Well it's time for me to say goodbye to Linode again. I had an account from 2003 until 2005 when the small disk space on Linode servers forced me to look elsewhere. From 2005 to 2008 I was hosted at ServerPronto, which quite frankly sucked. It had better resources than Linode (much more disk; worse CPU burst performance, although that was less important to me), but their support and general infrastructure surrounding server management were terrible.

I came back to Linode because although it was painful to squeeze my server into a Linode 768, it was even more painful to deal with the crappy service of ServerPronto. If there is one sure thing in the VPS hosting world, it's that Linode's service and system management services are head and shoulders above everyone else.

However, I have been continually and constantly disappointed in the disk space offerings of Linode. My particular workload for my server is very low CPU and fairly low bandwidth, but more demanding of disk space. This is because I used my server for primarily two things: email for my family, and our online photo album.

Every year or so my server would creep up to about 95% disk capacity and I would have to go in and prune stuff out, sometimes useless stuff that I didn't need to be burning disk space on, but sometimes more important stuff (like the backup of important documents from my home computer which I stopped storing on my Linode because I couldn't afford the disk space).

The unfortunate thing is that Linode doesn't offer disk space upgrades at anything approaching a reasonable cost. To add 10 GB of storage would be $20 per month, which is astronomically expensive. So I've been forced to once again look elsewhere for hosting.

I learned about Amazon EC2 "micro" instances and because of the low-CPU, high-disk usage nature of my server, it's a good alternative to Linode for me. For approximately half the cost of a Linode I get about twice the disk space, and I can add extra disk space at ten cents per gigabyte per month, which will allow my gallery site to expand by its yearly amount without ever hitting a storage ceiling.

I have already transferred my Linode server over to an EC2 micro instance - after alot of struggling, I finally figured out a method that worked for me, which was to create a micro EC2 instance using the standard Amazon AMI, then shut it down, start up another AMI, mount the virtual disk of the first AMI in it, and rsync my Linode's entire filesystem over top of it. Then I took the /boot and /etc/fstab from the running AMI and replaced the rsync'd-over filesystem's versions with those, and viola, I was able to reboot the EC2 instance with exactly the same filesystem as my Linode had, so once I switched DNS over it was is if I was running exactly the same server. I had also tried starting up a new EC2 instance and just transferring my data over, but I ran into alot of problems with gallery - this software is some of the most contentious I have ever run into when it comes to upgrading to a new version. Turns out that to go from gallery2 to gallery3 would require switching database backends because postgresql is no longer supported. And I ran into tons of problems trying to upgrade my postgresql database to the updated version that came with my new EC2 instance. In short, it was much more difficult to upgrade to newer server software than it was to just continue to use my existing outdated software, so rsyncing over my Linode's filesystem onto an EC2 instance turned out to be a much more straightforward and easier option.

Now EC2 micro instances are not perfect; they have two considerable disadvantages when compared to a Linode: one, they are CPU throttled in a very braindead and annoying way; which is to say, that they will allow processes in your virtual server to 'burst' to more than the standard CPU allotment, but then after about 15 seconds the EC2 instance gets throttled *hard*, to the point of complete unresponsiveness. I'd *much* rather that they simply did not allow my micro EC2 instance to burst at all, because I'd rather just have a more limited CPU that never became completely unresponsive when being throttled. This will rarely be an issue for my server because it is so low CPU utilization, but I have noticed that if I, for example, try to build software on the server, it will enter into the dreaded burst-throttle-burst-throttle cycle; and also when photos are resized on upload to my gallery, the same thing sometimes happens.

The second major disadvantage of EC2 compared to Linode is that the 'control panel' for EC2, and the general process of setting up and managing instances and volumes, is not nearly as seamless as it is for Linode. Amazon provides API access to all of this functionality but their own web front end access to this API is very lacking; and furthermore, the tools that are available that implement the Amazon API are fairly crappy as well. There may be third party solutions that are better, but just using the standard Amazon tools is an exercise in frustration. Many of them are Java based and inexplicably hammer the CPU, to the point of also causing throttling on a micro EC2 instance just when doing something as simple as querying for the set of volumes that are allocated to an instance.

