I did the math and the cost of an EC2 is much more than a Linode. This is assuming you run the EC2 24 hrs 7 days a week for a whole month. Now, I keep hearing that w/ cloud computing one can scale up and down and spawn new instances instantly. Can't you do the same w/ a linode? If my site gets hammered, how quickly can I go to the next plan or say add a new linode and do load balancing?

Upgrading to a larger plan involves a migration and a reboot. That can take 10-30 minutes depending on the amount of data that needs to be migrated.

Provisioning an additional linode, on the other hand, is instantaneous (assuming, of course, that additional capacity is available in the datacenter of your choice). After that, it depends on how you want to set up the new linode. If you have a script that automatically installs all the necessary applications (e.g. install apache, install rails, set up firewall, copy the configuration files from somewhere, and pull the latest version of your application from github, etc.) this could theoretically be ready to go in less than 20 minutes. In the meantime you'd want to change some settings on your reverse proxy (e.g. nginx) or add an A record to the DNS.

So personally I see little reason to choose EC2 over Linode, except in some rare cases. With Linode you won't be able to fire up 100 additional instances at a moment's notice, for example.

Why not? With the API and StackScripts you could technically do this very easily.

-Tom

Assuming there's enough resources for 100 instances free...

And then if you cancel after 1 day you'll have a massive credit with linode but it'd still have cost you that initial 100months upfront.

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

Only the first time; if you're constantly adding/removing linodes, the credit sitting in your account would cover it, and the net amount pulled from your credit card would end up being closer to the pro-rated amount.