is I fire up another Linode within 5 minutes and reload from a backup.
Thanks for answering. In my case, I'm looking more at the Hetzner VPS offering, because it's in the same price range and has better specs than the equivalent Linode.
I rarely see Rackspace Cloud mentioned on Hacker News in these sorts of VPS discussions. Anyone have insight as to why that is? Too expensive? Crappy service?
Background - my employer hosts on dedicated servers at Rackspace and we're considering using more of their cloud offering.
They need to call your over the phone in order to verify you are a human being and they need to know what you are going to do with their "cloud" - they called it "Onboarding"
I told them I just want to experiment with their apis and maybe they think I have no business value or I am a potential spammer, so they rejected my "Onboarding" request without any reason given. (So you know I am not commenting from the technical point of view since I have never access to their system)
On the contrary, AWS give you free tier access for a whole year, no question asked.
Our intent with the onboarding call is to personalize the new customer experience by getting to know more about your business or project so that we can then link you to the right resources. It sounds like we fell short of this goal when you attempted to start up your account, and for that I apologize. If you'd like me to look in to this or if there's anything else I can do to help please feel free to email me: shaggy@rackspace.com
I signed up with Rackspace a while back to host a new site I was putting together. I found the "onboarding" process so creepy and off-putting that, even though they accepted me, I went with Linode instead. Like, if that kind of weird bureaucracy was what I had to look forward to when I needed support, no thanks.
Also, their sorta-cloud-sorta-VPS setup for Rackspace Cloud seemed awkward to me. It made the control panels more confusing than they needed to be.
I've been using rackspace for a year now and have had a great run of it. I did get a call early on, but I did not register as creepy. The service has been great, except for one ubuntu kernel bug caused by me using an old image to build some servers on their new openstack systems. That was confusing.
I really like openstack. As a python hacker, it's the bee's knees.
Thanks for the kind words. We were able to get everything sorted with the kernel bug? Please let me know if I can help with this or anything else. shaggy@rackspace.com
We've had an absolutely horrible experience with Rackspace (managed, managed cloud, and unmanaged cloud). I think Rackspace has seen their day come and go (used to be a very loyal customer) and are really struggling. Their tech is old and outdated, they're awash in duplicate controls panels, their billing isn't unified, and their UK presence is completely out of control.
We're moving away as quickly as possible to Linode and AWS.
I work at Rackspace, and I'm really sorry to hear about this experience. We are working very hard to address the control panel inconveniences that you've mentioned and we would be extremely grateful if you could take the time to provide us with some feedback on how we could improve. You can reach me directly at shaggy@rackspace.com. Thanks.
Hey there - thanks for the response, but I've already wasted at least 15-20 hours over the last year communicating with Rackspace techs, management, and senior management (so I'm told). If you truly believe you can actually do something to fix all the problems, let me know.
Like I said, Rackspace's model of hiring great people and giving premium service worked great in the old days pre-cloud, but now the people are poor quality as the company has grown, the underlying tech is horrible, and the billing and other services so bad that you can't justify the premium prices anymore.
Rackspace servers and service (in all forms) are considered harmful. Just go with AWS or Linode.
its because rackspace is plain terrible. We had a VPS go down - and literally no one in their support team even going all the way up could explain why. Finally one of our own devs figured out that it was an issue with the VM. They talk a lot about their "fanatical" support - but thats essentialyl a whole lot of marketing hot air - support is average at best - and even on the managed levels where you pay 100 $ per month extra - there's no real managed service provided that is worth that much. I'd strongly suggest staying away!
Rackspace Cloud is the next poorest performing and most expensive VPS next to AWS EC2. And even though Rackspace calls its VPS cloud it isn't cloud at all.
But Unlike AWS where you get all the other AWS features and services via API and a half decent price if you play their reserve pricing and bid game. Rackspace has NONE.
I think one reason for that is because it was originally Slicehost before Rackspace bought them and a lot of people (me included) thought it went to shit after the buyout. Fortunately, in my case at least, the excellent Linode was there to pick up the pieces.
I was choosing VPS providers recently. I used http://www.serverbear.com for the benchmarks. Then I looked on the web for anecdotal information on how good and reliable the VPSs were. I chose Linode. Then I needed another VPS. It was favoring Ramnode, but they had temporarily run out of SSDs. So I went with Rackspace, which was used by many people, even though they seemed to generate more complaints then Linode.
