It blows my mind that this is happening. Back in the day, there were a thousand cheapo VPS providers out there with similar rates. But DO were the ones to put up an extremely simplified interface to spinning up VMs and that has seen them skyrocket (I'm not saying this is a bad thing).
At the end of the day, I feel sorry for linode. The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way) and are often overlooked by many customers.
I signed up for DO because they were $5/mo and at the time Linode was $20. Twenty bucks is fine for production but for hobbyist mucking about, which I would classify my usage as, it's a bit steep. I image many users are in a similar situation.
But you're sharing the 1Gb/s link with who knows how many $5 droplets - resulting in unpredictable IO. Linode network IO is dedicated and scalable to 10 Gb/s. DO is shared and capped at 1 Gb/s - even on the largest droplet.
Thanks for bringing this up, this is part of why we closed such a large debt round so that we could really focus on the next evolution of the hardware that we use. There are a lot of things in the works for that and we will be really excited to share them.
Absolutely. I don't need $10 droplets for all of my internal servers, so the cost adds up significantly. I run a cluster of $5 droplets as well as a few large units, and I'm sure many people have similar use cases.
Linode seems to be going strong. I wouldn't dare put anything in production on a rickety shop like DO. Especially after the whole controversy of them taking down someone's blog because it criticized some VP's friend at Google. DO feels like a company founded by devs first and sysadmins last.
DO seems to be for devs farting around and kids putting up wordpress sites. Its not really competing with shops like Linode or Rackspace. That may change, but everything about DO screams, "Do not use me for production."
Meanwhile, my 7 or so production VMs on Linode are going strong and now have been migrated to their new SSD-based platform.
How many startups have devs and no sysadmins? Seems like if a 2 man shop can make DO work without a sysadmin, they just saved a lot of money. When you get big then you can worry about such things.
DigitalOcean offered SSD-backed VMs at low prices. They were one of the first to do so.
I was very happy with Linode, but they dragged their feet for years on it. My workload was I/O-bound and I got far more bang for my buck from DigitalOcean, so I jumped.
By the time DO started competing with Linode, it wasn't worth Linode's time to care about a cheap $5 box. The only problem is that people go to a $5 droplet and stay for a $XXX droplet.
It is so common there is even a term for it, 'Disruptive Innovation' [1].
The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.
Same here. I still have a $20 Linode for production, but wanting play around and test things out without thinking too much about cost is the reason I also frequently spin up 1-2 DO VPS's.
Linode bet the wrong way by prioritising more cores over SSDs and I think this slip up is what gave DO room to enter the market. Had Linode moved to SSDs earlier and offered their cheapest VM @ $10 instead of $20, DO's trajectory may have been a little different. Also, Linode was (and still is) very bad at marketing imho. DO definitely spanked them on that front (both through their content marketing strategy and just by virtue of their $5 SSD offering which caused all the geek hobbyists to jump over and start blogging about them).
Having said all of that, Linode are still going very strong and remain the much better option for production stuff. I have 3 machines with DO (two $5 ones and a $40 one) and about 15 with Linode (of varying sizes) and in my opinion Linode is head and shoulders above DO in terms of features, capability, professionalism and reliability. They just need to improve their marketing.
Thanks for the feedback, we're definitely looking to improve a lot of the missing features and capabilities and really looking forward to 2015 in that regard.
As for the professionalism and reliability I'd love to hear more as those are items we need to be addressing immediately and the feedback would be very welcome.
Only just seen your reply now. I have no doubt you guys are going to keep on getting better and better and if I were Linode I'd be very worried. I should have mentioned too that it's natural for their to be a capability gap at the moment - Linode's been going since 2003 IIRC so they have had a rather large head start.
In terms of reliability and professionalism, my complaints are very similar to pangram's. Another issue that bit me last week was OpenVPN failing after an apt-get update due to DO forcing a particular kernel outside of the VM.
All of these things are teething issues though and I'm sure you'll get them licked sooner or later (hence why I'm keeping the 3 VMs I have with you).
