upgrades?

Well i also face the same thing.

The only cool about linode its the CPU that they offer and the good support. But i imagine the cost of a datacenter, electricity and manage the server.

RAM is dirt cheap these days compared to how it has been, though somewhat less so in the ECC server area. I would love to see Linode double RAM allocations on their plans. :D

Yeah, its a bit hard to swallow paying $40 extra a month for an extra 1GB when thats way more than the capital cost for that ram!

I always assumed the servers were already physically maxed out on ram.

Regardless of if they're physically maxed out, they all have the same amount in total (well, theoretically, there may be variations between different models). Paying double the price for double the RAM at Linode makes sense, because they can fit half as many on the same box.

That said, Moore's law being what it is, we haven't seen a RAM upgrade in two and a half years, during which time Moore's law says we should have seen roughly two doublings in density/economy. I'm not saying Linode should quadrouple RAM allocations, only that we're overdue for an upgrade.

Hello,

We don't pre-announce stuff like this, but I can tell you that we're always working on improving our service, and have a long history of plan upgrades that goes back almost 10 years.

Now, let's get a few things straight:

Upgrades: You're not paying for just the RAM when you upgrade a Linode. You're paying for a larger slice of the host machine - so that's more share of CPU, more storage, better disk IOs, along with the RAM.

Pre-paying a Linode for a year or two years brings cost down 10% or 15%. That's $35.95 or $33.95 for a Linode 1024 looking at it monthly.

CPU: Linodes come with 4 CPU cores that aren't artificially capped, and each upgrade HALVES the number of Linodes you share the host with. Small EC2 only has 1 core and is much more limited in computing power.

Storage: EC2 instance storage isn't persistent - meaning, if you stop or rebuild the instance (or obviously remove it) your data is wiped. They encourage you to use EBS (networked block storage) for persistence, which adds more complexity and cost. Their docs also talk about losing the instance storage if 'the underlying disk fails'. Does that imply a single disk? I don't know. We use battery-backed hardware RAID.

IPs: Linodes come with one public IP assigned to it. Stopping or rebuilding a Linode won't run you the risk of being assigned a different public IP as on EC2. To prevent this you need to use their Elastic IPs which adds yet more cost. (actually it looks like you may get one EIP included - hard to decipher).

Data Transfer: A boatload included with Linode plans. 800 GB outbound on AWS is $96/mo. That's MORE than the monthly cost of a Linode 2048 which has 800 GB of outbound transfer included!

Support: We have it, and we're damn good at it.

The everything-metered model is deceptive, since individual costs are split out leaving it up to the purchaser to put them back together again. And often only one component is deliberately promoted as to position itself as cheaper overall, and also when compared with competitors. The hourly/metered model is also inherently unpredictable and variable. Not all months have the same number of hours. Workload on your servers may change (io ops) along with data transfer which could be quite a surprise on your next bill.

AWS does a great job, and if that's your thing then by all means, go for it. Heavy utilization small reserved instance with 800 GB outbound transfer, 80 GB persistent EBS storage: $195 upfront + (hours in month * $0.016) + (80 GB EBS * 0.10) + (100 EBS IO OPS * seconds in month / 1,000,000 * $0.10) + (800 GB * $0.12) = $153/mo.

Linode's philosophy is simplicity and predictability. A Linode 2048 is $80/mo. That's it. Doesn't that feel better?

-Chris

A Linode 2048 for $80/mo feels good, but a Linode 4096 for $80/mth feels better ;)

I think you're actually understating the CPU differences. This is less true on Amazon's "second-gen" tiers, but that only starts at extra large. Everything smaller than "extra large" doesn't have a second-gen option, so these are the same CPUs as when AWS launched. So that benchmark from 2009 that showed Linode giving 600% the CPU performance for the same price? That hasn't changed…

There are also some really dangerous things for some of the AWS pricing models. The spot pricing attracts many people because it's cheaper, but variable. Which is fine until there is a capacity crunch and somebody manages to bid up a small instance to $10,000 an hour or something… It has happened multiple times before.

I have a micro instance for development at AWS it's cheaper than a 512 to run, has slightly more ram but performs considerably worse. AWS (or at least the smaller instances) just perform too poorly IMHO to be worth using in production. Linode may not be the cheapest but their support is top notch, their plans are simple and the functionality they provide is brilliant (not many providers provide lish or finnix equivalents).

The AWS Micro plan is only cheaper if you use no bandwidth. For an equivalent price of $16.96 per month on a term, you get:

Linode 512MB with 200GB of bandwidth

AWS Micro 613MB reserved instance with 54GB of bandwidth

Considering that the Micro has very little extra RAM and far less bandwidth for the same price, and enormously less CPU power, I don't think an AWS micro makes sense under any circumstances, even for development.

@caker:

IPs: Linodes come with one public IP assigned to it. Stopping or rebuilding a Linode won't run you the risk of being assigned a different public IP as on EC2. To prevent this you need to use their Elastic IPs which adds yet more cost. (actually it looks like you may get one EIP included - hard to decipher).
Elastic IPs are free as long as you're using them. To discourage IP hoarding, when you stop using one – i.e. when it's not attached to an instance, or the instance is turned off -- they cost $0.005/hour (~$3.60/month).

(Edit: I learned this today when I started playing with EC2. [Free tier – $0.00 for playing around is cost-effective. ;)])

Reserved instances do make AWS quite a bit cheaper.

My calculation (54GB of bandwidth on a micro) was from the reserved instance. It's still a bum deal even ignoring the CPU issues (since the RAM is almost the same), and then of course there IS the massive CPU difference.