All that being said, cost is a major point in favor of EC2; the micro instance with all costs included is about half as expensive as a Linode 768 while providing about 2x the disk space and with the option of cheaply adding disk at ten cents per GB per month.

And for this reason, I'm sorry to say that it's time for me to say goodbye to Linode again. If Linode could just offer disk at anything approaching a reasonable price, I'd never have left, and unless this changes, I won't be coming back; but if Linode can somehow become competitive on disk space, then who knows, I might be back again as I was before.

Goodbye Linode, and thanks for the great service and performance over these years!

Why did you "come back" at all?

You post makes it seems like Linode has let you down somehow, but since 2008, Linode has made several substantial increases in the resources available to each plan, without increasing the price of that plan (including a 33% disk space increase).

Seems like an awful lot of whining about an "issue" you knew about when you signed up.

I didn't think it was whining at all. It was feedback, which I'm sure linode appreciates. Companies pay for feedback, linode is getting it here for free.

Thanks for defending my post, it is sincerely appreciated.

If you have been reading these forums for years then you will be aware that I have provided lots of "feedback" on this issue, and some of it does border on whining, unfortunately. It is frustrating to have a service that is so close to ideal but that I can't use because of one drawback (expensive disk space).

That being said, I didn't think I was whining in this post as much as just giving out information and also putting Linode on notice a little bit with regards to needing to provide more reasonable disk space prices to avoid losing other customers.

Linode isn't suited for storing large amounts of data, no decent server is, why? Well most people want servers to respond quickly to do that they need fast hard drives, so far as I know the biggest 15k rpm hard drive is 600GB.
If you want storage you use something slower, the largest 7200RPM drive is 3TB so you can see why amazon with it's s3 storage is cheaper.

I'll happily pay for the faster disks at reduced storage, if I want space I'll dump my files on s3.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

Already answered in my post.



Linodes resource increases are really awesome; but the disk space started out overpriced in 2003 and this has not substantially improved; in fact I think they've become relatively more overpriced over the years, to the point where now they're 20x more expensive than competitors.

I feel in some ways that Linode did let me down; I joined in 2003 hoping that when Linode scaled up, as it has done over the years, that the disk space prices would go down. But they haven't, at least not at a fast enough rate to come into a reasonable price range. Linode absolutely delivered 100% on all service promises made though; it's just that my hopes for reduced disk costs were never met.



There were never better alternatives for me (I did try, with ServerPronto), but now with EC2 micro, there is a credible alternative.

I'd like to repeat that Linode is absolutely superior to every other VPS service as long as your workload fits within the Linode resources. So I don't expect anyone whose server fits within Linode's provided space to even consider moving elsewhere, as for basic hosting Linode just can't be beat.

Amazon's EBS storage is as fast as a local hard disk from my research. And it's 10 cents per GB.



This sentence is self-contradictory, because I think you're leaving out details. A remote S3 connection would be slower than any local hard disk, so it would be disqualified by your "faster disks at reduced storage" statement. I think that what you're saying is that your workload has a small data set that you'd like to have fast access to, and a large data set that can have access so slow that a roundtrip to S3 is acceptable.

For those who want a large amount of reasonably fast space though, Linode is not well suited. I could have looked into options for offloading data to S3 (it's my understanding that with gallery2 there are plugins that will let you store your photos and movies on S3), but this would have probably required many hours of reconfiguring to get working for me, and at that point, I figured why not just spend the time switching over to a hosting solution that doesn't require jumping through those kinds of hoops?

You need to research better, amazon s3 can be linked to directly so you don't have to use it as a remote disk many sites use it as a cdn.

I have 23Gb stored at amazon s3 and use around 10gb on linode, works perfectly fine for me.

If you host your server on amazon ec2 then you can access s3 via their private network inside the data centre which will make it appear faster for you, however if you do bench marks you will find that ec2 disk io is slower

Here's some good benchmarks http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

If I was doing what you're doing I'd use amazon, it's ideal for serving large amounts of data, I'd not dream of hosting something I need to access quickly i.e. a relational database.