Shiny new services will always be popping up with great deals and "faster" servers but I prefer to not move my infrastructure every time the next host du jour comes out. Plus, they're just going to raise their prices once they get a critical mass of customers.
Linode has been there through thick and thin for me. Sounds cheesy, but they report on and fix issues before I even notice them, I've only had to submit a ticket once (for something that was my fault), and their infrastructure is tight as a drum.
Linode is very, very reliable. Another thing that many people who work with larger applications than mine will tell you is that speed is not important, what's important is consistency. Linode's virtualization is set up to provide, above all, consistency (even on a loaded host). So sure your site might run 1.6778 times faster on DO, but when the host server is loaded your site's going to be crawling because the other neighbors are bursting their CPU into your space.
We'll see if DO's prices and performance stand the test of time. My guess is their support is extremely lacking in comparison. When everything's running perfectly, this is great. But when the chips are down can you really rely on them? I guess we'll see.
Linode would routinely not respond during major incidents (e.g. power outage at Fremont which was common for me) and when they did they were often not clear about what was happening. Their infrastructure is hardly tight as a drum (Google 'Linode bitcoin').
From reading through the comments, it seems a lot of the pain points for Linode happened in the non-Dallas datacenters. Our servers are hosted there with almost 0 problems. I did a good amount of research on which Linode datacenters are the best before placing our servers there (this was years ago) and found that the Fremont datacenter had a lot of flaky issues (and if your experience was recent at all, then they apparently still have issues).
So maybe Linode's main support system is set up to favor Dallas, which if this is true is pretty shoddy. I'd be interested to hear more experiences from other people across different datacenters.
I've been very happy with DigitalOcean since switching to them. This blog echo's my anecdotal experience. If DigitalOcean would open up a Chicago and West coast DC I could switch completely over...
I wish this had been a $20 vs $20 plan comparison.
Doh. "Due to a high load that we are experiencing with Trial Accounts - we have temporarily disabled them." However email after signup tells: Your trial period will last 12 hours.
I personally use digitalocean for hosting http://en.wikipins.org/ and would like to say that I am very happy with their service and SSD IOPS - something that took me 6hrs. on EC2 takes me ~45mins on digitalocean hosted machines for a half (or less) the cost.
I think DO compares to Linode (or even better) in CPU performance because the software used (for Encoding or whatever) doesn't make use of extra cores. You'll need multi-threads aware software to take advantage of the available cores.
I have a Linode 1Gb (and another 512Mb) and I rarely go over 110% CPU utilization even when my server is busy (the max is 400%, 4 cores being used).
Also, price comparison, Linode charges an extra $5 (for 512Mb) and $10 (for 1 Gb) for Backups. DO seems to be giving them for free.
My yearly bill on Linode : $900
My yearly bill on DO : $180
I think I'm trying DO soon, especially I'll be in need for more servers.
Edit: I'm a little afraid from DO. They are simply too^8 cheap and it's scary. Will they be around for too long? What's their down time like? Will they lose my data (and backups)?...
Price wise, DO beats the hell out of anything. I can renew my smartphone yearly for free just by moving.
I'm just emphasizing the opportunity cost here. I bought a high-end Smartphone the last year and I have been thinking if I should renew it on a yearly basis with the latest model.
By switching to DO (expecting they offer a comparable service), my purchasing power gets bigger and allow me to become richer (renew smartphone or buy some other stuff).
I'm just trying to show how competition, technology and efficiency makes us richer.
He's saving roughly $720 yearly by switching to DO. Most high-end smartphones retail off-contract for roughly $600 (which you would pay if you have a grandfathered unlimited data plan on Verizon or AT&T).
Hmm. They email your initial root password in cleartext, rather than either letting me choose it or displaying it on the site, both of which would be over SSL.
You should probably make it clear during server creation that if you have added SSH keys on the web site, they will be injected into ~root/authorized_keys in the image, if that's what you do. Linode, for example, lets you add SSH keys on their web site, but that's only to access your VM's console.
I've never heard of Digital Ocean. Are they reliable? Do they have a DNS manager comparable to Linode? (I have no aspirations of running multiple Bind instances on my own, thanks).
