How to choose the right Linode Plan

Hi Jonathan,

I have set up my server and website on the 5 dollar plan. Its all up and running now and I've just taken it live.

Congrats on taking your Linode live!

Will I get automatic emails if the resources are being over used?

Yes. You can expect to receive emails regularly if your current Linode is exceeding the default thresholds. I should mention that these “alerts” are essentially notifications. They will not penalize you and are simply in place to help you better administer your Linode. You can manage the notification thresholds for these alerts under your Linode's “Settings” tab within the Linode Manager.

My question is how do I know whether the 5 dollar plan is sufficient?

It's hard to determine what one consider's “sufficient” as there are a lot of factors that go into making this decision. However, to help you make this decision, there are some indicators to look out for. One indicator, as you have mentioned, is to keep an eye out for how frequently you receive email notifications. If you find yourself buried in email alerts even after adjusting thresholds, it may be worth upgrading your Linode. Another indicator would be to use our Longview service to help monitor your Linode's load. While it's not an alert system, it does help in providing fairly realtime data. I attached more information about Longview below if you're interested -

[https://www.linode.com/longview]

If you determine that the current plan may not meet your needs, I have listed some hardware factors w/ brief examples below. I hope that these points help you make an informed decision when deciding to upgrade your plan -

Memory (Standard [1-16GB] vs. High-memory [24-300GB]) – memory intensive workloads (ie. high performance databases). In-memory caching. Rendering. Data processing.

CPU cores (1 - 16) – more processing power. More CPUs means more resources to handle simultaneous connections. Helps in distributing load.

Storage (SSD) – more storage means more space to host content/media (not to be confused with our Block Storage service [HDD]). SSD means access times to data are not bottlenecked by a spinning disk. SSDs are more useful for storing and running programs, not storing bulk data.

Transfer limits (1TB/month – 9TB/month) – potential bottleneck if you're running a media server, or hosting content that is constantly being uploaded/downloaded from your site.

Inbound bandwidth/network speed (fixed at 40Gbps) – high-speed inbound network bandwidth is standard across all of our plans.

Outbound bandwidth/network speed (ranges from 1000Mbps – 9000Mbps) – if your site is extremely busy and has several simultaneous connections at any point in time, the outbound network speed will be negatively impacted.

Limits aside, will I get better performance by opting for one of the more expensive plans? Or is that irrelevant if I'm not hitting any limits?

Yes. You will almost certainly experience better performance by upgrading to one of the more expensive plans, regardless of whether or not your current plan actually hits the limit. However, while there are benefits to higher plans/resources, there are diminishing returns on that investment in most cases; depending on your site, these performance benefits may not be completely utilized.

For example, let's say that you have an extremely busy site with a MySQL database that is actively queried by at least 50 users at any point in time from all over the world. To satisfy the high demand of this server, one may be interested in a high memory plan so that MySQL can cope by performing in-memory caching. Now let's say that you wanted to host a media sharing site for yourself and 3 friends. In this case you can ensure that only a few people actually access the site at any single point in time – a standard memory plan would be better suited for this. That's not to say you can't host a media server using a high memory Linode, but you will be wasting a lot of its computational potential… and money.

I hope that I was able to answer all of your questions clearly and completely. If there's something that's unclear, please contact us at support@linode.com or through your Linode Manager via support ticket.

Have a great day!

Best,
Allen Meyers
Linode Support Team

Hi

Imagine, that we have an app that is available during 4 months only. But rest of the time we need it to develop it.

Can we upgrade a plan during 4 months and then downgrade it?
Or will be better to have a plan of 5$, and for this 4 months duplicate it in another plan and after the 4 months delete it?

Thanks

@ekintech It's very easy to scale your server size up and down on our platform! You can do this from our Cloud Manager. You will just need to make sure the disk is the appropriate size when you scale down during the dev months. We have an excellent post about that here.

Thank you very much.