Linode Reduces Transfer Pricing (Incoming Data is now Free)

http://blog.linode.com/2011/09/01/linode-reduces-transfer-pricing/

by martey • 15 years ago

177 58 15 years ago

blog.linode.com

ghshephard4• 15 years ago

Realize, of course, that "Free" usually means, "We'll let you use a lot for free, until you use too much, at which point we'll either (A) Rate Limit you, (B) Have a conversation about why you are abusing the Free Incoming ALlocation, (C) Charge you for your excessive incoming data (D) Suggest you take your business elsewhere.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it's inaccurate of Linode to suggest they can provide unlimited free inbound data.

The statement "This means you can upload an unlimited amount of data to your Linode without having to pay for any of the incoming data transfer." will not stand for all of their customers - the vast majority, yes, but don't create a business on the belief that you can do unlimited uploads into your linode VPS at full speed. You won't be able to in the long run.

I would have preferred they provide wildly generous inbound allocations (First 5 Terabytes inbound is free, or something like that) than make a claim they can't stand behind.

wmf• 15 years ago

I think we had this discussion before about EC2. As long as Linode's total inbound is less than total outbound (which is very likely due to their focus on hosting rather than backup), it is free to them and thus they can make it free to their customers. Also, customers who upload a lot of data tend to store or process it, which Linode can make money on.

thaumaturgy• 15 years ago

I'm a service provider, and we have similar "unlimited" offers, and I see where you're coming from. For us, there's the problem that many of our customers have no idea whether "5GB" or "10GB" or what-have-you is enough for them. We're willing to offer enough capacity that we're betting that they won't ever have a problem with it, and the shorthand for that is "unlimited". We're also gambling that if we do have one or a few customers that abuse the unlimitedness to such an extent that we have to talk to them about it, that we can have a reasonable conversation with them.

I think reasonableness is a big part of claims like this. Would a reasonable person expect to be able to download the internet into Linode? I don't think so, even though they're saying that it's unlimited.

If someone can think of a better way to tell most customers "don't worry about resources" without annoying a select few, I'm all ears.

Joakal• 15 years ago

If you tried to be a service provider advertising 'unlimited' in Australia yet provide limits, you would be slapped by the ACCC (government consumer watchdog) for misleading advertisement [0].

I do not know exactly the rationale behind ACCC's decision, but reasonableness to you means something else to buyers. For example, some people think Google is the Internet and think bandwidth is free.

[0] Telstra and Optus, the two biggest ISPs got slapped for advertising unlimited internet (until 10 GB, etc).

ghshephard4• 15 years ago

It's pretty straightforward - find a high-water mark for customers in terms of their inbound data, that 99.9% fall under, say, for linode, 99.9% of their customers pull in less than 16 megabits/second sustained, which is 7.2 Gigabytes/Hour, 5 Terabytes/Month.

And then explain to your customers that 99.9% of them use less than 5 Terabytes/Month bandwidth, and that effective now, the first 5 Terabytes/month of bandwidth is included in the cost of their VPS, and for those 0.1% of customer who exceed that 5 Terabytes, they'll get a very reasonable rate of $0.01/gigabyte ($10/Terabyte) for inbound data in excess of the 5 Terabyte initial allocation.

Realize that linode is probably paying less than $4/megabit @ 95th percentile - but the vast majority of that is likely downloaded, so they have an asymmetric allocation that they are trying to utilize with this "unlimited inbound" offer.

I just want the HN audience, in particular, to realize that the statement ""This means you can upload an unlimited amount of data to your Linode without having to pay for any of the incoming data transfer."" should not be taken at face value if you are putting together a business plan.

In general - bandwidth is priced @95th percentile on the internet, and any time you run into the phrase "unlimited" you should take it with a grain of salt and get something in writing before you rely on it.

Uchikoma• 15 years ago

How can one "abuse the unlimitedness"?

ez77• 15 years ago

Can't you give the option of either a) a very low-speed, but truly unlimited connection, or b) a high-speed connection with per-GB costs after reaching a certain amount of data transfer?

marshray4• 15 years ago

This is how business between ordinary people is usually done.

Paper napkins are free at every restaurant I've ever been to, but that doesn't mean that they'll give me a truckload of them in one visit.

To me it's a little different than a local ISP advertising "unlimited internet" or wireless carrier advertising "unlimited data" and then putting artificial caps and throttles on it. That's typically a home's only data pipe or a mobile device is on a long contract.

But there's much more competition for virtual servers and we all know our server infrastructures can be migrated to a different provider at the drop of a hat. Oh wait. :-)

ghshephard4• 15 years ago

The difference is, of course, we can all (mostly) agree what is considered abusive behavior when it comes to napkins.

But, what is considered abusive uploading behavior?

Is it:

  (A) 100 Gigabytes/Month
  (B) 1 Terabyte/Month
  (C) 2 Terabytes/Month
  (D) 4 Terabytes/Month
  ...

