Disclaimer 1st ...

Am a desktop gnu/nix fanatic, the logical next step seemed to be networking and server admin and so here I am. Atm have neither an active acct with either provider .. Linode or Digitalocean. Still window shopping right now. All that said ... opinions follow.

Wouldn't go so far as to say Digitalocean is a Linode "competitor", for many reasons.

a. They don't have the track record, thusly the proven reputation Linode has acquired and kept up.

b. They have a presence in all of 2 datacenters last time I checked, 1 in NYC ( US ) and one in Europe ...( Linode has 6, here in the States.)

c. Already DO apparently has had more than a few "technical issues", like losing clients ( at the time ... free backups.) Not allowing virtio by default, apparently it has to be specifically requested by clients.

d. Imo ... saying provider has ssdrives, leaves A LOT of speculation and/or territory to cover. Ssd's no doubt come in many varied qualities. While it may seem off the top attractive, still leaves many questions in my mind. Ssd's imply faster disk i/o ... But is that so on a box that may be highly oversold ? Guessing any good server admin, will try to strictly limit disk i/o anyway, as a standard operating procedure. Also ssd's are not esp known for graceful failure. Buncha other stuff comes to mind on this pt alone.

Conclusion: Based solely on mucho research and/or common sense. Personally wouldn't go so far as to classify digiocean as a Linode competitor. In my mind, at the time, DO is more a cheap source of vps's I'd feck around with to learn and once the skillset is up to par, move on into more reputable providers like Linode for real world production level stuff.

O course ... could always be wrong/etc. Tend to try to readily admit this simple statement of fact.

Only 4 of Linode's datacentres are in the US. The other two are London and Tokyo.

^ Thanks for clarification ...

Main reason, for including the "could be mistaken" disclaimer. Though still seems Linodes got 4 to 1 options in US. Which is the target audience atm I have any reason to care about, shrugs. For real ... am not advocating either/or ... That's x-persons choice to make.

Only personally doubting, that someone like digitalocean should be considered/count as a full fledged "competitor" for people like linode.

Yet again ... admit, I could be wrong !

I'd love for there to be a datacenter in Toronto (I'm in Montreal, but my ISP's closest PoP is in Toronto, so that city is my first hop), but that'd only shave off 12-13ms from my 26ms ping to Newark, so it's pretty good as-is

A bit of a nit; I know their promotional material states New York, but I believe it is in fact North Bergen, NJ. Admittedly, there's not a lot of difference than New York, NY but neither is between Newark, NJ and New York, NY. I just think providers should be upfront and clear about their locations and where customer data is physically stored.

You're correct about NJ. Not sure about the city, but their marketing about New York is a lie. (or was).

Meh. Linode's "Newark" location is actually in Cedar Knolls. "Dallas" is in Grapevine! Who cares? At the speed of light it's not a bit deal (for most purposes, anyway).

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

I stated as much in my first post, and I agree regarding Linode's datacenters, but at least they are in the same state advertised. There's not much difference in the latency between the locations, but which jurisdiction it falls under can and is increasingly so important to know for businesses. Besides, what else "sounded better" than the actual truth?

Oh. So you did.


I'm rather fond of organizing by IATA code, which puts Linode's Newark location under Newark (I think) or NYC. DigitalOcean's location would probably be similar.

I'd honestly never thought of state boundaries mattering for business/legal reasons, but that makes sense. IATA codes are so fuzzy (and proprietary!) anyway.

/me shrugs.

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Location does matter for legal purposes.

I once had a client with their offices in Amarillo, TX require that the server must not be in California or New York, had to be within the US, but had to be at least 500 miles from their offices so Dallas was not an option. The only sites that fit the requirement were the Atlanta, GA DC or the "New York" DC. Had to go with Atlanta since even though the NY site was actually in NJ, since the "Suits" had a fit since the documentation had "New York" on it.

This was for a "hot site" [no not that kind... ] and was required for insurance as part of the BCP in case they ever had a problem with their regular presence in Amarillo.

Terrible compared to Linode

That right there is a reason not to go with them. Dreamhost VPS is unreliable for the same problem. All that "unlimited" means is that they aren't going to tell how how much bandwidth you get. Nothing is unlimited. The way those promises work is their average bandwidth use per customer is something like 1TB (totally hypothetical), they have no problem keeping up with this level of usage, and so they say that they offer "unlimited" bandwidth because they know most customers won't exceed what they can supply. If sites use more, the hosting company might just ignore them. They could also even cancel service to websites that use too much bandwidth like shared hosting providers, which negates one of the major benefits of VPS.



Same reasons as mentioned above for the buzzword use. You want to stay away rom anything that tries to sound too awesome; it seems very similar to GoDaddy. Company transfer and oblivion is a serious issue. I did a lot of work for Wikkii only to have the service transferred to a company called "Gunggo," which has apperently ditched the service.

_________________
Homepage www.sturmkrieg.com
Social network Gamernet
Development website Sashaweb Development
Imageboard img.sturmkrieg.com
WikiHub free wiki host Community Wiki

Eh, they haven't advertised unlimited bandwidth for a while now. Seems they learned from that mistake. They changed their policy to 1TB for the basic droplet, with overage charges, except for the grandfathered accounts. However, they haven't quite got the metered billing setup yet, so AFAIK, there's no overage charges being billed yet. I think the whole "you get what you pay for" thing still rings true, I've heard a lot more complaints about DO than I have Linode. (At least DO hasn't sent me any promotional emails ;P ) However, for the price, it's decent for smaller projects or for people on a very tight budget.

Why I don't like is how all of a sudden all these DO related posts popped up a few months ago out of nowhere. It seemed fishy to me regardless the quality of their service, the way it went down made me glad I'm at Linode.

I still have my DO droplet till today and it's great value for money. Linode and DO have their own clients and fill different niches.