Introducing Hourly Billing(blog.linode.com)
blog.linode.com
Introducing Hourly Billing
https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/09/introducing-hourly-billing/
11 comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have a source for this? I just did a quick google search, and although they're somewhat comparable, DO outperformed Linode. And the tests were for read-only, not writes. I'd wager that writes are much faster on an SSD.
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$/mo.
Though, FWIW, still sticking with DO for the 5$/mo.
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.
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 $5 and what else would you expect? But I wouldn't think of hosting any real sites on droplets personally.
It's just my opinion and many people I've talked to have had the same experiences. Both are great services for different applications.
I'm of the same opinion. I host all of my production apps on Linode (the 8 cores is nice too), and my staging environment is on DO. I don't mind paying more for Linode because I think their network is better.
Linode is the toy here.
They have a long history of hiding information from customers during security incidents and outages.
No one running a proper site would be crazy enough to host on Linode.
They have a long history of hiding information from customers during security incidents and outages.
No one running a proper site would be crazy enough to host on Linode.
Do you have anything to support your claim?
It keeps getting brought up due to their repeated issues and lack of transparency.
For example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541915
For example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541915
I mean, a single instance (perhaps one more) is hardly a "long history" or "repeated issues".
Personally I wouldn't use them, and wouldn't recommend them. But I'm not here to argue about it.
I took the time to search for five seconds because you wanted references, but were somehow incapable of making your own research, or making up your own mind.
If you search you will find repeated instances, and that means a long history, with no changes after even a single security problem.
I took the time to search for five seconds because you wanted references, but were somehow incapable of making your own research, or making up your own mind.
If you search you will find repeated instances, and that means a long history, with no changes after even a single security problem.
>Though, FWIW, still sticking with DO for the 5$/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.)
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.)
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.
Thanks. That's the thing; the expense of SSD being what it is, competing with their $10 or $20 plan (where they have 3 and 2 gigabytes of ssd per dolar) is going to be way easier than competing with their $5 plan (where they have 4 gigabytes of ssd for every dollar.) again assuming no disk oversubscription.
The best answer sounds like it would be to decouple disk and ram allocations, use network storage and oversubscribe disk, as I imagine utilization on the disk of the $5 plans is low, but I would prefer to avoid doing that for the same reason that I believe Linode and DO avoids doing that. Network storage: reliable, fast, cheap. Pick two, if you choose really well.
From what I understand of my industry, and if nothing else, I've been in it for a while, new multi-user hardware, usually, is expected to be covered by subscription fees usually within 4-6 months, for this sort of thing. SSD is going to cost you between $0.6 (for cheap consumer-grade in raid5) and $2 (for intel S3500 level 'enterprise' mlc stuff in raid10) per gigabyte, so... it makes a difference.
ObLinode:
Of course, if you are using real live 'enterprise' slc, the price goes way up from there... but I doubt anyone in my sector is using those for anything but cache; in fact, I think Linode posted a while back that they were doing just that, using really good SSD for write-cache.
It's a good idea, really; once your server warms up, for most use cases, most of your reads are going to be cached in ram (assuming you have enough, which at today's prices, you should.) - If good ssd write-cache with something like bcache or dm-cache or your hw raid driver or what have you can get you good write speeds, that might be just as good as SSD in a real-world environment, assuming your ram cache is larger than the data you access often.
Of course, you are still going to get killed by the all-ssd host on disk benchmarks and on metrics like 'how long does it take to spin up a new guest?' - there are other ways to cheat on those metrics, but all that I know of have pretty big downsides for real-world performance.
The best answer sounds like it would be to decouple disk and ram allocations, use network storage and oversubscribe disk, as I imagine utilization on the disk of the $5 plans is low, but I would prefer to avoid doing that for the same reason that I believe Linode and DO avoids doing that. Network storage: reliable, fast, cheap. Pick two, if you choose really well.
From what I understand of my industry, and if nothing else, I've been in it for a while, new multi-user hardware, usually, is expected to be covered by subscription fees usually within 4-6 months, for this sort of thing. SSD is going to cost you between $0.6 (for cheap consumer-grade in raid5) and $2 (for intel S3500 level 'enterprise' mlc stuff in raid10) per gigabyte, so... it makes a difference.
ObLinode:
Of course, if you are using real live 'enterprise' slc, the price goes way up from there... but I doubt anyone in my sector is using those for anything but cache; in fact, I think Linode posted a while back that they were doing just that, using really good SSD for write-cache.
It's a good idea, really; once your server warms up, for most use cases, most of your reads are going to be cached in ram (assuming you have enough, which at today's prices, you should.) - If good ssd write-cache with something like bcache or dm-cache or your hw raid driver or what have you can get you good write speeds, that might be just as good as SSD in a real-world environment, assuming your ram cache is larger than the data you access often.