What's the downside to the customer of just spelling out the actual limits?

wisty2• 15 years ago

Restaurants rarely advertise "free unlimited napkins with any meal". They include them gratis, within reason.

Nobody can provide "free unlimited" anything. There are always limits. In Australia, these claims could run afoul of consumer protection laws, with good reason - anybody claiming to sell "free unlimited" anything is lying. OK, Linode probably means well. But before you know it, every company will match them, and you won't be able to figure out which "free unlimited" plan suits your purpose because all the limits are hidden behind a "within reason" clause in the fine print.

"Free unlimited" offers turn the whole thing into what Scott Adams calls a "Confusopoly", in which companies stop competing on value by hiding what value they actually offer.

michaelbuckbee• 15 years ago

I would say it is more like an all you can eat buffet telling you to stop eating after one plate of food.

Bandwidth is a core part of their offering.

philjr• 15 years ago

This is probably a reasonable assumption coming from the world of ISP "all-you-can-eat" packages where they're saying "unlimited" but in reality it's not, because unlimited starts affecting other customer so it's "unlimited (T&C's apply)"

This is a completely different scenario though:

* Transferring stuff to linode isn't generally an end in and of itself. There are far fewer use cases for it. At the end fo the day you probably need to get data back out of it.

* The vast majority of cloud hosting and hosting providers in general's bandwidth is outbound. People download from the web. These hosting companies provide a lot of the web's main infrastructure. You're probably looking at a ratio of 20:1 or 30:1 here.

* Linode doesn't pay for uploads and downloads with it's carriers / ISPs. It pays for circuits capable of synchronous upload and download speeds. Using the ratios above, if they, for example, have 300Mbps of traffic outbound, then they have a lot of spare inbound capacity.

* Abuse here is difficult. Downloading movies, music etc. are consumed at home. It's difficult to imagine so many usage scenarios where huge data volumes would be consumed so easily on a linode server without having to be downloaded again. Maybe someone can come up with some creative suggestions here though? :)

* Bandwidth allocation and contention is very different within a hosting providers access network than an ISPs access network. ISP last miles, local DSLAMs, AP's etc. are huge points of contention. Inside the data center, I imagine most hosting providers "last mile" are 100Mb or Gig/E here straight to the servers with gig or 10gig/e uplinks from access switches.

The basic crux really is though, they have shedloads of free inbound bandwidth and why not give it away for another USP.

ghshephard4• 15 years ago

Totally agree with you on all your points - but "shedloads" is different from "unlimited."

All I'm really trying to do is catch the attention of the HN'er who read the article on "Unlimited Upload" to linode, came up with a great idea (for example) for a remote telemetry application that required little back end processing, would be installed on millions of systems, and would upload 100 mbit/second aggregate to the linode environment.

If I managed to get that person's attention, and cause them to consider the possibility that the "unlimited" wasn't really "Unlimited" - then I'll have accomplished what I set out to do.

wisty2• 15 years ago

Creative use of unlimited BW - downloading the internet for data-mining purposes. You can't store it (as Linode's disks are pricy), but who cares? You can just download it again if you need to re-do your calculations.

biot• 15 years ago

The preferred terminology is "unmetered" which typically means that you're sharing something like a 100Mbps pipe with other users and you accept the inherent bandwidth and latency issues that comes with that kind of setup.

If you want guaranteed bandwidth that costs extra and will definitely be metered, either for a fixed pipe size or per GB.

stonemetal• 15 years ago

Is there a way to take advantage of it though? They charge for both out bound traffic and storage. So unless your just pumping data in to a remote /dev/null they are going to make it up eventually either because you are storing it or because you are pushing it back out. I guess it would make a pretty nice back up server though, only pay for bandwidth when you need to restore.

papaf• 15 years ago

We'll let you use a lot for free, until you use too much, at which point we'll either (A) Rate Limit you

They throttle already. I had an app on Linode that required large uploads (around 1MB) but had to move to a different provider because of the throttling. The throttling kicks in during a single upload.

That said I would choose Linode in an instant for different apps that didn't require uploads because my experience with them was excellent and their network appears fast (possibly because of the throttling).

brlewis2• 15 years ago

I haven't noticed that sort of problem with uploads up to 100MB. I use a Linode 1024 in the Fremont datacenter.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

How big is the pipe comming in to the server?

Because unless it is very large, chances are that it will not be able to banckrupt Linode.

On the other hand, they pretty much sealed the deal about where I will host my next project.

sasha-dv• 15 years ago

> ... than make a claim they can't stand behind.

I think they can stand behind this claim. The largest plan they sell comes with 800GB of storage. Your OS installation will probably take 10GB and you're effectively left with 790GB to store your data in.

