I have to decide in one week where to deploy some small VPSs. I saw caker's "stay tuned" comment about cheaper smaller linodes. Any idea if the announcement will come within next week? Otherwise it looks like I will have to do it on vultr.

I think smaller linodes would be a good option, especially for people just looking for something small and quick, possibly temporary. It would make Linode more competitive with with Google Compute Engine, which is why I'm guessing they offer metered billing and doubled the amount of memory for their cheapest option. A 512 MB linode for for $5 per month would be a good option for people just looking to do a small website or some networking task like setting up a personal proxy or VPN for encrypting traffic over networks. I run 256 MB Debian VMs for various networking exercises, so 512 MB should be fine for a small server. I think it wasn't long ago that Linode actually offered 512 MB for their $20 option.

I suspect tat if they do offer smaller linodes, it would be a $10/mth option that include one 1GB of RAM and 1 CPU core. It's hard to offer half a CPU core.

Nonsense, it's easy. You can just guarantee 50% steal at all times.

Sick jokes aside, that really is about what Amazon does, though it's probably a custom patch to Xen or something. Linode could also easily offer "1 CPU core, but with twice the contention". Though that doesn't fit on the marketing copy very well.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

I highly doubt Linode will ever offer $5/month plans. Even $10/month would be a major change in their stated philosophy. Given the competition, that might be necessary, but stepping down into the ultra-low end VPS hosting business won't be without its challenges.

It's possible. I have seen other hosts limit the Mhz of the core.

Well, since they made the announcement a month ago I guess we all know what we get for $10:
https://blog.linode.com/2014/06/16/11th ... node-plan/

Indeed, I'm quite happy with my $10 linode, and since they come with more gigs-per-dollar than any other linode, they're also ideal for bandwidth-heavy use like a VPN.