I might consider moving off Linode for pricing alone.
They've been very reliable for us. Network is spiky (12-20MB/s at times), but otherwise, compared to roughly equivalent VMs (lscpu, /proc/cpuinfo, etc.) they are hands-down faster than AWS. In the limited testing we've done on AWS SSD AMIs (optimized for cluster compute), AWS wins on network and CPU, but at literally 10X the cost.
I've been evaluating them for the past 6 months or so and it's definitely one of the more stable cheap VPS providers out there. I believe they added a DNS manager a few months ago but I haven't used it as yet.
He's the author of LoseThos (64 bit OS, written from scratch), and has schizophrenia. His story is very interesting, if you can get past the wall of computer-generated religious content.
I've been a Linode customer for many years. I couldn't be happier. They have a buttload of locations to choose from, fast networks, and as everyone else has already mentioned: out of this world support. I've even managed to earn a few hundred bucks in referral cash from them.
I had a handful of dyno's, a worker, and a few add-ons running my iPhone app's API within Heroku up until about a week ago where I transitioned everything onto a small collection of Linodes in the UK datacenter. We're launching in Europe so it made sense to bring everything closer. If you're comfortable and skilled with a terminal, you can get a lot more bang for your buck with Linode.
That being said, I am always interested in trying something new. For a $40 Linode you get 1GB of RAM, with DigitalOcean the same $40 gets you 2GB of RAM and they run on SSD's. I'm going to deploy a copy of my primary API server here to take it for a spin.
First impression thus far: fast deployment. From pressing the submit button to shelling in took literally less than a minute.
Unfortunately though the latency on the box seems a bit high. There is a bit of lag in the terminal, something I do not experience with Linode's UK datacenter.
I'm in Sweden on a 4G modem, here's a traceroute between me and both boxes. DigitalOcean is first, followed by Linode.
### DigitalOcean – Amsterdam Datacenter
traceroute to 192.81.221.48 (192.81.221.48), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 tiny (192.168.0.1) 10.573 ms 1.658 ms 1.393 ms
2 10.9.14.115 (10.9.14.115) 33.218 ms 24.250 ms 59.223 ms
3 10.9.14.113 (10.9.14.113) 51.009 ms 35.878 ms 30.836 ms
4 90-229-25-24.link.se.telia.net (90.229.25.24) 33.153 ms 30.662 ms 34.999 ms
5 s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.96) 33.962 ms
s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.228) 74.544 ms
s-b2-link.telia.net (213.155.133.147) 77.395 ms
6 s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.246.148) 36.792 ms
s-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.234) 29.966 ms
s-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.133.142) 31.228 ms
7 kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.134.141) 151.952 ms
kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.248.65.29) 42.281 ms
kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.178) 123.130 ms
8 kbn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.249.51) 39.032 ms 45.868 ms
kbn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.245.159) 44.708 ms
9 te4-7.ccr01.cph01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.14.33) 67.971 ms 60.729 ms 96.055 ms
10 te0-7-0-0.ccr22.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.62.117) 132.391 ms
te0-7-0-6.ccr21.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.2.149) 97.568 ms
te0-7-0-0.ccr22.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.62.117) 137.713 ms
11 te0-0-0-3.mpd21.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.50.57) 101.141 ms 89.885 ms
te0-0-0-3.mpd22.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.1.101) 147.596 ms
12 te2-1.mag01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.48.62) 104.005 ms
te1-1.mag01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.0.242) 52.704 ms 127.224 ms
13 nxs-internet.demarc.cogentco.com (149.6.128.6) 98.294 ms 130.686 ms 142.924 ms
14 192.81.221.48 (192.81.221.48) 148.148 ms 107.753 ms 134.880 ms
and now Linode...
