If Linode adds a $5 512MB option, it should make them much more competitive with Google Compute Engine. Some people might want small VMs that they can run for a long time without running up large bills. GCE has an advantage here because of their smaller option for users who do not need a large VM and are looking to save money.

If Linode adds this, I would use it to set up the encrypting proxy server that we use; it's a private proxy, not an open proxy.

Google charges around $10+ per month for .6GB RAM, so $5 512MB would be even cheaper than Google.

Linode has repeatedly stated they have no interest in going after the $5/mth pricepoint, although there have been rumblings that they might do a $10/mth offering.

That Google instance that you're referencing costs far more than Linode's cheapest package, so I don't know why you think Linode needs a lower price to compete with it. The base cost is ~$10/mth, but it doesn't come with any data transfer, and Google's prices for that are insanely expensive (up to $0.21/GB depending on destination). Google's offering is only cheaper if you use less than ~50GB of data transfer, while Linode's comes with 3000GB for that price. On top of all that, the Google offering comes with much less CPU power and RAM...

If you think $20 USD a month is "large bills" you need to find a new hobby.

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

In perspective of costs, $20 per month isn't that much. If there's a place that has a cheaper option, that's better. Lowering the costs is still always good.

There are a lot of "hosts" that charge more than $20 per month for things like blog and wiki hosting where you don't even get access to the admin stuff.



I ended up realizing that. The bandwidth from Google is astronomical. It doesn't make sense for any sort of major website hosting. The actual cost does come out closer to what Linode offers.

As rumoured, Linode just announced a $10/mth plan:

https://blog.linode.com/2014/06/16/11th ... node-plan/

In fact, it comes with more gigabytes-per-dollar (200GB/$) than the $20 plan does (150GB/$), so it's an even better value for bandwidth-oriented linodes.

In fact, I suspect this is Linode's intention, to reduce the physical (disk/RAM/etc) resources consumed by users who are mostly using their linodes for VPNs and other such things.

Yes, I can't wait to get more spam via foreign spammers using VPN's based in the States.

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Linode is pretty good at keeping on top of spammers. I'm one of the users who mostly uses my linode for a VPN to geolocate myself in the US.

In fact, now that Linode does hourly billing, I wonder about creating a stack script that would set up OpenVPN. You could spin up a linode for $0.15 per hour, watch some Netflix, shut it off and destroy the linode.

It's great that they came out with the $10 option. It's the same cost as the median web hosting option from GoDaddy. Much better than GCE. I'll be moving our proxy over here.



I think a stack script like that would be really useful.

$0.015 ?

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

Yeah, $.15 would be insanely expensive for a small linode.

With this option I can afford twice as many linodes. With hourly billing, I can set up like 30 linodes so I can do yo dawg we heard u like SSH... I think I did that with four one time. iPad to PC1 to PC2 to Linode. Lets see if I can add phone to iPad... I don't think the iPad apps can accept incoming SSH for obvious reasons.

Yeah, I meant $0.015 per hour. If the StackScript could set up the VPN fast enough, it could be useful for an on-demand "I need a VPN through country X, let me spin up a linode for that."