lindoe vs. godaddy's virtual dedicated servers

I only use GoDaddy for domain registration, so I can't comment on their servers.

If you have more traffic than a virtual server can deal with, surely you need a dedicated server ? No io limits, no contention ratio, but more money :-)

Well, if you get more than one linode, all of the same type/plan, you can certainly do DNS round-robin. You'd just want to be sure that they're set up on different physical hosts, ideally.

Still, I would think a dedicated server, or a higher plan, would be preferable to several parallel smaller instances, unless you're going for redundancy or compartmentalization in particular.

Well, here's my story. I used to be Linode customer for couple of years with Linode 128 (which then became 160) but I had all sort of trouble with my apps taking too much memory and io_tokens. I had done all sort of tuning but it just wasn't enough. So, I found GoDaddy… cheap and seemingly meeting my requirements. I jumped the ship and I was GoDaddy's VPS customer for about one month. I came back to Linode and got Linode 240 and things have been good since then. I won't do the same mistake again.

Good with GoDaddy: cheap. If you pay annually, they offered me 30% discount. I think that was only about $25/month or so.

Bad with GoDaddy: if you do anything complicated, don't use them. If you just run a web server and database that don't use resources, you're probably OK. Customer service can't answer complicated questions. Your outbound port 25 is blocked… you have to use their relays that use plenty of odd spam control mechanism (like blocking all URLs with tinyurl.com) (inbound 25 is open). You won't get a console (you just have to hope you won't mess up your sshd or web interface they provide (I axed that)). Some inbound ports are blocked and they don't tell you which ("security"). They use virtuozzo and they don't tell you how many users they stack up on each system.

The nightmare story: one Sunday afternoon my GoDaddy VPS just vanished. BOFF! Gone. About 12h later and numerous tickets I was told there was a security breach. And about 24 hours later they finally told me it was my irc server I was running. Apparently this is somewhere in TOS but you really need to read in between the lines. They also claimed that I was using excessive amount of resources with my scripts (I had looked for my "beans", like they call it in Virtuozzo and didn't notice that I had exceeded anything). They offered to to bring it up for 30 minutes and I was lucky to do the last rsync and save my changed files. After that they reinitialized my server and I immediately canceled my account. They refunded the rest of my annual payment fine, so no harm done there but a lot of work went to quickly come back to Linode.

Good with Linode: personal customer service, freedom to do almost anything you want, consoles, community (like this forum, irc).

GoDaddy is OK for DNS registrar and perhaps simple web hosting. But I would not recommend their VPS hosting to anyone. Even if it's cheaper, you'll get what you pay for. Pay for Linode and you'll be overall much happier. Especially if you want to do more than just plain web hosting & database you should not use GoDaddy.

Cheers,

Risto