Hey All,

Before I begin you should know that I'm a total newb when it comes to sysadmin - so forgive me now for this question

I've used Linode for about two years now. I have an Ubuntu LAMP stack running on a 512 Linode with about 20 sites. Overall I've had a really positive experience and have been impressed with the performance.

Recently I've been tasked with creating a website that will contain a large number of audio files and will require a lot of storage - probably around 160 - 500 GB. The audio files will be available to the site user for playback.

After reviewing the Linode plans it is going to cost anywhere from $160 to $500 a month for this amount of storage. This is more than the client wants to spend.

I did a little research and found a number of companies that offer VPS plans that include a large amount of storage space and cost considerably less. Here is an example of such a plan - http://dreamhost.com/servers/vps/. As you can see they are offering a TB of storage, and 768 MB of ram for $38 a month.

I would like to continue using Linode but need to justify this cost with the client and was hoping that some of you could help me understand what makes Linode a better choice than a cheaper solution. I need specific facts to present to the client. I was hoping some of you could provide insight as to why Linode is the right choice for the project as well as the differences between the two environments.

Thanks for your help and let me know if you have any questions.

Dreamhost is selling "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth. Which means they are really overselling. You might want to take a look at what's not allowed in their "unlimited" policy: http://dreamhost.com/unlimited-policy/ It sounds very subjective and seems like they could decide that the gigs of audio files are not necessary "or your websites directly".

With Linode, the space you're paying for is yours. You can do pretty much what you want with it as long as it's not illegal.

From a financial perspective, would it be possible for you to host the client site on Linode but keep the files on Amazon S3 or similar?

Mr Nod,

The AS3 solution would be the most desirable. Do you know of any "How to's" in regards to connecting a Linode to AS3. Does your Linode see your AS3 account as a mounted drive? It would be interesting to hear from some folks who have a node that is currently configured this way.

I do something similar (a large amount of audio files + a Linode-hosted application). I'm using django-storages to handle it all, and it's pretty transparent. Most decent frameworks should have a way to do this.

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I have been on DreamHost for a long time and also have a VPS.

There's a big difference between Linode and DreamHost VPS that I haven't seen anyone mention yet. Even with VPS, DreamHost does not give you root access to your virtual server. So like the shared hosts, you are still at their mercy as far as maintaining the OS and installed packages--and DreamHost is notoriously bad at keeping up with updates, even security updates.

I just signed on to Linode recently to try it out as an alternative to VPS for this very reason, even though I get a $10/month VPS discount from DreamHost (for helping them with some beta testing a while back).

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Larry

That statement does not appear to be correct. From their VPS page:

I had to look a little more closely at my VPS control panel to see how to give myself root access... but you're right. I stand corrected.

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Larry

Hi,

Do you have any idea about how much could cost a cloud hosting equal to dreamhost $200/month VPS ? (4000 MB)

Is it easy to move from Dreamhost to cloud hosting ? Any tutorial ?

Thanks.

You could just check the prices on Linode's website... The website you're currently on...

A linode with 4GB of RAM can vary in price between $136 to $160 per month depending on payment term, but the other aspects (like disk and bandwidth) are not comparable.

Dreamhost claims to offer unlimited disk and bandwidth, but of course that's silly, and it's not really unlimited. The problem is you never know when they're going to cut you off and say "You're using too much"

With Linode, you know exactly what you get. You get 160GB of high-speed storage (4x 15K RPM SAS in RAID-10), and 1600GB per month of transfer. And you can use up every byte of each every month without Linode ever complaining. Because that's what you paid for.

Thanks for reply.

Dreamhost is really unlimited, at least for most of us, even heavy users but they are too often down also, it's becoming more and more boring...

So the only problem with Linode is that I have to setup and manage everything myself ?

Is it difficult ?

Thanks.

There's a lot of information in the Linode Library - however some knowledge of the CLI will help

If you've never worked with it yourself and used managed hosting - I hear good things about VPSBuddy on these forums. I've never used their services myself, though.

I've been on Dreamhost for 6 years now. Up until now I was quite happy, but then my site was hacked and the one thing I asked them to help me with they ignored. Several support tickets were sent in for various reasons and nearly all were unread when the person responded as the answers never had anything to do with my questions.

So I decided I'd try out the VPS, so I could have more control over my server. Well that didn't help. Not only is my issue still not fixed (even though I fixed it on linode in mere seconds), but I found out that the costs are enormous.

When you say you want 512MB of RAM you don't actually get that much. You get 512MB of total memory, not RAM. My site, which can run on very minimal specifications, is using upwards of 2GB of "total" memory, even though the actual RAM usage reported has yet to go over 200MB.

So yeah, I came over here and once I move everything over I'm never looking back. I know that's not overly helpful but I wanted to warn you that Dreamhost VPS is not a very good solution at all. Whatever RAM they say you get is not RAM, it's "total memory".

That's probably more of an OpenVZ-vs-Xen issue. They do memory management very differently.