Linode simply isn't designed for what you want, it's designed for speed.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

I might not be understanding what you are saying, but I already alluded to setting up my gallery software to serve the photos/movies off of S3 (linking to them rather than serving them locally). But I concluded that rather than playing that game, it would be easier and cheaper to just directly use EC2.



I think that EC2 is definitely designed less for speed and more for scalability; an EC2 micro instance doesn't even have the pale shadow of the CPU performance of the lowest end Linode.

When I first joined Linode in 2003 it wasn't clear that the focus was going to be speed, or that cheap disk space would be contradictory to that purpose, or that Linode wouldn't be able to offer both fast local disks and big network storage, but all these facts are pretty clear now.

Why not stick with linode, and use Amazon CloudFront as a CDN? I've toyed with ec2 also, but you just can't beat linode's control panel.

I think the issue he is having is not going to be resolved by using a CDN.... he needs more space and basically he likes Linode performance he just does not find the cost of disk space to be practical for his needs.

I've never really understood why you'd want to use a Linode for the above two functions when they're available in the cloud for much cheaper. Personally, I use Google's Gmail for email and PicasaWeb for online photo's and albums. It runs me $5/year for 20GB of storage and stores all my digital photos I've taken since 2000 in 1600x1200. You can use higher res if you want. If you need more storage, choose the 80GB option for $20/year or the 1TB option for $256/year. Ditto for email and email domain hosting (and you get 7GB for free, no matter if you use gmail.com or your own domain).

A quick search shows there are plenty of other sites that offer the exact same features for more or less the same price.

I have a Linode, but I don't use it for online storage - it's not what it was intended for (at least, in my book).

--deckert

I've just signed up for a Linode. Prior to signing up I was looking for a good comparison or tradeoff list between Linode and Amazon micro instance and this message thread provides it all - does it not?

Thanks,

I have been running my own email server since 1998 when it was a better option for many reasons than online mail services (gmail didn't even exist). It was mostly through inertia and concerns about not 'owning' my email that I didn't move to an email provider.

Well, along with switching to EC2 I have also offloaded my email to gmail; I use pobox.com as a forwarder for my domain's email to gmail and to my 'users' (i.e. my family) the transition was seamless as they still have their same email addresses and I just changed their thunderbird config to use gmail's IMAP instead of my server (and I also IMAP transferred over all of their old mail to gmail so it was really totally seamless for them). Honestly I don't know why I didn't do this sooner because it's so much easier than managing my own server. Professionally managed ant-spam is worth the cost of admission alone.

As to my photo gallery, my wife and I are kind of adamant about owning it; we are hesitant to put our album in the hands of a third party that may go under and take with it all of our hard work on the album. So I run my own gallery software and will continue to do so, and for this reason, I need tens of GB of disk space and unfortunately Linode is just not ideal for this type of server.

As I think about it more, it might have been even better for me to have switched down to a Linode 512 and take the time to move my gallery over to S3 hosted photos, so that my disk space requirements would be minimal and I would still get all of the benefits of Linode. A Linode 512 is only about $5 more expensive per month than an EC2 micro instance and although the Linode has about 1/4 the disk space for that price, just about every other aspect is heavily in Linode's favor.

But, since I've already done it, I'll stick to this EC2 instance for the yearly term that I have signed up for and maybe come back to Linode next year.

So naturally you put your valuable photos up on the cloud???

The same cloud that the press has had a field day in detailing how they roll over for the feds. The same datacenters where the feds are hauling out unrelated servers by the truck load on one warrant?

The only way you will OWN your photos is if you store them on a box that you own, in your own house, preferably buried somewhere in your backyard and connected by untraceable power and data.

Even then, nothing is 100% safe. You MUST of course have backups right? So in the end, what difference does it make who hosts your files? And once they're on the net anywhere, you have to worry about unlicensed use - so you best watermark every photo.

Stuff is either shared or private - you really can't have it both ways.