I'm relatively new to the VPS world, and I'm interested to hear some opinions from people who have been on other providers. A friend pointed me to http://www.lowendbox.com/, where it looks like there are a LOT of cheaper VPS hosts, some with more RAM, bandwidth, disk space, etc.

I know the customer service with Linode is top notch, and my downtime in the Newark DC has been almost non-existent, but I wonder what causes Linode to be $20/month for the base plan when others are providing more for less. Is it just the customer service?

Appreciate the input, as I said, I'm pretty new to the VPS world

Thanks!

"cheaper providers" are usually cheaper for a reason, by cutting costs as much as possible and running to Wal-mart and buying up all the clearance HDD's they can find to stock their systems with.

Quality systems cost money, and there's no way around it other than being careful where you buy parts. And for servers, it's rare to find a sale on high-grade parts.

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うるさいうるさいうるさい！

Found quite a few offer a very small cpu allocation (1 core vs. 4 cores with linode) and if you need to do any processing work... can be fun with an unresponsive server.

I compare the market periodically looking at more expensive and less expensive providers. A lot of the cheaper providers use openvz which means you get "burstable" ram which can be good if you occasionally need a bit extra ram but if you need access to a constant amount it's not as good.
Most providers only provide a single core and make you pay extra for multiple, linode give you 4 out of the box this is a big factor for me since I run a lot of parallel processes.

Another factor is disk IO, linodes disks which I believe are 15k rpm sas drives in raid 10 are blindingly quick, I've not found a provider with equivalent performance at the same cost.

Last time I benchmarked (using my own benchmarks since real world benchmarks applied to the specific application are the best to use) linode were the best value for money in the linux world, joyent's smartos did perform reallllllly well but I'm not very familiar with soliaris so that counts that out for me.

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I am more than willing to pay Linode's prices, at least for the lower end levels. I've just seen too many horror stories on Web Hosting Talk about people who go with a cheap provider and end up losing their data or experiencing a lot of downtime.
Some of the many benefits to using Linode include:

The Linode Manager (seriously, best customer panel out there. There is none better)
Guaranteed server-grade hardware (you know exactly how many per box and the quality of the hardware in the box)
Guaranteed resources (I hate when providers try to sell you X Ghz CPU and burstable RAM on a VPS)
Telepathic support (They are answering your ticket before you put it in)
Flexibility (Multiple datacenters, tons of distros and kernels, can create your own disk images)

There are exceptions (but almost always in the "ripping off by overcharging" department), but generally in this industry you get what you pay for. When prices drop crazy low, something has to give. Either the contention ratio is enormous on something or everything (bandwidth contention, RAM contention, disk contention, CPU contention), or the company's support infrastructure is enormously understaffed, saving them a ton of money at the expense of quality customer service.

I've had experience with some other VPS providers. One was a one-man operation, and that was working OK up until he decided to put all the servers on a truck and move them to another datacenter. The servers got damaged in transit. This might not have been that painful of an experience, except the provider neglected to inform his customers that any of this was going to happen. All we knew was that our server disappeared one day, and it was days before the provider responded to any inquiries about what was going on. Needless to say, as the downtime stretched into weeks, we migrated (to Linode).

We also have been at another provider. They were decent, but their prices were a tad high for the service they provided, and they used OpenVZ (never again!). So you get what you pay for, but within a reasonable range, there's still room for substantial differences; sometimes it's just a good host versus a bad host.

I don't think there are any VPS hosts out there that are up to Linode's level of service, at any price, to be honest. Amazon is their closest competitor, and they have more features in some ways, but they lack the personalized service and give you much less bang for your buck.

Amen.
I think Rackspace would like to think they are a competitor, but they're really a joke compared to Linode, and even Amazon, when it comes to price and quality hardware.

Rackspace give you 4 cores at least but they slower AMD processors, their control panel is slow, and their support..hah it's awful their front line people really know diddly squat.

Amazon, never used their support so can't comment, but their performance is awful, Linode are 10x faster (IMHO)

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RackSpace was a competitor back in the Slicehost days. Since then, they jacked their prices way the heck up, so they're not real competition anymore. Month-to-month, a 512 Linode with 20GB of disk and 200GB of bandwidth costs about $20 per month. SliceHost used to be on-par. Rackspace? $57.90.

I'm not a VPS expert by any means since I mainly use my Linode as a test-bed for different things. But with most things, you tend to get what you pay for, and VPS hosting seems much the same way. IMO, the only legitimate way to get cheaper anything is to give up features, since features cost money. I personally don't think Linode includes much in the unnecessary feature category, but that's just my opinion.

Pick two: Price, Specs, User Experience.

In other words: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Specifications

In many (many) more words, this.

Linode has great specs, great tools, great support, and respectable prices (with discounts when you pay by the year). Thinking about nothing but MHz and GBs is so 90s. These days you need more than just specs to really stand out, and Linode delivers.

I didn't think they were still offering annual discounts. I seem to recall asking, though I can't remember how I asked (email).

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Says so here, though:
https://manager.linode.com/signup/#plans

FWIW I'm developing the following site on a Linode 768:

http://www.vpsperformance.com/

There may be cheaper or faster-performing VPS servers around but I trust Linode for reliability.

Interesting site. Thanks for that. Hopefully over time you'll add even more VPS hosts.