Because really, most of these "competitors" that come into Linode's general forums are usually crap, and they don't compare to Linode standards whatsoever. So why worry? If they lose a few customers, chances are they'll come back when crap hits the fan.

I'll just repeat the same thing I said at the very beginning: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If somebody is charging dramatically less than every other reputable provider for any kind of service, then there is either a very specific legitimate reason why they are able to do that (example: OVH's scale and custom hardware) or otherwise something's gotta give.

In this case, they didn't have any legitimate reason why they could offer what they promised for the prices they did, so it turned out that they were offering prices that low through lies and terrible service.

Linode - providing the benchmark for vps service providers since 2003

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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.

I've just spun up a 512MB instance on their free 7 day trial and the speed is awful. My Linode 512MB beats the hell out of it in both network performance and hard drive performance.

Still, since I'm planning on using it as an email server I guess speed is not crucial, but if I was doing something to be important I'd stick with Linode.

(Edited, see below)

Cromulent -- what benchmarks did you use to measure performance? I ran some benchmarks of CPU, RAM, disk, and bandwidth, and found that Linode won only on the bandwidth tests, with a comparable Digital Ocean node performing significantly better on all other benchmarks I tried.

I did the bandwidth tests with tespeed and the rest with Phoronix test suite. Here are my results:



It's not a 100% apples-to-apples comparison since my Linode is serving a couple of very low-volume web sites, but I didn't see any traffic at all coming in during these tests, and there was plenty of spare CPU/RAM headroom.

Don't get me wrong -- I've been with Linode for 4.5 years, and I'm deinitely not here to bash the service, but I would like to see what benchmarks other folks are getting on their nodes to see if my results are atypical. My node is a Linode 768 instance, and I've felt that it's been quite sluggish for a long time now, which is what led me to look into Digital Ocean.

Perhaps I'm just on a crowded host, but for $30/month, I'm feeling like the results on my Linode should be better, and Digital Ocean is looking pretty good, performance-wise. I agree with everyone who's said that DO is probably dumping their plans at a loss to gain market share, and will probably end up in the "oversold" category once this catches up to them, but if I can get six months out of them, I can save $150, and that's not chump change. I doubt the service will measure up to what Linode has given, but I just can't pay a 400% premium for slightly support response time and more honesty about bandwidth numbers. Perhaps if the performance gap was 2:1 instead of 3:1 or more I could do it, but as things are, I'm going to at least give DO a shot for a month or two to see how reliable it is, and if it stays solid, I'll definitely be considering a switch.

EDIT: I originally just ran the disk write numbers, but upon further review, Linode does significantly better on reads. I updated the charts with a breakdown of sequential/random reads/writes.

>> and I've felt that it's been quite sluggish for a long time now, which is what led me to look into Digital Ocean

I've been with probably 7 or 8 since the late 90's. Linode not only is the best performing virtual machine service, it feels like running on a real machine. I don't need a set of statistics to tell me that.

>> Perhaps I'm just on a crowded host

From my experience, that doesn't happen here. Perhaps it's something else.

With all due respect, that's just silly. Benchmarks aren't gospel, but they're certainly better than a subjective "feels like" analysis, and in any event, my Linode feels slower than a comparable DO node. Your experience may be different, but that doesn't make my experience any less valid, especially given that I have numbers showing many metrics where my Linode compares unfavorably.



Well, it happened once to me, and performance improved significantly after the Linode staff migrated my node. Perhaps it was something fluky about the host I was on, but your experience is different than mine. Again, I've been very pleased overall with my Linode service over the years, but I don't think it's helpful to be so dismissive of someone else's experience because yours happens to be different.

I'm willing to consider that there might be something else going on with this host, so my plan now is to migrate my services to my DO node and then configure a new Linode from scratch to repeat the benchmarks. I'll post those results here once I have them.

Your sequential write benchmark doesn't make sense... It's basically zero for linode, which would indicate a problem with your benchmark. It would also be more useful if all your graphs were absolute, to reflect the real relative difference.

It was actually 6.4 MB/s, not zero, but compared to the 300+ it didn't show up well on the graph.

Like I said, I will try to re-run the benchmarks from a fresh OS install with nothing hitting my server to see if things improve, but I do think the benchmarks reflect what's actually happening on my Linode.

interesting results, for me, disk reads and network are the most important for my website speed.
most of my content gets generated periodically and cached on disk and in memory and read many times before being deleted and regenerated.
also benchmarks don't test the reliability of a services, or the support.

My guess is that Linode is using Raid 1 on 15K disks thus doubling read speed and halving write speed due to not using write behind caching, or the cache being full.
DO are using unmirrored or JBOD SSDs.

Just guessing, I could be totally wrong.

RAID 10, I believe.

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lakridserne
Serverfruit - shared and managed VPS hosting, SSL certificates and domains
Awesome servers rented from Linode!

Hardware tests often mean very little in the real world.

More interesting benchmarks would be AB and MYSQL Benchmark.

Throughput to the real world is all I care about - don't care which box has faster internal tests (at least for remote VPS's).

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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.

To be fair, they can't be relied on as Linode can, but I will probably spin up a couple of dev servers to play around with - it's nice to have a scratchpad or two. At that price I can play around with configurations of multiple machines and try things out.

I can't imagine what would get me to consider leaving Linode. Well, maybe if caker sold it and bought an island or something

Instead of people digging them, why not just see them as a cheap alternative offering something different. Who knows, they might grow, they might convert their good wishes to a good business - wish them luck and go on your way

EDIT: Actually I might throw my (low bandwidth) sites onto one of them.