Linode vs. DigitalOcean – performance benchmarks

http://jasonormand.com/2013/02/08/linode-vs-digitalocean-performance-benchmarks/

by okor • 13 years ago

305 257 13 years ago

niggler2• 13 years ago

How are the "requests per second" measured? (I assume that something like `ab` is used, but I'm wondering if it run on the same machine or from an external machine ...)

jacques_chester2• 13 years ago

Don't fuss about it.

HN loves benchmark porn. Throw some dramatic charts up, show approximately zilch methodological control, voila: front page.

(Complete with sarky comments like this one.)

My personal question is: are DigitalOcean making a profit?

niggler2• 13 years ago

"are DigitalOcean making a profit?" -- pandodaily is mentioned on the home page, so I'm guessing no.

Let's suppose for a moment that I actually wanted to do a performance comparison for my own purposes (which means I actually care about the actual results). How would I do it right?

zagi• 13 years ago

>My personal question is: are DigitalOcean making a profit?

Yes. If you do the math they actually do break even and manage to squeeze some profit.

voidlogic• 13 years ago

I've been very happy with DigitalOcean since switching to them. This blog echo's my anecdotal experience. If DigitalOcean would open up a Chicago and West coast DC I could switch completely over...

I wish this had been a $20 vs $20 plan comparison.

nlh• 13 years ago

The article says Linode has "predictably greater CPU performance". Am I missing something? It looks like Digital Ocean is the winner in every single benchmark other than Apache Static Page Serving.

(I'm assuming lower is better for encoding time.)

karolist2• 13 years ago

Last I had to work on a video transcoder using ffmpeg, most codecs were not easily parallelized. That's what might have happened here, even though Linode has 4 cores, core vs core comparison it gets beaten.

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

Your reply makes sense. I'd note also that running 4 parallel encoding jobs would expose the CPU difference.

milliams• 13 years ago

My thought exactly. Unless I'm misunderstanding, the only benchmark in which Linode came out in front was the Apache static page one and that was the closest of all the tests. Based on this DigitalOcean is a run-away winner which is a bit surprising.

justin0• 13 years ago

For some of the media encoding, presumably higher is better. x264 for sure: when talking about frames encoded per second, more would be better. the rest of the benchmarks are all "higher is better" so perhaps the same is true for seconds of (mp3|flac) encoded in a period. they are certainly ambiguous though.

spyder• 13 years ago

The X264 encoding graph shows "frames per second" and if it's higher then it's better. And probably he measured the other encondings the same way but mislabeled the graphs.

okor3• 13 years ago

spyder is correct, the x264 graph was mislabeled. I've updated the label. It should have read "Frames per Second" not "Seconds". However, the mp3 and flac graphs are correctly labeled. DigitalOcean still outperforms Linode on mp3 and flac, but that's probably (guessing) because the processer are not waiting for the disk and the x264 encoding is using multiple cores where mp3 and flac encoding is only using one core.

brandon2725• 13 years ago

There are plenty of VPS providers out there who are cheaper than Linode, including some with compelling SSD packages.

With Linode, I know that I am getting excellent support. There's the peace of mind of knowing that when I submit a ticket, someone will read and respond in short order.

A $5 SSD VPS sounds great, but I automatically wonder what kind of hardware I will be on (does it compete with Linode's RAID 10 configuration?), and how long my support requests will take to be addressed, and whether or not the low prices are a sustainable business model.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years ago

I agree with everything you say, but if history has taught us anything it is that people want "cheap" and just expect great support regardless of price.

I mean the best example is airlines. For the longest time the big national airlines claimed that they would laugh last since their support/customer care was /so/ much better than cheap no-thrills airlines.

But look at what happened! The no-thrills airlines have been stealing market share year upon year, people are booking whatever is cheapest in the price comparison all other things be damned.

The same is true of retail Vs. the internet. Retails shops claimed that they wouldn't lose market share because people loved the one on one customer service and face to face interaction, but clearly they were mistaken.

In fact the ONLY company I can think of who has high quality customer care/support AND is actually growing is Amazon. But they also often happen to be the cheapest.

LeonidasXIV2• 13 years ago

> In fact the ONLY company I can think of who has high quality customer care/support AND is actually growing is Amazon. But they also often happen to be the cheapest.

Not sure about the US, but when buying electronics Amazon is usually somewhere in the middle, price-wise. They are almost never really the cheapest and if so, this is usually due to a Amazon Marketplace seller, not Amazon themselves.

phillmv3• 13 years ago

Well, the main difference that comes to mind is that in the airline business, the denominator in your "cost function" is probably going to be keeping $30-100 million dollar planes in the air all the time.

Whereas in low-end VPS services, the labour cost for Great, Responsive Service will quickly begin to approach your capital outlay.

Amazon on the other hand, doesnt make any money - http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...

sudonim3• 13 years ago

"With Linode, I know that I am getting excellent support."

To be honest, the poor support was one of the reasons we moved away from Linode. We were in the Newark datacenter for about 8 months with 12 linode boxes. Had frequent issues with their load balancer and most of the time when we told them there was a problem, they asked us to prove it.

A few times we had extended outages due to "unscheduled maintenance"

Prior to running my business on Linode I had a single VPS with them for 2 years for personal stuff. I had zero problems... so YMMV. Overall, I'd still use them again, but not for mission critical stuff after that experience.

brandon2725• 13 years ago

My experiences with Linode have been excellent as far as support is concerned. That's just anecdotal and YMMV.

With that said, would you trust a $5/mo. VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?

kbar13• 13 years ago

> Had frequent issues with their load balancer and most of the time when we told them there was a problem, they asked us to prove it.

Probably was just a request for logs or other such evidence showing what went wrong so that they could diagnose and fix the problem? Might have been a misunderstanding

> A few times we had extended outages due to "unscheduled maintenance"

Hardware isn't magic.

It sucks that you didn't have a good experience, but this is highly anecdotal.

agopaul• 13 years ago

"but I automatically wonder what kind of hardware I will be on" that is actually a good point. Is the underling hardware server grade?

You can easily achieve good performance on some common desktop hardware (or some cheap home-built server) and some SSDs, but obviously, no one would host nothing more than a personal blog on it

joelhaasnoot• 13 years ago

lowendbox.com - best VPS deals. Companies are shady sometimes, mostly dedicated boxes that are divied up. Some good providers - buyvm.net has a proud following and are very stable, others not so much.

xur172• 13 years ago

I'm not sure I'd call buyvm "stable". I experienced a hardware failure while I was with them that resulted in multiple days of downtime (with poor communication - I had to go into their IRC chat and ask to figure out what was going on. They didn't reply to my support ticket).

More recently, their network has been the target of DDOS attacks, etc. I'm guessing this is partly due to their clientele. Also, all of their Las Vegas servers went down earlier today.

The lack of backup options are making me consider switching to DigitalOcean. We'll see if their reliability lives up to the hype.

bitcartel2• 13 years ago

How long will the prices stay low? $5 is low-end, not mid-tier.

