Introducing Hourly Billing

https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/09/introducing-hourly-billing/

by kyrra • 12 years ago

148 50 12 years ago

blog.linode.com

gamegoblin• 12 years ago

Good on them. Competition between Digital Ocean and Linode for the customers that often sporadically use machines will just be great.

Though, FWIW, still sticking with DO for the 5$/mo.

lsc4• 12 years ago

Though, FWIW, still sticking with DO for the 5$/mo.

DO claims that the $10/month plan is their most popular... I express doubt, as most people I have heard from are on the $5 plan. From looking at their pricing, the $5/month plan looks like a significantly better deal, in terms of resources per dollar, assuming there is no overselling of disk involved, which is my current assumption.

(My motives for collecting this data are self-serving, but they are also transparent.)

netcraft• 12 years ago

I use $5 servers to setup images and then destroy them, but I spin up $10+ servers from those images for everything that runs all the time - just as another data point for you.

JeremyMorgan• 12 years ago

Yeah it is a good move to compete, but I still think the customer base might be a bit different.

I still think of Linode as more of a "real" type hosting environment, in the time I used them I didn't didn't notice any difference from actual bare metal servers. If I didn't know better that's what I would think they were.

DO, to me is much more of a "toy" and experimenting type of service. I have tried hosting things on "droplets" and had strange issues, dropping, outages etc. Not frequent of course, but over say a week or two of uptime. I'm ok with it because it's $5 and what else would you expect? But I wouldn't think of hosting any real sites on droplets personally.

It's just my opinion and many people I've talked to have had the same experiences. Both are great services for different applications.

vcherubini• 12 years ago

I'm of the same opinion. I host all of my production apps on Linode (the 8 cores is nice too), and my staging environment is on DO. I don't mind paying more for Linode because I think their network is better.

threeseed2• 12 years ago

Linode is the toy here.

They have a long history of hiding information from customers during security incidents and outages.

No one running a proper site would be crazy enough to host on Linode.

madsushi• 12 years ago

I like that they configured the 'cap' to be the normal monthly price. It's a smart move that ensures that hourly customers AND monthly customers are getting treated fairly.

chc• 12 years ago

Yep — Digital Ocean does it the same way. It's great to see good ideas spreading.

rrrazdan• 12 years ago

How does a Linode instance stack up against an AWS instance in computing power? I have something on AWS which pushes a c3.large instance to around 80 percent of CPU util. I am thinking of going with a different provider for that server at least, if it makes sense cost wise.

stefantalpalaru• 12 years ago

It depends on the host. If you're lucky enough to get a host that's mostly idle you have the CPU all to yourself most of the time because Linode doesn't have per-VM caps.

You can improve your luck by going for a more expensive plan.

threeseed2• 12 years ago

If you are pushing a C3.large it might be worth looking into dedicated. You can even get them in the same data centre as AWS US-East which means you can still use the rest of the AWS stack.

mwcampbell• 12 years ago

What dedicated provider(s) do you recommend for being in the same building as AWS us-east-1?

Jack000• 12 years ago

AWS is extremely expensive for cpu. I had better luck with rackspace and linode. About 5x faster per dollar on average for a cpu-bound application when I tried them 2 yrs ago. It does depend on what your neighbours are doing though.

SEJeff• 12 years ago

Linode doesn't oversubscribe to the extent AWS does. This results in Linode _consistently_ beating AWS in just about every benchmark due to it being more consistent.

tgeek2• 12 years ago

AWS doesn't oversubscribe at all. This is a pretty baseless rumor.

aalpbalkan• 12 years ago

DigitalOcean is doing this since the beginnning.

eli• 12 years ago

Sure, and Amazon has been doing it for the better part of a decade.

funkyy• 12 years ago

Thats the point. There was no widely recognized host before that could try to challenge big "cloud" companies. Now since DO is around trying to steal the market with pricing (and acceptable quality), Linode needs to step up their game. All of sudden it turned out that they can give twice the resources, hourly pricing and still make money. Hail to free market competition!

opendais• 12 years ago

To be fair, Linode doubled some aspect of their plan [without raising prices] every year before DO even existed.

benjaminwootton• 12 years ago

2009 called - they want their pricing model back.

It's amazing that the industry has come so far that it now seems normal to be able to spin up a server, have it available in a minute or so, then bring it down when done with it and only pay by the minute or hour.

orthecreedence• 12 years ago

YESSS This is awesome news. Linode is my favorite VPS host, and now it's going to be so much more viable for quickly testing things, and also for quick scaling up.

This is doubly good news because Linode instances are well-geared towards CPU work (having 8 cores by default), so if you use a queue-based architecture for background processing, you can now spin up 10 instances to process a bunch of work, and take them down a few hours later when the rush is over.

I especially love the monthly cap, so people who just want a server don't pay unpredictable amounts every month.