### Linode – London, UK Datacenter
traceroute to blitzen.dbld8.com (176.58.120.7), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 tiny (192.168.0.1) 9.671 ms 2.313 ms 1.411 ms
2 10.9.14.115 (10.9.14.115) 32.881 ms 21.701 ms 34.152 ms
3 10.9.14.113 (10.9.14.113) 36.843 ms 21.986 ms 26.750 ms
4 90-229-25-24.link.se.telia.net (90.229.25.24) 26.421 ms 24.166 ms 26.982 ms
5 s-b2-link.telia.net (213.155.134.55) 27.415 ms
s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.248.199) 33.347 ms 37.758 ms
6 s-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.254.114) 34.993 ms
s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.254.58) 92.886 ms
s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.247.216) 38.297 ms
7 hbg-bb1-link.telia.net (213.155.135.236) 83.932 ms
hbg-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.251.41) 36.076 ms
hbg-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.147) 47.708 ms
8 ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.201) 67.937 ms
ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.132.247) 106.801 ms
ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.169) 63.880 ms
9 ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.249.170) 54.534 ms
ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.251.237) 101.259 ms
ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.247.25) 64.316 ms
10 telecity-ic-150799-ldn-b3.c.telia.net (80.239.167.94) 59.564 ms 70.329 ms 64.835 ms
11 85.90.238.70 (85.90.238.70) 70.606 ms 68.463 ms 60.808 ms
12 212.111.33.234 (212.111.33.234) 69.237 ms 60.927 ms 70.726 ms
13 li522-7.members.linode.com (176.58.120.7) 65.147 ms 60.434 ms 62.646 ms
Quite a difference here. Geographically Sweden is closer to Amsterdam, but i'd imagine there is a fat pipe crossing the North Sea that is faster than being routed through Northern Europe to AMS.
Linode appears to have a BGP mix of Level3, NTT, Time Warner, KDDI, and Telia vs DigitalOcean's BGP mix of Level3 and Cogent. Linode hands down has the better network connectivity.
Linode is my favorite provider on the web right now. For us, Linode is the best. It could be overkill for someone else, or a variety of other reasons unrelated to the speed of their hardware. For example, my neighbor only buys stuff from women-owned businesses, no exceptions.
I don't think anyone can be a "hands down winner", because it varies based on the needs of the user. Businesses frequently use Cogent for bandwidth at the lowest price point. Their business model could even depend on it. Other businesses require low latency, service level agreements, etc.
Hmm, this seems a bit odd. I get ~16ms lat on ping from the Digital Ocean Amsterdam center (I'm in Denmark). I tried their US one which gave me ~100ms. From what I gather from your traceroute, this is a lot faster than what you experience?
It depends. Some people get a decent speed in both DC. Some dont. For a hosting company you want most people to be in the great speed camp, and good speed for the rest.
you should use mtr and something like gist.github.com or pastie. ICMP over mobile networks is quite unreliable. Even some linode responses vary from 54 to 101ms…
One of the key featuers of Linode (at least it was when I used them) is the control panel which allows you to manage various vdisks (and even various whole OS installs on those vdisks if you so desire, though not with several running on a single account) within the space limits of your account. That and the general support. At the time I used Linode very few other hosts at that price-for-stuff value point offered such control. Neither of these things are mentioned in the comparison so I don't know if DO offers similar - obviously it isn't important to this reviewer but that sort of thing is for some.
I currently use one of the cheap servers from http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ (9UKP/mo for 2Gb RAM, 500Gb space and 5Tb bandwidth (after 5Tb you are not cut off but bandwdth is throttled, though I've never come close to that to see how much effect it has)). Excellent if you don't need any hand holding (it is a completely self managed service) or much support (I've not needed to contact support so can't comment, but again "completely self manged"), or a very specific OS/kernel (they have their own builds, getting stock versions intalled is possible but a bit of a faf), you want a pile of space, and your tasks are not CPU intensive (the cheaper machines only have Atom or Celeron processors). Having your own dedicated drive makes I/O contention a moot point unlike with a VPS (though depending on how loaded DigitalOcean's host servers are they may still outperform this for some I/O patterns due to the use of SSDs).
I host with Ramnode.com, and I love their prices and SSDs. Not one issue yet except the odd DDoS attack. Used the server bear coupon code to get 31% off my services for life.
I wonder how it stacks up to DigitalOcean. I also have a linode server, but I'm thinking of cancelling because it is too expensive, but it is solid as a rock.
Not a bad deal for Digital Ocean especially when there are $20 off promo codes available. Assuming you can use it for 4 months, it's essentially a 4 month trial. I found a few codes with a Google search. ;)
It's still just 512 megs of RAM. I'd love to find a VPS provider that gives me like 2 gigs of RAM, and charged me by how much of that was hot during the month. It's frustrating to have to pay in advance for the maximum amount of RAM I might need.