"Investors are really looking for a couple of things... At DigitalOcean, we were able to differentiate ourselves by focusing on the mid-tier market, and catering to the needs of individual developers that were being completely ignored by the larger cloud hosting providers." http://www.forbes.com/sites/danreich/2012/09/19/startup-ceo-...

homosaur7• 13 years ago

They claim forever if you read the comments on the article. It seems likely if they're limiting CPU access.

andmarios• 13 years ago

For a $5 vps you don't have to wonder, just try it out for a couple of months if you have time and incentive (like many Linodes).

I think it would more fair though to compare a $20 Linode with a $20 offer from another provider.

corford5• 13 years ago

If it helps, I moved a mail server that's been running on a 2GB Linode vm for the last two years over to a 4GB DO vm and so far (~4 weeks in) it's been problem free (in the Amsterdam DC).

jstalin• 13 years ago

My favorite site for finding all kinds of VPS deals (some for as little as $15 a year) is http://www.lowendbox.com. It's great for finding a VPS nearly anywhere in the world for your SSH tunnel, offsite storage, or just to tinker with.

TylerE• 13 years ago

That's ok for some, but it kind of annoys me. Where's the equivalent index for people want a VPS to do real work? I'd love a site that would let me compare pricing for say, 4GB/4 core machines.

visionpol• 13 years ago

I use this list to find a VPS to my specs. It has sliders for pretty much any relevant spec.

* http://vps-list.cryto.net/index.php?action=list

brandon2725• 13 years ago

Here's a site comparing different types of plans. http://serverbear.com/

dsl• 13 years ago

LowEndBox is a great site, but the hosts that tend to advertise there are ran by kids (literally).

It is also the recommended go to spot that is linked from a lot of "hack forums" for information on where to find VPS providers who don't have solid abuse handling in place yet.

fowlduck• 13 years ago

These graphs are meaningless without methodology.

michael37• 13 years ago

The methodology is a well-documented "Phoronix Benchmark Suite".

However, why in the world is this methodology relevant for the hosting service? Would any of you really do any x264 encoding on an outsourced server, or would you use your desktop?

I would much rather get apache running, and run the ab (Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool).

noamsml• 13 years ago

I might, actually. A huge part of the reason I own a VPS is precisely because I don't own a desktop, and having a persistent networked machine comes in handy often.

photomattmills• 13 years ago

In fact, he did do benchmarks with ab: http://jasonormand.com/2013/02/08/linode-vs-digitalocean-per...

rmoriz3• 13 years ago

(shameless self-promo ;-)

Use the DigitalOcean API from Ruby and Chef/knife to create/shutdown/destroy virtual servers ("droplets"):

* https://github.com/rmoriz/digital_ocean

* https://github.com/rmoriz/knife-digital_ocean

rjsamson2• 13 years ago

That's really cool! I'm definitely going to have to give it a try.

rmoriz3• 13 years ago

feel free to contact me if you encounter problems :)

homosaur7• 13 years ago

No problem with self promos when you're dropping dope softwares. I'll check this out later.

pwelch• 13 years ago

Nice work. I did not see a knife plugin on the community site a few weeks ago when I looked. Thanks for putting this together!

Steveism• 13 years ago

Where are Digital Ocean's data centers? I can't seem to find that information anywhere on their site.

jamroom• 13 years ago

Looks like New York and Amsterdam.

DASD• 13 years ago

Equinix(New York) and Telecity(Amsterdam).

Ologn• 13 years ago

I was choosing VPS providers recently. I used http://www.serverbear.com for the benchmarks. Then I looked on the web for anecdotal information on how good and reliable the VPSs were. I chose Linode. Then I needed another VPS. It was favoring Ramnode, but they had temporarily run out of SSDs. So I went with Rackspace, which was used by many people, even though they seemed to generate more complaints then Linode.

karolist2• 13 years ago

I've never heard of Digital Ocean. Are they reliable? Do they have a DNS manager comparable to Linode? (I have no aspirations of running multiple Bind instances on my own, thanks).

I might consider moving off Linode for pricing alone.

yogo2• 13 years ago

I've been evaluating them for the past 6 months or so and it's definitely one of the more stable cheap VPS providers out there. I believe they added a DNS manager a few months ago but I haven't used it as yet.

driverdan2• 13 years ago

They're a Techstars company, if that means anything to you.

signifiers2• 13 years ago

They've been very reliable for us. Network is spiky (12-20MB/s at times), but otherwise, compared to roughly equivalent VMs (lscpu, /proc/cpuinfo, etc.) they are hands-down faster than AWS. In the limited testing we've done on AWS SSD AMIs (optimized for cluster compute), AWS wins on network and CPU, but at literally 10X the cost.

Also, see: http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean for interesting benchmarks over time (with all the standard caveats, yada yada).

citricsquid• 13 years ago

For me the performance of Linode isn't the greatest factor, the greatest factor (and the reason I spend ~$300/m with them when I could get the 10 servers for 1/5th the price elsewhere) is that support is second to none. I have never experienced better support than I have with Linode. If I have a problem and submit a ticket (which is rare) it's answered within a few minutes, if there's a network or hardware issue they open a ticket with me before I've even noticed. No other provider I've used has ever had that quality of service.

okor3• 13 years ago

I've had the same experience with Linode. They have great support.

rjsamson2• 13 years ago

I've been on Digital Ocean for around 6 months now and I have to say that their support is pretty awesome - very responsive when needed. I couldn't be happier with DO so far.

homosaur7• 13 years ago

That's good to hear, I was thinking of switching to Linode which I use for work, but I think I will try buying two 512MB DO servers instead.

namidark• 13 years ago

Seconded, DO's support is as quick to respond to technical issues as linode (and they're helpful on IRC as well).

kposehn• 13 years ago

Thirded. DO is pretty fanatical about support.

chadcf• 13 years ago

Good to know. I just set up a $5 a month server with a $20 promotional coupon code. That's 4 months free, yeesh. I love linode too, but my needs are modest as all I really do is host a few small traffic sites for friends and staging sites for clients. As much as I love linode, my next year of hosting will go from $240 to $40. And with their prices if I'm happy I now have a great affordable host to recommend to clients.

Tehnix2• 13 years ago

As a new user on Digital Ocean, I gotta agree, it took them less than 2 minutes to reply to a ticket I opened (so fast that I got a reply from two supporters on the same time) on a question concerning moving my server to the Amsterdam center since it'a a bit closer to me :)

yogo2• 13 years ago

I haven't had too much experience with using the support at Digital Ocean since they're pretty stable but I don't think it is as fast as Linode. I've had the same experience with Linode too--everything gets responded to in under 5 minutes. Digital Ocean is good to checkout though, they seem to be committed to providing good service and added Arch Linux :)

chc2• 13 years ago

Well, you can see the benchmarks here. As you'd expect, Digital Ocean does better on IO-bounded tasks (because it uses SSDs) while Linode has better peak CPU performance (because it offers four cores instead of one).

davidw3• 13 years ago

It'd be cool if one of these spammy hosting comparison sites actually did some work to do things like monitor downtime, support ticket response times, and so on and so forth.