Thanks, Linode.

walden424• 12 years ago

I'll need to choose a cloud host soon for an online service that will require great uptime, and Linode is one of my top choices. The reviews, uptime, and prices are great, including management services. The ONLY thing that's keeping me on the fence is lack of SSD's, as there will be a ton of I/O on the relational database. I read that they're beta testing SSD servers, so I hope they come out soon.

gmac• 12 years ago

Bear in mind that Linode's SAS arrays apparently already outperform Digital Ocean's (presumably somewhat crappy) SSD setup, so this may or may not be a silver bullet.

I have a Postgres-based service on a Linode — it works fine in my (mainly read-based) use case, but I do pay for quite a lot of RAM in order to get enough caching.

hackerboos• 12 years ago

Does Linode have the ability to grow a VPS?

robertfw• 12 years ago

You can resize a VPS quite easily, but it does involve anywhere between 15-30 minutes to complete.

Kudos• 12 years ago

It takes way longer than that at larger sizes.

On one of my 4096 boxes there:

You will experience downtime while your Linode is migrated. We estimate 144 minutes to migrate your Linode, but that may vary based on host and network load.

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

Finally. For a while now I've been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) when I need to spin up a quick testing server independent of my standard Linode hosting. The capped pricing per month is a nice touch, exactly the way Digital Ocean do it.

As a Linode customer this makes me very happy, especially knowing it should hopefully garner the company a few more customers. A great company that deserves the success they get.

bashcoder• 12 years ago

When comparing to AWS, it's worth noting that both Linode and DO continue to charge hourly fees for instances that have been stopped but not destroyed.

AWS does not do this. Stop an EC2 instance and you stop paying hourly instance fees. Even if it hasn't been terminated.

There are small fees for maintaining EBS volumes if you are using them for inactive instances, however.

jtchang• 12 years ago

The fact is linode is more expensive than Digital Ocean. I actually hope they stay that way. Why?

My expectations are that they take that extra money and give me more assurances. Pricing is screwy and I fully admit this just may be pricing psychology.

For the extra amount I expect:

* Better support

* More stable network and disk I/O

* Feature decisions that favor stability over bleeding edge.

Every quarter I am looking at digital ocean and wondering if I need to move our production boxes over. So far though Linode has me hooked. The extra amount I save is not worth it. Digital ocean wins hard on price but they need more than that to buy a customer. Just like the competition between Azure and Amazon, Azure needs to do MORE than price match. Azure needs to go above and beyond what I expect from Amazon.

dangero3• 12 years ago

Outside of the standard SSD drives, DO has not had any major data breaches that I'm aware of. That's a pretty big one. At this point recommending Linode to a company I work for seems borderline negligent considering their security history.

kyrra• 12 years ago

DO had the issue where you could delete a droplet without scrubbing the disk. So the next person to create in that area could read the disk and recover any data from it.

rimantas• 12 years ago

And recent events make recommending to use TLS and OpenSSL seem borderline negligent too, considering their security history, right?

brianbc• 12 years ago

Several points here: #1 what is consider hourly usage? services actually running, or just having the VPS enabled even though there is no actual usage account time in the hourly billing? #2 linode should really work in their UX, site is not visually enticing, though hacker news isnt either :P

jenscow3• 12 years ago

I also wondered that. See https://library.linode.com/billing-and-payments#sph_if-my-li...

kijin• 12 years ago

I've been wondering about this since they first started beta testing the hourly billing option. Here are my questions:

1) Would hourly billing attract a different kind of usage pattern than what Linodes have so far been used for?

2) Will this hurt performance for other customers?

The reason I'm curious about this is that even the cheapest Linode comes with a lot of CPU power, especially compared to EC2. But the CPU is not dedicated, in fact it's massively oversold. This is great for people who occasionally need to use 8 cores but stay relatively idle most of the time. Guess what, if you keep a server online for months, it's going to be idle a lof of the time.

Hourly billing, on the other hand, encourages people to fire up an instance, compute whatever they need to compute as quickly as possible, and shut down the instance as soon as they're done. In fact, that's exactly how I use EC2's high-CPU instances. Everything is scripted to ensure the most efficient use of resources throughout the lifetime of the instance, because every hour costs money. Why use 50% CPU for two hours when you can use 100% CPU for one hour for half the cost?

This kind of usage pattern, if widespread among customers, can lead to higher overall CPU usage on the host node (as well as of other scarce resources such as I/O), because fewer instances will sit idle. With EC2 this is not a problem AFAIK because the CPUs are dedicated to my instance. But Linode's CPUs are shared.

For a "traditional" Linode customer, the implication is that there will be busier neighbors. Officially, of course, you would never get less resources than a fair share of the host node. But it has usually been the case that, in Linode, you get a lot more resources most of the time. If people can no longer rely on this unofficial assumption, there could be trouble ahead for Linode.

Introducing Hourly Billing

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