I'm celebrating my first year with Linode...what an awesome service.

I do think that $10 for an extra 100GB is on the tad expensive side.

I have an "unlimited uncapped" bandwidth plan for $8.5 a month on a shared hosting plan and use over 1TB a month so I'm assuming bandwidth isn't that expensive?

My 512 linode has finally grown to the point where I'm hitting 200GB bandwidth per month (php ascii transfer only, no pictures or files) but only using 5GB of disk space and 13% of CPU.

I'm going to pony up for extra bandwidth but it would be nice to get more than 100GB for 10 bucks.

Is the bandwidth on your shared hosting plan oversold? 1TB for $8.5 is pretty cheap.

Defiantly sounds like over selling...wait it's shared hosting of course it's over sold! (I shouldn't be so cynical)

Are you compressing your php content? You can normally save 30-60% of your bandwidth by doing that.

On a pure average consumption level (which totally doesn't work in real life due to peaks and valleys in consumption patterns), here are some typical bandwidth costs in megabits converted into gigabytes (and keep in mind I don't *buy* bandwidth, so I'm going from half-remembered pricing seen on WHT):

Super cheap bargain-bin bandwidth:
$1/Mbps: 3210 GB per $10

Budget-level bandwidth (or very large commits from medium-level providers):
$3-5/Mbps: 642 to 963 GB per $10

Medium-level bandwidth (or very large commits from high-level providers):
$10/Mbps: 321 GB per $10

High-level bandwidth:
$20-30/Mbps: 107-160 GB per $10

Clueless bandwidth (yes, some companies do charge this):
$100-300/Mbps: 11-32 GB per $10

Before everybody jumps on me saying these price points are not accurate, or that "X company is of Y quality and only charges Z", keep in mind that this is just to provide a vague ballpark idea, not researched information to make business decisions from.

So, for the concern over bandwidth pricing, I'd point out that:

1) Linode does not buy super-cheap bandwidth. They don't buy budget bandwidth either. In fact, they don't buy bandwidth directly at all, they get the blend from the datacenter. From what I've seen, data centers seem to charge in the $20-30 per megabit range for their blend, although there are obviously exceptions (like what 100TB gets from SoftLayer).

2) Linode needs to make a profit on it. They're a business

3) Linode has other expenses than the raw bandwidth cost. There are hardware costs, for example; higher bandwidth usage means you're consuming a higher percentage of available resources.

I just realized that linode's bandwidth prices haven't changed since 2004: http://blog.linode.com/2004/01/15/reduc ... h-pricing/

I've started looking for another host

I did a little shopping about and came up with:
http://onenode.net/

While there doesn't seem to be any statistics on how many customers they are hosting, the prices and features seem to be directly competitive with Linode.

I was thinking of giving their service a try, although I find the linode node manager to be rather useful, I doubt any other service has one so nifty.

Looks like they're a softlayer reseller, the ip belongs to softlayer, the domain was registered in feb 2009 I'd stick with the 7 years experience that linode have

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Are you trolling, or just misreading? Look more closely at the bandwidth prices you just posted. 10GB for $10. That is ten times higher than the current price, 100GB for $10. Linode's bandwidth prices have dropped by 90% over the past 6 years.

Put another way, they were 900% more expensive in the past. That doesn't even count inflation. MATH!

Tad expensive... perhaps it depends where you go really.... I can get 1TB of transfer for $39.95

umm I can get 1TB for $39.95 all day long at a very nice provider

Not that i'm singing their praises or anything, but that onenode's bottom 3 packages all have 1TB monthly transfer. It's also a Xen platform and seems to have good peering.

Since they are fairly new (almost 2 year old) I'm guessing they are cutting the profits a little closer than linode does.

For the record, I'm not jumping ship, I've been a linode customer since 2008. But I might use their $10/mo starter plan for testing things out.

Well, try to use that 1TB completely for a few months, then.
I bet you'll get some "You're overusing our resources!" email at best, and obscure additional charges / account closure at worst.
They're plainly overselling, just like most shared hosts do.
Call a good datacenter, ask how mych they'd charge per GB for your server if you'd put it there, multiply, see the result.

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rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

Look at the figures you're quoting again. 1TB for $40 is about $12.50 per megabit (naively), which is feasible on high quality bandwidth when oversold, or medium quality bandwidth without overselling (but everybody oversells, because it's stupid to reserve bandwidth that will never be used).

Linode's bandwidth is a tad pricey, but not out of the ordinary for high quality bandwidth. It's naively $30/mbit or so; if Linode pays $30/mbit and oversells that, it's about what you'd expect.

Too bad they're out of stock...seems like bad business to not have a product...