Good support counts for a lot, especially when the shit hits the fan, but resources/dollar count too, and it'd be nice to know exactly what kind of tradeoffs you're making, or if a hosting provider is simply below the curve.

patja• 13 years ago

Just curious why you think the article is "spammy"? That is a pretty pejorative term to toss around.

It seems like sound testing and analysis of the things that are readily tested.

He doesn't even have a link to either provider. Doesn't look like he is looking for referral $ or anything other than sharing what he learned.

ohashi4• 13 years ago

I feel your pain and while my startup doesn't exactly monitor those issues, I try and monitor them by proxy. How? I am tracking what users are saying about the company, I also break it down by type of comments - support, uptime/downtime, price. I am trying to avoid that 'spammy' feel by making it transparent with all the data being publicly collected and sourced to social media. I'd love to hear your feedback because avoiding the 'spammy' label is what I am trying to fix in that industry.

http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting

thegyppo2• 13 years ago

We monitor uptime :)

http://serverbear.com/9683/linode#view-uptime-beta

Plus benchmarks etc (user run, which means you get a decent dataset to compare by server spec/location).

http://serverbear.com/9683/linode#view-benchmarks http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean#view-benchmarks

We've actually considered ticket response times, a lot of hosts use WHMCS to manage their nodes - which we could make a plugin for. But a large amount of the more established hosts use a custom system.

Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality. Anyone could respond with a "We're looking into it" within 5 mins & not get a resolution for a few hours.

berlinbrown2• 13 years ago

Great documentation and support and there a lot of others using it.

+1 Linode.

homosaur7• 13 years ago

A lot of people use Windows, that doesn't attest to quality.

driverdan2• 13 years ago

I don't have a lot of experience with DO's support, but my one request was solved in under 10 minutes. Other than shared hosts, I've had this type of support from all hosting provides I've used. If a provider took more than 15 minutes to respond to an urgent request (eg server down) I'd find a new provider.

canttestthis• 13 years ago

Good support is not exclusive to Linode (_especially_ at that price range). For equally good support at cheaper prices look at BuyVM (NY/CA), Prometeus (Italy), Ramnode.com (Atlanta, if you need SSD/SSD-cached) and SecureDragon (FL). And thats just the ones I have used for my personal use.

xur172• 13 years ago

I've been using BuyVM for about a year now, and I've had several instances of downtime, including one for half a day, and one due to hardware failure where I lost my data. Also, their support wasn't all that responsive when the server was down.

I'm considering switching to DigitalOcean just for the backups. Are these included in the cost?

pjungwir• 13 years ago

I can attest to Linode's great service: One Sunday morning I was playing around with a Chef script, which meant occasionally wiping the machine so I could re-run the script from scratch. At some point the machine wouldn't come back up. I sent in a ticket, but I figured the rest of my Sunday was shot. By the time I'd made some tea and sat back down, I had a reply that the problem was fixed!

nanidin2• 13 years ago

My former houesemate works at Linode. Based on how he ran the servers in the house, this is about what I'd expect! :)

INTPenis• 13 years ago

I've used VPS on dreamhost and glesys for a couple of years now and I don't see when you really need support.

One time I had to reset a VPS but in the end it was due to a mistake I made as root.

Generally I treat VPS like any other co-location hosting operated by a 3rd party. I make sure to have redundancy and backups managed seperately.

The only other situation I can imagine is site-wide issues, which you can do nothing to help with anyways so just sit back and wait for them to get their stuff together.

In other words, if you know your way around the shell and your server OS, the need for support becomes very insignificant.

raylu• 13 years ago

I've had the opposite experience, similar to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5209207. I'm using a VPS so I'm not really looking for support.

On a few occasions, the machine has gone down because of some maintenance or some issue that comes up. I was not notified of this and had to submit a ticket myself, after which I was told that the techs had taken down my machine. After asking why I wasn't notified, I was given no direct response.

deutronium• 13 years ago

I recently switched from Linode to a dedicated server from Hetzner as I found I could get better specs for only a few quid more / month (than Linodes 1GB package).

Linode was a great provider, but now I can manage my own VMs using Xen myself.

elbear2• 13 years ago

I just checked Hetzner out and their VPS is also cheaper than Linode. Are you satisfied with their services?

petercooper• 13 years ago

Not to answer for the OP but I'm both a Linode and Hetzner customer. The Hetzner machine has been solid and their network is great. But.. I keep the most important stuff on Linode because if a piece of hardware in the Hetzner machine blows up, I could be off the air for $indeterminate_time whereas with Linode, the worst case is I fire up another Linode within 5 minutes and reload from a backup.

machbio• 13 years ago

Performance Benchmarks for what.. Are these Benchmarks for a Remote Server for Work.. Or is it as a Webserver..

Benchmark does not prove thing for Webserver other than Disk I/O is greater with Digital ocean. If Disk I/O was so critical then no one would go with AWS since they have got the worst of all.

Benchmarks need to prove a thing in its application, unless it does its waste of time.

larrys• 13 years ago

A new broom sweeps clean. Results even with VPS depend on who else is using the equipment and what they are doing.

Easy to spin up a machine with no usage and get great performance if there is nobody on it. That doesn't mean this data isn't correct of course but keep in mind the OP is making a comparison between 1 machine at Linode and 1 machine at Digital Ocean at a given point in time. Same equipment or different equipment at a later date could yield different results as the equipment gets filled up or depending on who else is using it. We had VPS's at Media Temple that would literally stall periodically for a few seconds. We then migrated to a different machine at a different data center and it hasn't happened since.

earless1• 13 years ago

DigitalOcean seems like they are worth a look

tcohen• 13 years ago

We just switched over to Digital Ocean and I'm very happy with it!

endijs• 13 years ago

Doh. "Due to a high load that we are experiencing with Trial Accounts - we have temporarily disabled them." However email after signup tells: Your trial period will last 12 hours.

clone10184• 13 years ago

Sorry we'll get that fixed asap D:!

isalmon• 13 years ago

Same for me, please let us know when this is resolved

sergiotapia2• 13 years ago

Off-topic:

Who is this "Terrence Andrew Davis" fellow who comments on pretty much every single post that reaches HN?

He sounds like a lunatic and religious fanatic constantly quoting bible verses and sermons. Pretty darn creepy to read at 4am.

mtrimpe• 13 years ago

He's a schizophrenic but quite a brilliant one. He wrote this entire OS in assembler: http://www.sparrowos.com/

If it disturbs you you can always turn off showdead (or if he made a new account, wait until it's banned as it soon will be.)

minsight• 13 years ago

He's the author of LoseThos (64 bit OS, written from scratch), and has schizophrenia. His story is very interesting, if you can get past the wall of computer-generated religious content.

sergiotapia2• 13 years ago

Wow, I had no idea. Now I feel sorry for him. I wish him well.

curcumin• 13 years ago

Very confused, but I understand brand loyalty. Linode scorched Slicehost at one point. I like the idea of DigitalOcean and I'm moving all my non critical/beta/alpaha sites to DigitalOcean.

armored_mammal2• 13 years ago

From DigitalOcean's TOS: "You agree that you will NOT use DigitalOcean's services to: violate any applicable state and federal law and regulation, including, but not limited to, any copyright, trademark, patent, anti-piracy, or other intellectual property law or regulation, or encourage or enable others to violate any such law or regulation. Transmit, distribute, post, store, link, or otherwise traffic in information, software, or materials that is offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental, including, but not limited to, those that: Are obscene, fraudulent, or discriminatory, including any containing profanity, or obscenities. DigitalOcean permits adult websites that abide by state and federal law and regulation. ..."