We switched from DO to Linode a few months ago. I think DO is great, but three things convinced us to move over to Linode. 1) lack of robust logging, 2) we'd get intermittent connectivity problems about once a month (this was in the SF colo), and 3) backups were unreliable, and support didn't really have a good answer as for why the backups were so unreliable. You can send me an HN message if you want more details.
They've been hit with a coldfusion 0day in the past, but the stuff that has happened to them could happen to anyone. I wouldn't have much to critique about their security practices.
That's incorrect along a couple different axes. The biggest problem is, most providers wouldn't be hosting ColdFusion code at all; ColdFusion is archaic and has a terrible security track record. But even if they'd built that UI in Scala, the onus is on the hosting provider to make sure the code is safe.
Being a hosting provider is a big, big deal. They have less margin for security errors than almost any kind of tech company.
Why is Linode so much better? I got a bunch of free credit for DO and I'm only using it for small things so I went with them, thinking about spinning up larger projects however and would like to look at my options.
They've been around a lot longer and have a lot of expertise. I think you'll find that they'll perform better during benchmarking of hardware and have superior network performance and uptime (I've personally experienced times where the entire DO network dropped offline for minute(s)). Their support is great too. I recommend reading up on a few comparison blogs if you wish; just make sure they were written recently and are comparing apples with apples.
But I think the general consensus amongst a lot of people is that DO are better suited to devs wanting to play around and Linode are better for when you want something more than that or want to push something to prod.
edit: now that I think of it, DO developed a reputation for terminating VMs with no notice if you violate their terms or do other things. I personally had my VMs terminated because I signed up for 2 accounts with the same IP. Imagine if I was hosting production content on there....
Their network is more reliable, their control panel is much more advanced and they offer a lot more capabilities (load balancers, longview, additional IPv4 addresses etc.).
DO is great at what it does (I have 3 vms with them) but when you need more, Linode wins.
Last I looked, DO has next to no SLA and Linode offers 99% SLA (almost no cloud provider offers SLA, much less 99% -- exception being Joyent at 100%). Also DO support is known for being a bit slow and Linode support is very quick to respond any time of day. YMMV.
The only thing I'm aware of that, supposedly, made Linode better, is they guaranteed full compute power. If it said you got 1 CPU core, then that was yours, period. From what I understood with DO, their approach was that they'd make every effort to deliver the equivalent compute power of 1 CPU, but would not peg it to you exclusively. I also think this may have changed for DO.
Where have you seen that you have a dedicated CPU core on Linode?
In the VPS market it's nothing unusual to oversell CPU, you can't only have 24 VM on a single server, that doesn't work financially (except if they count threads from hyper-threading as a core but that's not dedicated).
I've been following my DO allocation using New Relic. When I first signed up, I noticed the hypervisor stealing from my allocation. Not a lot, but some. After a week or two, however, this ceased. I can now report that for almost a year now I have been receiving my full allocation. I am very pleased with DO, but based on the good things that I've read on here, I'll give Linode a shot if DO ever drops the ball horrendously.
I'm not sure of the best way, but I was able to tell by looking at the CPU usage chart when you are analyzing your server. The brown line indicates resources stolen by the hypervisor.
> The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way)
If you need a few small VPSs to play around and test things out, and are fine with the (very) occasional performance / bandwidth degradation, I don't see how Linode offers you a "much better service", at least in terms of cost.
I have a Linode VPS for production, but find myself often spinning up and tearing down DO VPSs for experimentation.
Digitalocean is $5 and Linode $10 for the smallest plans. Linode used to be $20 for smallest, but upgraded their hardware and dropped their prices a while ago.
SliceHost was Linode's only real competitor at the time, they always cost more and gave you less. Rackspace bought them and the pricing pretty much stayed the same.
DO is cheaper but it's not quite the same level of product.
I used several of those 'cheapo VPS providers' in the past, and was always plagued with issues. DO was backed by some major VCs, which made it a bit more trustable.
At the end of the day, I feel sorry for linode. The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way) and are often overlooked by many customers.