I'd like to be able to leave processes running that might have a lot of data mapped into their address spaces, but for much of the time that data can safely be paged out to disk and not used. When I come and use the machine, I'd like to have a large amount of RAM, but when I'm not using it, I don't want to pay for it.
It's just capacity planning - they can migrate me around as needed, though obviously they'd like to minimize the number of times that happens. Maybe there are periods where I spin up but don't get the full memory - that's OK, I'm only paying for what I use.
We have all of this virtualization technology but I still have to make hard decisions about size ahead of time. There are lots of providers that will let me burst CPU, I'd like to burst RAM. For people building small apps that get occasional usage, having more flexibility on memory would be a huge boon.
I've been with Linode for a few years, nothing to complain about. Like others have mentioned, super fast support, good wiki pages for setting things up, and good IRC channel.
With RAM prices being what they are, Linode should price their RAM more competitively and offer SSD for those who want it, at a reasonable price.
On the other hand they also have a data centre in Tokyo, which means noticeably better pings to Asia than DigitalOcean.
In any case, will give DigitalOcean a try for a couple of projects.
Might also want to try OVH and Hetzner for dedicated servers for about £50/month.
Very confused, but I understand brand loyalty. Linode scorched Slicehost at one point. I like the idea of DigitalOcean and I'm moving all my non critical/beta/alpaha sites to DigitalOcean.
There is routine 10x variation in disk performance between different VPS's on Linode. It's luck of the draw and performance will change (i.e. get worse) over time.
You'd need to provision and benchmark a bunch of Linodes to get meaningful numbers.
That's one of a dozen ways in which a VPS is not like a real server.
5 second benchmark which corresponds well to real-life disk performance:
There might be better performing hosting providers, and there are definitely lower cost providers than Linode, but I don't love them like I love Linode.
It's not entirely rational, but if you ask around, I'd wager most people who use Linode love it.
Maybe it's because it used to be just caker doing everything, or the free disk / memory upgrades he kept handing out. I remember him asking about LASIK surgery in the (very helpful) forums; there's a family feeling to it. It's the anti-Rackspace. It's home.
So true. I moved a mail server I manage over to digital ocean recently because it needed more RAM and the price difference between a 4GB DO instance and a 4GB Linode one was just too much to swallow.
Very happy with DO so far but... I still have 7 1GB and 512MB vms with Linode and no plans to move any of them because I just can't bring myself to sever all ties with Linode :D
I've been a happy Linode customer as well. But being able to deploy silly side projects like this for just $5/mo is really cool. This is my 3rd DO VPS and they've all been great. I had a PostgreSQL problem on another one and my support requests were replied to really fast.
I have both Linode 512 and DigitalOcean 512 VPS. Both VPS are running the same version of Debian, same version of Apache (Apache/2.2.16 (Debian), same apache2.conf files, list of loaded modules are same. For benchmark is used same web site on localhost. (simple joomla site).
Results are quite different and I can't figure why. Linode has much more "Requests per second".
#linode London
Server Software: Apache/2.2.16
Server Hostname: localhost
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 7483 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 33.140 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 8037000 bytes
HTML transferred: 7483000 bytes
Requests per second: 30.18 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 662.791 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 33.140 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 236.84 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 2.1 0 16
Processing: 118 658 1143.2 487 19006
Waiting: 113 655 1138.1 485 19006
Total: 118 659 1143.2 488 19006
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 488
66% 563
75% 616
80% 658
90% 779
95% 932
98% 3635
99% 6406
100% 19006 (longest request)
#DigitalOcean Amsterdam
Server Software: Apache/2.2.16
Server Hostname: localhost
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 7483 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 118.087 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 8032000 bytes
HTML transferred: 7483000 bytes
Requests per second: 8.47 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 2361.734 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 118.087 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 66.42 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 4.0 0 33
Processing: 1256 2355 234.1 2284 3604
Waiting: 1256 2328 232.5 2264 3604
Total: 1256 2356 234.1 2284 3604
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 2284
66% 2328
75% 2412
80% 2500
90% 2666
95% 2768
98% 2877
99% 3204
100% 3604 (longest request)
Maybe this is the reason, (from DigitalOcean):
Backup
User is solely responsible for the preservation of User's Data. Even with respect to Data as to which User contracts for backup services, DigitalOcean shall have no responsibility to preserve Data, the service is provided as is, without warranty.
