I am a new Linode customer who has kept an eye on Linode plans for a while now and the new SSD plan announcement was just the thing needed to get me to bite and try Linode out.

Background.
I mainly use hourly billing providers for testing my custom Centmin Mod Nginx LEMP menu based installer stack http://centminmod.com/. As such, I am constantly spinning up new CentOS 6 based VPS instances from various providers such as DigitalOcean, Amazon EC2, Rackspce Cloud, PheonixNAP SecureCloud and various other LEB based VPS providers. As such how faster my Centmin Mod LEMP stack installs is important to me, especially when it comes down to hourly billing.

As such I spun up 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB VPS instances from Linode and DigitalOcean and did some comparison benchmarks and posted the results at https://blog.centminmod.com/346. Linode's E5-2680v2 processors and SSD definitely on higher plans were faster all round

Centmin Mod installer is based on the 13th .07 beta listed in Google+ Community thread and will install the following web stack majority of which is done via source compilation

• Nginx 1.5.13 via source compile
• PHP 5.4.27 then upgrade to PHP 5.5.11 (php-fpm) via source compile
• MariaDB 5.5.36 MySQL performance fork via official YUM repository
• PHP opcode cache: APC Cache 3.13 + igbinary 1.12-dev via source compile
• Memcached Server 1.4.17 + Memcache 3.0.8 PHP Extension via source compile
• Libmemcached 1.0.18 + Memcached 2.1.0 PHP Extension via source compile
• ImageMagick 3.1.2 PHP Extension via source compile
• NSD for DNS via source compile
• Siege Benchmark Tool via source compile
• CSF Firewall via source compile

CLI install command

To run Centmin Mod CLI Install script, all I did was load up CentOS 6.5 64bit image for both VPS servers and SSH in and ran this one line command and waited for installation to complete and report the total installation time:

time curl -sL http://centminmod.com/centminmod_beta/installer.sh | bash

The Centmin Mod CLI Install benchmark times:

• DigitalOcean 2GB VPS (2 cores) = Install Time: 1361.410512372 seconds
• DigitalOcean 4GB VPS (2 cores) = Install Time: 1399.195370295 seconds
• DigitalOcean 8GB VPS (4 cores) = Install Time: 1345.712748882 seconds
• DigitalOcean 16GB VPS (8 cores) = Install Time: 1029.784321412 seconds
• Linode 2GB VPS (2 cores) = Install Time: 1775.994987934 seconds
• Linode 4GB VPS (4 cores) = Install Time: 951.771001711 seconds
• Linode 8GB VPS (6 cores) = Install Time: 962.287260593 seconds
• Linode 16GB VPS (8 cores) = Install Time: 921.727023983 seconds

Linode's new SSD plans are definitely looking good

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* Centmin Mod Nginx menu based auto installer (Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB MySQL) :: Centmin Mod LEMP Stack - What's New

Yeah check this out.

New Linode SSD offering (Fremont):

$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/xvda

/dev/xvda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 2748 MB in  3.00 seconds = 915.75 MB/sec

vs.
Digital Ocean, NY2:

$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/vda

/dev/vda:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 834 MB in  3.00 seconds = 277.74 MB/sec

Yup definitely Linode SSD is faster .. so many exciting opportunies disk wise

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* Centmin Mod Nginx menu based auto installer (Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB MySQL) :: Centmin Mod LEMP Stack - What's New

Added my first production live Linode VPS server for my new forums http://community.centminmod.com - nice and fast

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* Centmin Mod Nginx menu based auto installer (Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB MySQL) :: Centmin Mod LEMP Stack - What's New