Of course, you are still going to get killed by the all-ssd host on disk benchmarks and on metrics like 'how long does it take to spin up a new guest?' - there are other ways to cheat on those metrics, but all that I know of have pretty big downsides for real-world performance.
I use the $5 servers for everything I run. Never had speed issues despite pretty heavy traffic loads, so I haven't bothered to upgrade.
Yeah, that is the real question I have about SSD; I mean, normally you want to buy enough ram to cache all the data you regularly access, because the overhead of hitting spinning disk absolutely kills you.
Now, SSD is still slower than ram... way slower than ram. But it's way faster than spinning disk, especially on reads. I imagine there are some applications where SSD is fast enough that hitting disk is okay; you don't need to worry about having enough ram to cache all data you might read, and ram is still like eight or nine bucks a gig (vs. $0.6 to $2 for mlc ssd) - and if we're talking about reads here? MLC is fine for reads.
Of course, part of that ram difference might be that ram prices haven't fallen much over the last year or two, (in fact, most of the ram I bought last year, I bought at a lower price than the ram I'm looking at now.) while SSD prices have really fallen fast, so I don't know if this is the long-term price-equilibrium; still, I would expect ssd to continue to be significantly less expensive than ram.
Now, SSD is still slower than ram... way slower than ram. But it's way faster than spinning disk, especially on reads. I imagine there are some applications where SSD is fast enough that hitting disk is okay; you don't need to worry about having enough ram to cache all data you might read, and ram is still like eight or nine bucks a gig (vs. $0.6 to $2 for mlc ssd) - and if we're talking about reads here? MLC is fine for reads.
Of course, part of that ram difference might be that ram prices haven't fallen much over the last year or two, (in fact, most of the ram I bought last year, I bought at a lower price than the ram I'm looking at now.) while SSD prices have really fallen fast, so I don't know if this is the long-term price-equilibrium; still, I would expect ssd to continue to be significantly less expensive than ram.
What do you use for caching that uses the hard drive? Redis?
No, I was talking about caching disk reads in ram. Nearly all modern operating systems do this. If you have enough ram, the data you read from disk is cached in ram. With spinning disk, especially shared 7200rpm spinning disk, for interactive use? generally speaking, you have human-noticeable latency every time you do a blocking read that isn't cached.
Because of this, having enough ram to cache all the data you read often is extremely important to system performance when you are on spinning disk. (and having a pagecache that doesn't dump all the stuff you use often when you do a one-time read of a big file.)
I was suggesting that SSD might have fast enough read-access that for some applications, the penalty for reading from ssd rather than from pagecache might be small enough to not be a big deal, meaning you could get acceptable performance out of a system with less total ram.
Because of this, having enough ram to cache all the data you read often is extremely important to system performance when you are on spinning disk. (and having a pagecache that doesn't dump all the stuff you use often when you do a one-time read of a big file.)
I was suggesting that SSD might have fast enough read-access that for some applications, the penalty for reading from ssd rather than from pagecache might be small enough to not be a big deal, meaning you could get acceptable performance out of a system with less total ram.
Thanks for clarifying. I was wondering about Redis because it doesn't replace cached contents when there's no memory left, like Memcached.
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.
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.
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.
And recent events make recommending to use TLS and OpenSSL seem borderline negligent too, considering their security history, right?
That's a slippery slope. By that logic no company can be critiqued for security failures. Linode was storing their shell passwords in clear text. To me that's where I draw the line.
On the other hand, if there were good alternatives to OpenSSL the community probably would be talking about considering them right now.
On the other hand, if there were good alternatives to OpenSSL the community probably would be talking about considering them right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I also wondered that. See https://library.linode.com/billing-and-payments#sph_if-my-li...
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.
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.
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.
What dedicated provider(s) do you recommend for being in the same building as AWS us-east-1?
US-East isn't a single building. Per AWS its over 10 datacenters that make up US-East(from a post they had in 2012). You aren't in the same building as their availability zones, you are probably talking about their Direct Connect POPs which is something completely different.
--(updated with links)--
https://aws.amazon.com/message/67457/
https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/details/
--(updated with links)--
https://aws.amazon.com/message/67457/
https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/details/
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.
You can improve your luck by going for a more expensive plan.
Does Linode have the ability to grow a VPS?
You can resize a VPS quite easily, but it does involve anywhere between 15-30 minutes to complete.
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.
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.
DigitalOcean is doing this since the beginnning.
Sure, and Amazon has been doing it for the better part of a decade.
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!
To be fair, Linode doubled some aspect of their plan [without raising prices] every year before DO even existed.
And has a history of upgrades since 2003.
https://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/page/3/
https://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/page/3/
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.
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.
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.