I think it's funny how they can go from barring any information "offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental, including, but not limited to, those that: Are obscene, fraudulent, or discriminatory, including any containing profanity, or obscenities" to specifically permitting "adult websites that abide by state and federal law and regulation."

In any case good, luck keeping your blog, blog, comments, or whatever else you host with them clear of all profanity all of you who decide to try their services, because you've just walked into a convenient TOS violation. Damn! (Oops. TOS violation. Goodbye HN. Ha ha.)

beigeotter2• 13 years ago

Thank you for raising this issue. We try to make our terms of service as fair as possible—we are not looking to censor any information or content on our customers' droplets.

As you have raised this issue, to make the situation clearer, the phrase referring to obscenity and profanity has been removed from our terms of service.

Thanks,

Etel

aflott• 13 years ago

I recently signed up with Digital Ocean and I'm now happier I did due to responses like this.

bitcartel2• 13 years ago

Good spot. Also if you Google you can find the exact same TOS on other sites. It's just generic boiler-plate.

armored_mammal2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I'm sure it's not anything unusual. Probably I'd have not even paid attention except that their TOS was short enough to breeze through to begin with.

nhebb• 13 years ago

Since their US servers are based in New York, what are the state's policies as far as sales taxes? I believe there was a issue with Linode's Texas hub that any sales to Texas residents required you collect sales tax. Does NY have a similar issue where a server constitutes a physical presence?

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

I rarely see Rackspace Cloud mentioned on Hacker News in these sorts of VPS discussions. Anyone have insight as to why that is? Too expensive? Crappy service?

Background - my employer hosts on dedicated servers at Rackspace and we're considering using more of their cloud offering.

nemesisj2• 13 years ago

We've had an absolutely horrible experience with Rackspace (managed, managed cloud, and unmanaged cloud). I think Rackspace has seen their day come and go (used to be a very loyal customer) and are really struggling. Their tech is old and outdated, they're awash in duplicate controls panels, their billing isn't unified, and their UK presence is completely out of control.

We're moving away as quickly as possible to Linode and AWS.

RackerShagz3• 13 years ago

I work at Rackspace, and I'm really sorry to hear about this experience. We are working very hard to address the control panel inconveniences that you've mentioned and we would be extremely grateful if you could take the time to provide us with some feedback on how we could improve. You can reach me directly at shaggy@rackspace.com. Thanks.

tszming2• 13 years ago

For me, it is a horrible experience.

They need to call your over the phone in order to verify you are a human being and they need to know what you are going to do with their "cloud" - they called it "Onboarding"

I told them I just want to experiment with their apis and maybe they think I have no business value or I am a potential spammer, so they rejected my "Onboarding" request without any reason given. (So you know I am not commenting from the technical point of view since I have never access to their system)

On the contrary, AWS give you free tier access for a whole year, no question asked.

IMHO, don't waste time on Rackspace.

chc2• 13 years ago

I signed up with Rackspace a while back to host a new site I was putting together. I found the "onboarding" process so creepy and off-putting that, even though they accepted me, I went with Linode instead. Like, if that kind of weird bureaucracy was what I had to look forward to when I needed support, no thanks.

Also, their sorta-cloud-sorta-VPS setup for Rackspace Cloud seemed awkward to me. It made the control panels more confusing than they needed to be.

RackerShagz3• 13 years ago

Our intent with the onboarding call is to personalize the new customer experience by getting to know more about your business or project so that we can then link you to the right resources. It sounds like we fell short of this goal when you attempted to start up your account, and for that I apologize. If you'd like me to look in to this or if there's anything else I can do to help please feel free to email me: shaggy@rackspace.com

corford5• 13 years ago

I think one reason for that is because it was originally Slicehost before Rackspace bought them and a lot of people (me included) thought it went to shit after the buyout. Fortunately, in my case at least, the excellent Linode was there to pick up the pieces.

kamakazizuru• 13 years ago

its because rackspace is plain terrible. We had a VPS go down - and literally no one in their support team even going all the way up could explain why. Finally one of our own devs figured out that it was an issue with the VM. They talk a lot about their "fanatical" support - but thats essentialyl a whole lot of marketing hot air - support is average at best - and even on the managed levels where you pay 100 $ per month extra - there's no real managed service provided that is worth that much. I'd strongly suggest staying away!

ksec6• 13 years ago

Rackspace Cloud is the next poorest performing and most expensive VPS next to AWS EC2. And even though Rackspace calls its VPS cloud it isn't cloud at all.

But Unlike AWS where you get all the other AWS features and services via API and a half decent price if you play their reserve pricing and bid game. Rackspace has NONE.

rythie• 13 years ago

ServerBear has all the $5/month hosts in one place: http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=BearScore&Order=desc&...

sunyc• 13 years ago

i think its bullshit, just buy 10 vps and write garbage to disk, in a month you can wipe their entire stock of ssd disks.

antiterra• 13 years ago

DigitalOcean is promising, but they should probably hire a lawyer to fix up their Terms of Service. I notice they've attempted to appease adult content websites by removing the restriction against nudity and adding a statement that adult sites are expressly allowed if legal. But, they've left in a prohibition on profanity? That seems a bit backwards.

Inappropriate content is also disallowed, what does that mean? It's not a legal term of art that I'm familiar with. Why does a sentence begin with "Transmit"? And please, consider using bulleted lists.

https://www.digitalocean.com/tos

beigeotter2• 13 years ago

Profanity clause has been removed.

SanjayUttam• 13 years ago

Anyone know of any similar hosts (VPS, SSD) for Windows Server? Seems like installing a virtual Win instance may not work [ http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... ]

Alternatively, if anyone has successfully installed Windows on a VPS instance, please let me know :)

ck2• 13 years ago

Just hope those SSD are made by intel and are in raid10.

Otherwise 3-4 year failure is quite common.

epaulson2• 13 years ago

It's still just 512 megs of RAM. I'd love to find a VPS provider that gives me like 2 gigs of RAM, and charged me by how much of that was hot during the month. It's frustrating to have to pay in advance for the maximum amount of RAM I might need.

I'd like to be able to leave processes running that might have a lot of data mapped into their address spaces, but for much of the time that data can safely be paged out to disk and not used. When I come and use the machine, I'd like to have a large amount of RAM, but when I'm not using it, I don't want to pay for it.

clone10184• 13 years ago

You can dynamically resize your servers via DigitalOcean's API.

tedunangst• 13 years ago

What happens when they sell your ram to another customer, and then you decide you want it back?

epaulson2• 13 years ago

It's just capacity planning - they can migrate me around as needed, though obviously they'd like to minimize the number of times that happens. Maybe there are periods where I spin up but don't get the full memory - that's OK, I'm only paying for what I use.

