Dare I ask? Any plans on executing this?

I'm sorry but I find this whole thread asinine. The products are offered at a particular price, if you want more memory pay for it. I pay $40 per month for 128MB -- LAMP only, I don't try running mail -- and consider this a true bargain for a fast root system with excellent uptime and bandwidth and attentive support. Ever tried pricing a dedicated machine?

I am not remotely well off but still never cease to be amazed at the lengths some people will go to try and make 64 MB work. If it works for you, great, but for those who find it too little your choices are simple: reduce your needs or upgrade your system.

I was especially appalled at the attempt to dictate Linode.com profit margins. This is not only arrogant and meddling but futile. You can never know the full and true amount of time put in by caker in learning, time for configuration, time and expenses for business startup and maintenence, legal expenses, hosting costs, depreciation, non CPU capital expenses, interest, taxes, fees, payroll for other employees, time to configure distribution images, time for Xen testing, cost of insurance, etc. Thus you can never know the expense side of the ledger and don't think reading numbers off the Dell website is any substitute. Without the expenses you cannot calculate profit margins.

And even if you could, this is not a cooperative. If caker was somehow able to achieve 50% full net margins AND if this meant he made in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself AND he had already recouped and paid off all startup costs -- and I'll bet dollars to donuts zero of these conditions is now in effect -- but even if all that was true, I still would not ask him to give me twice as much for the same price. The free upgrades here are relentless so I have no doubt the value created by Moore's law is getting passed along to the customer but even on Internet time asking for double memory is more than a bit much.

Let's reward caker's constant free upgrades by NOT pawing relentlessly at his pocket for more and by recognizing that customer relations is a two way street.

Sigh. Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now.

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update: Just noticed this whole thread is half a year old, except for the last two posts. Oh well.

Whoa there!! Take it easy. If you notice above, caker said that he is anticipating providing upgrades so all I was doing was ask.

I happen to work for a Internet security services company where I serve as a technical account manager. What was posed here is not uncommon for anything that is sold. As time goes on, raw materials get cheaper. As a result, customers get more and suppliers purchase materials for less. Caker can make more margin at the same time being competitive and boosting client loyalty with extras.

When my clients ask for upgrades and enhancements, I dont fly off the handle. I say "yes this is coming" or "no we wont provide this", then providing business reasons for either outcome. Most people are in the business of making money so I'm confident Caker will do what is best for his business.

If you noticed, this is a Feature Request forum, not a take the supplier hostage and threaten to defect forum. So I, you, or anyone else can request features. It doesnt mean that we'll get it. If caker didnt care, this forum would not exist.

I noticed that i needed to upgrade to a Linode 128 (which I did), and then I simply wanted to ask if there were memory upgrades coming in the near future, albeit I already upgraded.

Anyway, that is all. I am not trying to be a pest, I am just doing what any other client would do in a long term partnership.

To clarify, I am a very happy Linode customer. Caker runs a top notch operation in my opinion and I have no intention of leaving!

My 2 cents,

Ron

My point of view is: overall, I've been quite happy with the service here (except for that power outage, but that was The Planet's fault!). I've been very pleasantly surprised with the disk space and transfer upgrades; if Chris sees fit to provide further upgrades, great, but if it doesn't happen, it's not a big deal for me. About the only gripe I have is with the I/O limiter and its effect on BitTorrent seeding, but that's a necessity with a shared system, so I'm not going to complain too much.

_________________
Bus error (passengers dumped)

First off, I've been with Linode for well over a year now. Love it.

Without any further comments, please take a look at iWeb's (http://iweb.ca/en/index.php?page=dedie) hosting services .. especially the MyServerNow offers. I have purchased there a Xeon P4 HT 3.0 GHZ, 2 GB Ram, 80 GB RAID 1, 2000 (two thousand) GB monthly transfer and 8 IPs ... 165 USD/month. The customer and tech support are top notch and they have some other nice features too (e.g. remote reboot or 1GB backups). Network access is a *lot* faster than Linode's.

I'm thinking of dumping my beloved Linode 128 and buy one of iWeb's $59 1.4 GHZ Celeron, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hdd instead. I think i've grown attached to my Linode and to the nice bells and whistles of the Linode's web interface but then again, I hardly touched that in the last 6 months.

I'm not trying to make "bad publicity" here, what I'm saying is that Linode might want to consider revising their prices and/or services ... people will soon go after real dedicated servers with more ram/hdd/ghz at (almost) the same price as Linode's s companies like iWeb are popping up all over the net and continue to lower their prices.

Oh, I'm aware of what kind of replies I might get with this post

there's a big difference between paying $165 a month and paying $19.95 a month, not to mention there being a management difference between a VPS and a Dedi. And as for 'network access' I think due to the fact that it's in canadia might help there, there's nothing wrong with Linodes network, it lies with *your* network.

If you want to leave, leave, pack your bags and go. And "well like but if they did this and that and like omg" is just another way of saying "Gimmie this or else".

In my eyes, Linode is still has very competitive pricing as far as bang for your buck goes.

and I'll stop there, want to keep this thread G rated, cheers.

All that was asked was how Caker's already stated plans for increasing memory allocations was coming along.

Hardware gets cheaper over time; it's perfectly reasonable to expect that we'd get more hardware for our $ as time goes on (as we have been). It's also reasonable to see at what rate other providers have been increasing features.

I do think it's inevitable that some day, at Linode, we'll get better hardware for the same monthly fee we pay now.

It's still a good deal here. I have a dedicated server in addition to my linode. You can't compare the two. You can do things for free with the linode web interface that would cost extra money with any dedicated provider. Also, I believe our disk space is on raid at linode, and the cheaper dedicated servers that seem to compete in terms of hardware are not. If you use your linode for an type of commercial application, even email, the extra down time from failed hardware would be costly also.

I tell you, I sweat bullets every time I restart a remote dedicated server. One pre-ssh startup failure and I'm toast, I gotta either shell out bucks to have them fix on-site, or shell out bucks to rent console access, or shell out bucks to do a fresh install and then re-install everything from backups. Not to mention the down time.

Having said that, I think it's inevitable that some day the dedicated providers will have management tools as automated as linode's, but by then, I bet we'll all have our free memory boost.

And thinking about it, it doesn't seem like it would be that easy to double the memory of all linode users. There must be hundreds of linode users on machines that don't now have enough RAM for it. They'd need to either take em offline and upgrade, or shift users to new machines. I see in the linode plans that they're gunna move toward being able to transparently migrate users between hosts, but right now it seems to be pretty difficult and labor intensive to do that.

Given how fast technology and prices change, I think it's very wise for Linode to spend time on a project to be able to quickly and transparently shift users between hardware, instead of, for example, undertaking a major project to implement a one-time memory upgrade.

I'm willing to give em some time.

Ron, you have my apologies, I didn't realize yours was the only new post and I was replying mostly to the ones that came before. I did realize and update my node to this effect but I can see how you feel jumped on.

No problem ryantate. Thanks for your reply.

Ron