That is pretty much the case with every VPS provider in my experience. Many will make best efforts but hardly any will offer any garantees so officially distater recovery is your responsibility not their's.
How is it possible that amazon charge $0.050 per GB (for more than 350 TB / month ) while DigitalOcean charge $0.02 per GB for each extra GB and 0.005$ / GB for the 5$ plan?
How can they make any profit?
Given you can get 1Gbps from Cogent for ~1K/mo (at least that's the price I heard last time they were having a sale) that works out to $0.003/GB, so both are making a massive amount of profit.
Contact your local cogent rep. If your dedicated server is in a building with a cogent feed you can probably get a line to it. I'm not sure their current non sales pricing and that might require a 10Gbps commit.
Has nobody else noticed that the benchmarks use ext3 for Linode and ext4 for DigitalOcean? Not that the SSD's won't outperform hard drives anyway, but that's one extra variable that will skew results.
Linode customer for years. I'll buy 4 servers and give digital ocean a shot just because it seems the community approves the service and they accept paypal (Linode doesn't and it bothers me)
Yes, you can over-subscribe RAM either through ballooning or just by over-subscribing the host.
Both KVM and Xen use QEMU for their device models so the machine they emulate is very similar (at least in HVM mode). Xen and KVM use different paravirtual I/O drivers but everything I've ever seen indicates that I/O performance is better in KVM.
Xen PV guests are a mixed bag. On the one hand, they work on boxes without virtualization hardware (which are rare anymore) but on pre-Nehalem/Barcelona processors, they are much slower than using HVM (especially 64-bit).
I've never seen a good Xen HVM benchmark either comparatively speaking... Of course, I'm more than a little biased :-)
How are the "requests per second" measured? (I assume that something like `ab` is used, but I'm wondering if it run on the same machine or from an external machine ...)
"are DigitalOcean making a profit?" -- pandodaily is mentioned on the home page, so I'm guessing no.
Let's suppose for a moment that I actually wanted to do a performance comparison for my own purposes (which means I actually care about the actual results). How would I do it right?
When Digital Ocean has a west coast datacenter, I will give them another look. Latency has a larger perceived impact to users than any of those benchmarks given.
Performance Benchmarks for what.. Are these Benchmarks for a Remote Server for Work.. Or is it as a Webserver..
Benchmark does not prove thing for Webserver other than Disk I/O is greater with Digital ocean. If Disk I/O was so critical then no one would go with AWS since they have got the worst of all.
Benchmarks need to prove a thing in its application, unless it does its waste of time.
The methodology is a well-documented "Phoronix Benchmark Suite".
However, why in the world is this methodology relevant for the hosting service? Would any of you really do any x264 encoding on an outsourced server, or would you use your desktop?
I would much rather get apache running, and run the ab (Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool).
I might, actually. A huge part of the reason I own a VPS is precisely because I don't own a desktop, and having a persistent networked machine comes in handy often.
It amazes me that people on here are so quick to forget about the Linode Bitcoin incident.
Because it is during security incidents that you really find out what type of company you are dealing with. With Cloudflare they informed users quickly, were transparent about what happened and took their licks. With Linode they didn't inform users and we still don't know what happened.
As a former customer I would never, ever use Linode again.
I'd wager (though not with bitcoins) that Linode would be entirely happy to not have bitcoin-related apps running on their systems either, considering the probability of attracting highly motivated attackers.
I'll agree they're obviously in no mood to make public comments about this, but I think that might be part of that
I think they're more than happy to not be a destination host for users that want to store unencrypted bitcoin wallets on hosts. I'd certainly never store anything that translates into money on a public host.
I think it's funny how they can go from barring any information "offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental, including, but not limited to, those that: Are obscene, fraudulent, or discriminatory, including any containing profanity, or obscenities" to specifically permitting "adult websites that abide by state and federal law and regulation."
In any case good, luck keeping your blog, blog, comments, or whatever else you host with them clear of all profanity all of you who decide to try their services, because you've just walked into a convenient TOS violation. Damn! (Oops. TOS violation. Goodbye HN. Ha ha.)