We have all of this virtualization technology but I still have to make hard decisions about size ahead of time. There are lots of providers that will let me burst CPU, I'd like to burst RAM. For people building small apps that get occasional usage, having more flexibility on memory would be a huge boon.

account_taken• 13 years ago

DigitalOcean is good value but I found their I/O speed not anywhere close to SSD levels. I ran this bench mark from github. RamNode is the best.

https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench

mrinterweb• 13 years ago

When Digital Ocean has a west coast datacenter, I will give them another look. Latency has a larger perceived impact to users than any of those benchmarks given.

csomar2• 13 years ago

I think DO compares to Linode (or even better) in CPU performance because the software used (for Encoding or whatever) doesn't make use of extra cores. You'll need multi-threads aware software to take advantage of the available cores.

I have a Linode 1Gb (and another 512Mb) and I rarely go over 110% CPU utilization even when my server is busy (the max is 400%, 4 cores being used).

Also, price comparison, Linode charges an extra $5 (for 512Mb) and $10 (for 1 Gb) for Backups. DO seems to be giving them for free.

My yearly bill on Linode : $900

My yearly bill on DO : $180

I think I'm trying DO soon, especially I'll be in need for more servers.

Edit: I'm a little afraid from DO. They are simply too^8 cheap and it's scary. Will they be around for too long? What's their down time like? Will they lose my data (and backups)?...

Price wise, DO beats the hell out of anything. I can renew my smartphone yearly for free just by moving.

cheapsteak• 13 years ago

>I can renew my smartphone yearly for free just by moving.

You lost me there. Is that slang for something?

gamblor956• 13 years ago

He's saving roughly $720 yearly by switching to DO. Most high-end smartphones retail off-contract for roughly $600 (which you would pay if you have a grandfathered unlimited data plan on Verizon or AT&T).

csomar2• 13 years ago

I'm just emphasizing the opportunity cost here. I bought a high-end Smartphone the last year and I have been thinking if I should renew it on a yearly basis with the latest model.

By switching to DO (expecting they offer a comparable service), my purchasing power gets bigger and allow me to become richer (renew smartphone or buy some other stuff).

I'm just trying to show how competition, technology and efficiency makes us richer.

jwmoz• 13 years ago

Well looks like I'm just spunking away ~£12 every month!

willholloway• 13 years ago

I made the switch from Linode/AWS micro instances to Digital Ocean recently.

Pros: Great pricem, performance is excellent,UI is great for creating servers

Cons: I have had two periods of about 20 minutes of down time in the early mornings recently.

Digital Ocean is great hosting for developers. They are really doing it right.

clone10184• 13 years ago

Have you ticketed your issue?

zargon• 13 years ago

I've been using digital ocean for a minecraft server and vpn. Network reliability has been a problem. Some days I get frequent disconnects, and other days it is fine.

I will continue using linode for my servers that matter, and digital ocean for toys and experiments, just because it's so cheap.

ksec6• 13 years ago

During my resrach for performance / $ I recently discovered a host specialise in Minecraft hosting that offers one of the best performance for its price.

Check Out Simplenode. ( I am not related to them in anyways )

nathanstitt• 13 years ago

I fail to see how anyone can create a repeatable objective benchmark between different VPS providers.

I respect the fact that the author tried hard and didn't bias the results, but I fail to see where he even repeated the benchmark over a number of days to attempt to eliminate variations in what the other guests were doing while the benchmark was running.

As I see it, the only way I would trust a benchmark of this nature was if it was somehow ran over multiple hosts and was able to sample a large fraction of the physical boxes over a large period of time. As you can image, that's impossible to do on S3 and any of the other larger VPS providers

Even if somehow someone did manage to pull off a benchmark like the above, I still wouldn't trust it because it would only be valid until the provider added "Joe's Cheap Video Encoding Service" as a client that's sharing my box. Or someone else who's running a benchmark just like you are?

With all of the above said: I'm sure that there is differences between the VPS providers in how they allocate CPU and IO resources and Digital Ocean may indeed be much better on average. I'm just not sure how you can measure it objectively to make sure they are or that they will continue to be so even 5 minutes in the future.

Which is a shame, because an objective metric that was trustworthy that compared all the different providers would be absolutely awesome.

derefr• 13 years ago

For a while, I was pretty happy with another low-price host (ChicagoVPS)--but I had to switch away (to Linode, as it happens) due to something not mentioned or measured in this article at all: network throughput volatility. Someone or something was regularly burst-saturating the physical pipe going into the machine, such that it would seem to all the rest of the world that my website would be down for random 90-second periods every few hours. This is really bad when you're trying to run a realtime game with persistent connections :)

I'm not sure quite what it was--whether malicious user behavior, a lack of separation in bridge-interface setup making network traffic on the box un-QoS-able, or maybe someone on the box I was on bearing the brunt of temporary, persistent DoS attacks--but I didn't care to roll the dice on another box from the same host, when I knew that this kind of thing "just doesn't happen" with the major providers.

Still, if there was a low-end host that specifically mentioned stable network throughput in their SLA, I'd love to try another one. $7/mo sure does buy a lot of horizontal scaling and High Availability, once you can ensure each node can hold onto the little bit of traffic you send it. :)

danellis2• 13 years ago

Hmm. They email your initial root password in cleartext, rather than either letting me choose it or displaying it on the site, both of which would be over SSL.

signifiers2• 13 years ago

If you use keys, no password is sent. An option to not send password by mail (for non-key-based launches) is on the coming-soon roadmap: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...

danellis2• 13 years ago

You should probably make it clear during server creation that if you have added SSH keys on the web site, they will be injected into ~root/authorized_keys in the image, if that's what you do. Linode, for example, lets you add SSH keys on their web site, but that's only to access your VM's console.

jsnrkd• 13 years ago

Not a bad deal for Digital Ocean especially when there are $20 off promo codes available. Assuming you can use it for 4 months, it's essentially a 4 month trial. I found a few codes with a Google search. ;)

madmaze2• 13 years ago

In this article, DigitalOcean's virtualization technology is misstated.

Its KVM not VMware

madmaze2• 13 years ago

this has now been corrected.

gourneau• 13 years ago

I signed up for DigitalOcean, thanks.

dhruvbird• 13 years ago

I personally use digitalocean for hosting http://en.wikipins.org/ and would like to say that I am very happy with their service and SSD IOPS - something that took me 6hrs. on EC2 takes me ~45mins on digitalocean hosted machines for a half (or less) the cost.

emddudley• 13 years ago

DigitalOcean does not currently offer IPv6.

http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...

DigitalJack2• 13 years ago

How does KVM compare with Xen? Can you over-subscribe ram with KVM?

aliguori• 13 years ago

Yes, you can over-subscribe RAM either through ballooning or just by over-subscribing the host.

Both KVM and Xen use QEMU for their device models so the machine they emulate is very similar (at least in HVM mode). Xen and KVM use different paravirtual I/O drivers but everything I've ever seen indicates that I/O performance is better in KVM.

