Greetings, I'm looking to buy a new vps for my own private use and I'm very interested in Linode. Currently, the only thing holding me back is that the 512 node is a bit too big and expensive for my minimal needs, as I could easily live with half of the 512 node's resources (so much space! Being a minimalist, I simply don't know how to fill that void!).
Is there a way to get a smaller node or do you guys at Linode have any plans to offer smaller nodes in the future?

There are no packages smaller. While you may be able to find other providers that charge less, the quality of their offering is less than linode. If you pay for a year you get a discount of 10%, if that helps you decide

Heya, thanks for such a quick reply! I'm already aware of that discount, but it's still a little bit too expensive when I will not even use half of the capacity (yea, I'm both a minimalist and a cheap rat!).
And by the way, that's excactly why I'm so interested in Linode: the quality. I hear nothing but good words and praise for the quality around here! I really hate to be doing this weighting between it and money. It seems I'll have to grumble over it some more...

The question has come up with a fair regularity, but Caker (owner of Linode) has made it clear that he does not want to offer anything smaller than a regular price of $20/mth. I would presume that, even though Linode's heavy automation leads to extremely light staffing requirements, there is probably a point at which smaller linodes become less and less profitable until they're not worth it for Linode to offer anymore. It would seem that $20/mth ($17ish with discount) is about as small as they're willing to take that.

I ended up pre-paying for two years, which gets you a 15% discount; $19.95 becomes ~$16.96 per month, in one lump $406.98 payment. It's almost easier to swallow when you can just save up and dump some money in at the start, and then not have to pay a dime for two whole years.

There are VERY few companies that I'm willing to prepay for extended periods of time. Linode is one of them. The only one at the moment, come to think of it.

I love Linode. Paid for a year up front. No complaints.

That said, Rackspace offers a 256MB server that is about $12/mo. They charge by the hour, but that's about what it comes out to. I ran a couple of servers over there with no issues and generally liked the service.

I have warm fuzzy feelings about Linode though.

Keep in mind that doesn't include any network transfer - which they charge you extra for. This is how they trick you. Beyond a small amount of transfer/month, a Linode 512 makes much more sense for $20 bucks and includes $36 worth of outgoing transfer according to Rack Space's pricing.

How people justify this is beyond me.

-Chris

I sometimes see televised advertisements where the product costs $10 US but the 'shipping and handling' fee is $15. The advertisements usually mention a 100 percent money-back guarantee, so long as you pay the same shipping and handling fee again to return the product.

James

/me checks his last Rackspace invoice.

256 MB Cloud Server for 744.999 hours: $11.17
0.152 GB of outgoing transfer:         $ 0.03

Looks pretty darn justified to me.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Just curious, what do you use such a lightweight server for?

I was wondering if someone would suggest I could save even more money by just getting rid of it...

TBH, really only DNS, NTP and (when my one Linode is down) irssi.

I originally got it because I needed a 4-8 GB server for a few days and didn't want the large credit card Linode would've caused. (Rackspace doesn't make you prepay; I'm not complaining about that aspect of Linode (right now, anyway), but it is the decision I made.) I also thought it would be fun to take the opportunity to try out a different provider. After I was done with it, I decided to resize it down to the smallest and cheapest plan and keep it, just for whatever.

I've been thinking about just getting rid of it instead of bothering to upgrade it off of Ubuntu Hardy when the time comes.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

I wanna to say linode256(Just half of linode512.) is very big demond in China.
You can consider customer's requirement.

A linode 512 used to be a 256 a few years ago. In fact, if you go back far enough, I believe it started as a linode 64

It's not likely that Linode will consider anything smaller than this (probably because the profit margin gets too small). However, there are two things you can do to help reduce the cost from $19.95:

1) Pre-pay for 2 years. This gives you a 15% discount, bringing the total down to $16.96 or so
2) Share the linode with someone else, bringing the total per person down to $8.48

You can even split things up further. Generally it's not recommended to do virtualization on top of virtualization, but it is possible to use OpenVZ on top of Xen. Another simpler approach (that requires you to trust your colleague with root access) is to just set up two chroot jails on the linode, one for each of you. Anybody who has root access inside a chroot jail will have root access outside of it, but you can at least get two different environments that let each of you do your own thing, potentially even with different IP addresses (although getting a second IP from Linode might be tricky).

It's been interesting to me to see these posts all talking about how a Linode 512 is excessive for some people's needs, but that the price seems to be a secondary issue. That is, it seems to me that people are actually being discouraged more greatly by feeling like they're paying for more than what they need, rather than seeing they're getting a pretty good value for their money. I wonder how psychologically different it would be if Linode resorted to some marketing tactics like saying they're selling a Linode 256 for $20/month, but are giving people 256 MB extra for free!

I came over from a shared host that cost me $10/month, so this VPS cost has been very reasonable to me. Given how rapidly my support tickets have received replies, I totally understand the diminishing returns there would be if there were even cheaper pricing tiers.

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Amateur, eager to learn.
My hematology, oncology, and chemotherapy regimen wiki

Yup, back then the high end plan is the same as the current low end plan, and cost 4x as much.