Unless you're uploading and deleting 790GB each and every day I don't see why they can't afford it. Considering that the most people will buy Linode 512 (20GB of storage including the OS) the numbers we are talking about are rather small.

rhizome• 15 years ago

Cloudy hosting competition seems to be heating up, with this and Heroku's PG move.

chintan• 15 years ago

We recently moved to Linode from AWS (after the recent AWScalypse)

However, the problem we currently face with linode is that the Disk spaces are puny and "attaching" additional storage is very costly as compared to AWS. There is no reduced pricing for Yearly contract either.

Love their sub-minute support times. Can't beat dat!

mlacitation• 15 years ago

Prepaying for a year saves you 10%, prepaying for 2 years saves 15. If you already have an account, just open a ticket and you'll have the discount in minutes.

latch• 15 years ago

And, even if you prepay, you can still cancel and get a full refund. Even if you know you'll only use the server for 1 month, prepaying for 2 years is a smart move!

xnxn• 15 years ago

My understanding is that Linodes aren't really "for" storage. IIRC it's often more cost-effective to just upgrade to a larger Linode than to add additional storage.

I'd recommend storing bulk data on S3, but as you said, you're wary of AWS :)

stoph• 15 years ago

EC2 has had some issues in the past, but did those issues affect S3?

Even if you're on linode, you might find sending large binaries to S3 is a cost-efficient way to increase your storage size. Plus, you have a built in CDN when you need it.

brlewis2• 15 years ago

That's what I'm doing with OurDoings.

krrose27• 15 years ago

I swear another cloud provider did this recently..

Oooh yeah. AWS did back in July. http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/06/30/aws-ann...

tkhoven• 15 years ago

Rackspace's July update for Slicehost customers to the same effect: http://forum.slicehost.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=5210...

In particular: Under the Rackspace Cloud program you will not have to pay for incoming bandwidth.

jdelsman• 15 years ago

This will allow us to provide more real-time data to users without having to worry about going over our limit. Thanks, Linode!

Briney• 15 years ago

I've been using Linode for over a year, and I must say their service is the best I've seen. Their customer support is also off the charts brilliant. I think this is truly wonderful.

Karunamon• 15 years ago

I don't see what's so hard about unlimited meaning unlimited. Australia has the right idea here. If you advertise no limits, and then attempt to enforce limits, you rightfully deserve the smackdown you'd get.

Moral of the story: Don't say you can provide something you can't.

tszming• 15 years ago

Now it is possible to use Linode as a Poor Man's CDN.

StavrosK• 15 years ago

How? Outgoing data still costs money...

riobard• 15 years ago

I think the more important news for many is that the overage for outbound traffic is the save price as pre-paid plan, so you could lower your plan (e.g. going from Linode 1024 with 400GB to Linode 512 with 200GB). Serving static pages shouldn't cost much memory and processing power anyway.

losvedir• 15 years ago

This is great! I've been using my Linode as a VPN for when I'm working in coffee shops, so I'm very happy that half of my traffic is not counted any longer.

cheald• 15 years ago

Wow, Linode just handed me a pile of money. Thanks, Linode! :D

ryan-allen• 15 years ago

This must be in response to Rackspace Cloud offering free incoming data due to their forced migration of Slicehost's customers.

Rackspace Cloud has a bit of a different audience to Slicehost's existing customers (I'm one of them).

If I were in Linode's position, I'd be offering migration coupons to existing Slicehost customers as an incentive to move to them instead. It's an opportunity wide open.

The way Slicehost has been communicating with their customers recently regarding the forced migration has been enough incentive. It's almost like Rackspace don't want the business the way they've been conducting themselves.

ben1040• 15 years ago

Seriously, this forced march from Slicehost to Rackspace Cloud has been an absolute trainwreck and I've been meaning to move all my services away to Linode as soon as I can find the time. Maybe during this long weekend.

wiredfool• 15 years ago

I've got a slicehost machine out there, and their communication with the cutover to rackspace has been awful. I'm still not sure if it's going to be mostly transparent, needs dns coordination, or if I'm going to have to rebuild my vm on the cloudwhatever. To be fair, it's not a common configuration (debian lenny/32bit,384mb), but everything I see just makes me think that it's going to be more of a pain than I want to have to deal with.

Linode looks good, are there any red flags to worry about?

dillona• 15 years ago

> Linode looks good, are there any red flags to worry about?

Not that I can think of. Linode is pretty great if you can deal with the lack of disk space

mike-cardwell• 15 years ago

I know a place that does unlimited bandwidth. You're limited to 10Mbit/sec throughput though, so your theoretical maximum usage per month is only a little over 3TB.

How much throughput does a Linode server get?

tsycho• 15 years ago

Reminds me of http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/

api• 15 years ago

Linode's weak spot is storage. Their offerings are pretty pathetic.

Linode Reduces Transfer Pricing (Incoming Data is now Free)

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