Xen PV guests are a mixed bag. On the one hand, they work on boxes without virtualization hardware (which are rare anymore) but on pre-Nehalem/Barcelona processors, they are much slower than using HVM (especially 64-bit).

I've never seen a good Xen HVM benchmark either comparatively speaking... Of course, I'm more than a little biased :-)

dotBen2• 13 years ago

One of the many reasons I pay for Linode is the "good neighbor" aspect the price point brings.

I'm not saying that DigitalOcean suffers this problem but the cheaper a VPS provider is the greater chance of it being used by folks running bit torrent, warez downloads, etc and/or folks who think they need to smash the (shared) resources out of server to get their moneys worth.

Paying a few dollars extra for a Linode instance (and I have 100's of them, so it adds up) is worth the peace of mind of being unattractive to these kinds. IE 'bad neighbors" who will pee in the pool.

Support is also top notch (although I rarely need it).

jordan0day• 13 years ago

> etc and/or folks who think they need to smash the (shared) resources out of server to get their moneys worth.

Wouldn't this be more likely on a higher-priced VPS (like Linode) than a lower-priced VPS (like DigitalOcean)?

sirclueless• 13 years ago

No, definitely not. If your top priority is performance per dollar, then no rational person would choose Linode. As a result, Linode attracts people whose top priorities are reliable support and good uptime. People who are worried about uptime don't run their boxes at 110% all the time.

dotBen2• 13 years ago

I need to introduce you to a site called http://lowendbox.com - where scriptkiddies, 12 year old "web hosts" (like, a web host run by a 12 year old) and just weird (sorry, but I just don't get the personality type) people seek out to spend as little money on VPS's - often debating the merits of switching from one to another in order to pay $3.50/m instead of $4.

They then try to eeek out every bit of performance they can from the accounts they "collect". It's a curious sub-culture.

geuis4• 13 years ago

I just switched http://jsonip.com from Rackspace/Slicehost to Linode about a month ago. I was a multi-year Slicehost customer and couldn't have been happier. It was only a matter of time after Rackspace aquired them that I was expecting problems. That occurred about a month + one week ago. (Sorry for the downtime to any users that might be reading this.)

I've since migrated the service to Linode and holy shit, it's such an improvement. The support is great, but even more their admin interface is excellent. Gives me so much more info than I ever had before. It's even a little cheaper than the plan I had with Slicehost.

Just to throw some numbers out there: jsonip.com is a node-based app that supports upwards of 6-10 million requests per day. Lets just say that I couldn't be happier with Linode.

Note to Linode: Do not ever sell out to Rackspace or else I will be forced to go live in the woods somewhere. Thanks.

jervisfm• 13 years ago

I'm just curious : which linode plan do you have for your server ? Is it the $20 monthly plan ?

geuis4• 13 years ago

Linode 1024, ~$50 USD.

bartkozord• 13 years ago

You don't need node.js for this little service. If you're already using nginx you can just use the return directive. Voilà http://git.io/ip

geuis4• 13 years ago

Yes, I know. nginx is pretty awesome and I use it a lot in various servers. jsonip started as a node.js side-project for me a few years ago, and its scaled beautifully as traffic has grown. Its my preferred server environment these days, and I prefer to see how far it can be pushed. So far, I've yet to hit the limit on what it can do for this kind of high-traffic application.

In the future, if it started capping out, I'd look at alternatives. But I'm not there yet, and I like to continue experimenting with node. =)

jlogsdon• 13 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but I hadn't seen jsonip.com before this and I really like the way you did http://jsonip.com/about.

geuis4• 13 years ago

Thanks!

graham_king_3• 13 years ago

There might be better performing hosting providers, and there are definitely lower cost providers than Linode, but I don't love them like I love Linode.

It's not entirely rational, but if you ask around, I'd wager most people who use Linode love it.

Maybe it's because it used to be just caker doing everything, or the free disk / memory upgrades he kept handing out. I remember him asking about LASIK surgery in the (very helpful) forums; there's a family feeling to it. It's the anti-Rackspace. It's home.

corford5• 13 years ago

>It's not entirely rational

So true. I moved a mail server I manage over to digital ocean recently because it needed more RAM and the price difference between a 4GB DO instance and a 4GB Linode one was just too much to swallow.

Very happy with DO so far but... I still have 7 1GB and 512MB vms with Linode and no plans to move any of them because I just can't bring myself to sever all ties with Linode :D

kawsper• 13 years ago

Doesn't something like Rails appservers (Unicorns for an example) run better on Linode because of more access to cores?

Or does that depend on implementation? I remember reading something about MRI only being able to utilize one core.

dharma1• 13 years ago

I've been with Linode for a few years, nothing to complain about. Like others have mentioned, super fast support, good wiki pages for setting things up, and good IRC channel.

With RAM prices being what they are, Linode should price their RAM more competitively and offer SSD for those who want it, at a reasonable price.

On the other hand they also have a data centre in Tokyo, which means noticeably better pings to Asia than DigitalOcean.

In any case, will give DigitalOcean a try for a couple of projects.

Might also want to try OVH and Hetzner for dedicated servers for about £50/month.

JimmaDaRustla• 13 years ago

For over VPS benchmarks, I love serverbear.com

I host with Ramnode.com, and I love their prices and SSDs. Not one issue yet except the odd DDoS attack. Used the server bear coupon code to get 31% off my services for life.

I wonder how it stacks up to DigitalOcean. I also have a linode server, but I'm thinking of cancelling because it is too expensive, but it is solid as a rock.

orthecreedence3• 13 years ago

Shiny new services will always be popping up with great deals and "faster" servers but I prefer to not move my infrastructure every time the next host du jour comes out. Plus, they're just going to raise their prices once they get a critical mass of customers.

Linode has been there through thick and thin for me. Sounds cheesy, but they report on and fix issues before I even notice them, I've only had to submit a ticket once (for something that was my fault), and their infrastructure is tight as a drum.

Linode is very, very reliable. Another thing that many people who work with larger applications than mine will tell you is that speed is not important, what's important is consistency. Linode's virtualization is set up to provide, above all, consistency (even on a loaded host). So sure your site might run 1.6778 times faster on DO, but when the host server is loaded your site's going to be crawling because the other neighbors are bursting their CPU into your space.

We'll see if DO's prices and performance stand the test of time. My guess is their support is extremely lacking in comparison. When everything's running perfectly, this is great. But when the chips are down can you really rely on them? I guess we'll see.

taligent8• 13 years ago

Wow. I found the complete opposite.

Linode would routinely not respond during major incidents (e.g. power outage at Fremont which was common for me) and when they did they were often not clear about what was happening. Their infrastructure is hardly tight as a drum (Google 'Linode bitcoin').

orthecreedence3• 13 years ago

From reading through the comments, it seems a lot of the pain points for Linode happened in the non-Dallas datacenters. Our servers are hosted there with almost 0 problems. I did a good amount of research on which Linode datacenters are the best before placing our servers there (this was years ago) and found that the Fremont datacenter had a lot of flaky issues (and if your experience was recent at all, then they apparently still have issues).

So maybe Linode's main support system is set up to favor Dallas, which if this is true is pretty shoddy. I'd be interested to hear more experiences from other people across different datacenters.

whalesalad• 13 years ago

I've been a Linode customer for many years. I couldn't be happier. They have a buttload of locations to choose from, fast networks, and as everyone else has already mentioned: out of this world support. I've even managed to earn a few hundred bucks in referral cash from them.

I had a handful of dyno's, a worker, and a few add-ons running my iPhone app's API within Heroku up until about a week ago where I transitioned everything onto a small collection of Linodes in the UK datacenter. We're launching in Europe so it made sense to bring everything closer. If you're comfortable and skilled with a terminal, you can get a lot more bang for your buck with Linode.

That being said, I am always interested in trying something new. For a $40 Linode you get 1GB of RAM, with DigitalOcean the same $40 gets you 2GB of RAM and they run on SSD's. I'm going to deploy a copy of my primary API server here to take it for a spin.

First impression thus far: fast deployment. From pressing the submit button to shelling in took literally less than a minute.

Unfortunately though the latency on the box seems a bit high. There is a bit of lag in the terminal, something I do not experience with Linode's UK datacenter.

I'm in Sweden on a 4G modem, here's a traceroute between me and both boxes. DigitalOcean is first, followed by Linode.

  ### DigitalOcean – Amsterdam Datacenter
  traceroute to 192.81.221.48 (192.81.221.48), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
   1  tiny (192.168.0.1)  10.573 ms  1.658 ms  1.393 ms
   2  10.9.14.115 (10.9.14.115)  33.218 ms  24.250 ms  59.223 ms
   3  10.9.14.113 (10.9.14.113)  51.009 ms  35.878 ms  30.836 ms
   4  90-229-25-24.link.se.telia.net (90.229.25.24)  33.153 ms  30.662 ms  34.999 ms
   5  s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.96)  33.962 ms
      s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.228)  74.544 ms
      s-b2-link.telia.net (213.155.133.147)  77.395 ms
   6  s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.246.148)  36.792 ms
      s-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.234)  29.966 ms
      s-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.133.142)  31.228 ms
   7  kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.134.141)  151.952 ms
      kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.248.65.29)  42.281 ms
      kbn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.246.178)  123.130 ms
   8  kbn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.249.51)  39.032 ms  45.868 ms
      kbn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.245.159)  44.708 ms
   9  te4-7.ccr01.cph01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.14.33)  67.971 ms  60.729 ms  96.055 ms
  10  te0-7-0-0.ccr22.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.62.117)  132.391 ms
      te0-7-0-6.ccr21.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.2.149)  97.568 ms
      te0-7-0-0.ccr22.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.62.117)  137.713 ms
  11  te0-0-0-3.mpd21.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.50.57)  101.141 ms  89.885 ms
      te0-0-0-3.mpd22.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.1.101)  147.596 ms
  12  te2-1.mag01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.48.62)  104.005 ms
      te1-1.mag01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.0.242)  52.704 ms  127.224 ms
  13  nxs-internet.demarc.cogentco.com (149.6.128.6)  98.294 ms  130.686 ms  142.924 ms
  14  192.81.221.48 (192.81.221.48)  148.148 ms  107.753 ms  134.880 ms

and now Linode...

  ### Linode – London, UK Datacenter
  traceroute to blitzen.dbld8.com (176.58.120.7), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
   1  tiny (192.168.0.1)  9.671 ms  2.313 ms  1.411 ms
   2  10.9.14.115 (10.9.14.115)  32.881 ms  21.701 ms  34.152 ms
   3  10.9.14.113 (10.9.14.113)  36.843 ms  21.986 ms  26.750 ms
   4  90-229-25-24.link.se.telia.net (90.229.25.24)  26.421 ms  24.166 ms  26.982 ms
   5  s-b2-link.telia.net (213.155.134.55)  27.415 ms
      s-b2-link.telia.net (80.91.248.199)  33.347 ms  37.758 ms
   6  s-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.254.114)  34.993 ms
      s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.254.58)  92.886 ms
      s-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.247.216)  38.297 ms
   7  hbg-bb1-link.telia.net (213.155.135.236)  83.932 ms
      hbg-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.251.41)  36.076 ms
      hbg-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.147)  47.708 ms
   8  ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.201)  67.937 ms
      ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.132.247)  106.801 ms
      ldn-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.247.169)  63.880 ms
   9  ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.249.170)  54.534 ms
      ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.251.237)  101.259 ms
      ldn-b3-link.telia.net (80.91.247.25)  64.316 ms
  10  telecity-ic-150799-ldn-b3.c.telia.net (80.239.167.94)  59.564 ms  70.329 ms  64.835 ms
  11  85.90.238.70 (85.90.238.70)  70.606 ms  68.463 ms  60.808 ms
  12  212.111.33.234 (212.111.33.234)  69.237 ms  60.927 ms  70.726 ms
  13  li522-7.members.linode.com (176.58.120.7)  65.147 ms  60.434 ms  62.646 ms

Quite a difference here. Geographically Sweden is closer to Amsterdam, but i'd imagine there is a fat pipe crossing the North Sea that is faster than being routed through Northern Europe to AMS.

rmoriz3• 13 years ago

you should use mtr and something like gist.github.com or pastie. ICMP over mobile networks is quite unreliable. Even some linode responses vary from 54 to 101ms…

aoprisan• 13 years ago

They have Amsterdam instances.

hhw2• 13 years ago

Linode appears to have a BGP mix of Level3, NTT, Time Warner, KDDI, and Telia vs DigitalOcean's BGP mix of Level3 and Cogent. Linode hands down has the better network connectivity.

ihopngo2• 13 years ago

Better is relative. A company like MegaUpload would say Cogent is the best, but a company like Gameservers.com would say Internap.

DeepDuh3• 13 years ago

I was looking for a (publicly available) list of DigitalOcean's locations but couldn't find it. Would you happen to have a link?

mfkp• 13 years ago

Bottom of this page: https://www.digitalocean.com/features "We provide service from New York, and Amsterdam."

Tehnix2• 13 years ago

Hmm, this seems a bit odd. I get ~16ms lat on ping from the Digital Ocean Amsterdam center (I'm in Denmark). I tried their US one which gave me ~100ms. From what I gather from your traceroute, this is a lot faster than what you experience?

ksec6• 13 years ago

It depends. Some people get a decent speed in both DC. Some dont. For a hosting company you want most people to be in the great speed camp, and good speed for the rest.

ksec6• 13 years ago

Facts: For $40 Dollar you get a 4GB Droplet from DO, not 2GB, So you actually get 4x the memory.

And yes their Networking isn't that great.

taligent8• 13 years ago

It amazes me that people on here are so quick to forget about the Linode Bitcoin incident.

Because it is during security incidents that you really find out what type of company you are dealing with. With Cloudflare they informed users quickly, were transparent about what happened and took their licks. With Linode they didn't inform users and we still don't know what happened.

As a former customer I would never, ever use Linode again.

zzzeek2• 13 years ago

I'd wager (though not with bitcoins) that Linode would be entirely happy to not have bitcoin-related apps running on their systems either, considering the probability of attracting highly motivated attackers.

taligent8• 13 years ago

Sure. But then everyone should be clear about it.

Linode is a toy and should never be used if you value the security of your data.

Legion• 13 years ago

Ahh, the Linode troll's right on time.

We've heard you http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840352 again http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121734 and again http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4911934 and again http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4652662 and again http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427802 and again http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4545458

In every Linode thread that pops up, no matter what the thread is actually about.

We get it. Move on.

jacques_chester2• 13 years ago

His other pet subject is that MySQL has a better replication story than PostgreSQL.

benbro2• 13 years ago

How is it possible that amazon charge $0.050 per GB (for more than 350 TB / month ) while DigitalOcean charge $0.02 per GB for each extra GB and 0.005$ / GB for the 5$ plan? How can they make any profit?

ios84dev3• 13 years ago

Given you can get 1Gbps from Cogent for ~1K/mo (at least that's the price I heard last time they were having a sale) that works out to $0.003/GB, so both are making a massive amount of profit.

benbro2• 13 years ago

How can I get $0.003/GB? Can I do it with a single dedicated server or do I need my own data center?

ktzar• 13 years ago

Maybe this is the reason, (from DigitalOcean): Backup User is solely responsible for the preservation of User's Data. Even with respect to Data as to which User contracts for backup services, DigitalOcean shall have no responsibility to preserve Data, the service is provided as is, without warranty.

dspillett2• 13 years ago

That is pretty much the case with every VPS provider in my experience. Many will make best efforts but hardly any will offer any garantees so officially distater recovery is your responsibility not their's.

EugeneOZ2• 13 years ago

But what about features set comparison? ipv6 support, backups, node balancer, dashboard, API, community, documentation...?

callmeed• 13 years ago

I just launched this project on a Digital Ocean $5 VPS ... it seems pretty fast. (nginx + passenger + Rails)

http://romancepass.com

I've been a happy Linode customer as well. But being able to deploy silly side projects like this for just $5/mo is really cool. This is my 3rd DO VPS and they've all been great. I had a PostgreSQL problem on another one and my support requests were replied to really fast.

propercoil• 13 years ago

Linode customer for years. I'll buy 4 servers and give digital ocean a shot just because it seems the community approves the service and they accept paypal (Linode doesn't and it bothers me)

gleb• 13 years ago

There is routine 10x variation in disk performance between different VPS's on Linode. It's luck of the draw and performance will change (i.e. get worse) over time.

You'd need to provision and benchmark a bunch of Linodes to get meaningful numbers.

That's one of a dozen ways in which a VPS is not like a real server.

5 second benchmark which corresponds well to real-life disk performance:

  sysbench --test=fileio --file-fsync-freq=1 --file-num=1 \
   --file-total-size=16384 --file-test-mode=rndwr run --max-time=10 \
   | grep "Requests/sec"

hhw2• 13 years ago

Has nobody else noticed that the benchmarks use ext3 for Linode and ext4 for DigitalOcean? Not that the SSD's won't outperform hard drives anyway, but that's one extra variable that will skew results.

DeepDuh3• 13 years ago

As someone living in a land far beyond the mountains and the sea (aka Switzerland) I'm thinking this: 5$ for a nice Hulu / Netflix proxy? Sweet!

dspillett2• 13 years ago

One of the key featuers of Linode (at least it was when I used them) is the control panel which allows you to manage various vdisks (and even various whole OS installs on those vdisks if you so desire, though not with several running on a single account) within the space limits of your account. That and the general support. At the time I used Linode very few other hosts at that price-for-stuff value point offered such control. Neither of these things are mentioned in the comparison so I don't know if DO offers similar - obviously it isn't important to this reviewer but that sort of thing is for some.

I currently use one of the cheap servers from http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ (9UKP/mo for 2Gb RAM, 500Gb space and 5Tb bandwidth (after 5Tb you are not cut off but bandwdth is throttled, though I've never come close to that to see how much effect it has)). Excellent if you don't need any hand holding (it is a completely self managed service) or much support (I've not needed to contact support so can't comment, but again "completely self manged"), or a very specific OS/kernel (they have their own builds, getting stock versions intalled is possible but a bit of a faf), you want a pile of space, and your tasks are not CPU intensive (the cheaper machines only have Atom or Celeron processors). Having your own dedicated drive makes I/O contention a moot point unlike with a VPS (though depending on how loaded DigitalOcean's host servers are they may still outperform this for some I/O patterns due to the use of SSDs).

datagramm• 13 years ago

The tests on disk performance are kind of redundant as ext3 is being compared to ext4. This will skew the results in favour of DigitalOcean somewhat.

t0mislav• 13 years ago

I have both Linode 512 and DigitalOcean 512 VPS. Both VPS are running the same version of Debian, same version of Apache (Apache/2.2.16 (Debian), same apache2.conf files, list of loaded modules are same. For benchmark is used same web site on localhost. (simple joomla site). Results are quite different and I can't figure why. Linode has much more "Requests per second".

   #linode London
  Server Software:        Apache/2.2.16
  Server Hostname:        localhost
  Server Port:            80

  Document Path:          /
  Document Length:        7483 bytes

  Concurrency Level:      20
  Time taken for tests:   33.140 seconds
  Complete requests:      1000
  Failed requests:        0
  Write errors:           0
  Total transferred:      8037000 bytes
  HTML transferred:       7483000 bytes
  Requests per second:    30.18 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:       662.791 [ms] (mean)
  Time per request:       33.140 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
  Transfer rate:          236.84 [Kbytes/sec] received

  Connection Times (ms)
                min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
  Connect:        0    0   2.1      0      16
  Processing:   118  658 1143.2    487   19006
  Waiting:      113  655 1138.1    485   19006
  Total:        118  659 1143.2    488   19006

  Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50%    488
    66%    563
    75%    616
    80%    658
    90%    779
    95%    932
    98%   3635
    99%   6406
   100%  19006 (longest request)

    #DigitalOcean Amsterdam
  Server Software:        Apache/2.2.16
  Server Hostname:        localhost
  Server Port:            80

  Document Path:          /
  Document Length:        7483 bytes

  Concurrency Level:      20
  Time taken for tests:   118.087 seconds
  Complete requests:      1000
  Failed requests:        0
  Write errors:           0
  Total transferred:      8032000 bytes
  HTML transferred:       7483000 bytes
  Requests per second:    8.47 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:       2361.734 [ms] (mean)
  Time per request:       118.087 [ms] (mean, across all   concurrent requests)
  Transfer rate:          66.42 [Kbytes/sec] received

  Connection Times (ms)
                min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
  Connect:        0    1   4.0      0      33
  Processing:  1256 2355 234.1   2284    3604
  Waiting:     1256 2328 232.5   2264    3604
  Total:       1256 2356 234.1   2284    3604

  Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50%   2284
    66%   2328
    75%   2412
    80%   2500
    90%   2666
    95%   2768
    98%   2877
    99%   3204
   100%   3604 (longest request)

Linode vs. DigitalOcean – performance benchmarks

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