Not much to tell -- I switched because of price, and have been very happy. Good support, good community, nice docs (e.g. for things like upgrading OS images).
Both Slicehost and Linode have top notch service. I switched because of price/ram and 32bit support. I found that the overhead on a 64bit machine on low ram instances is just not worth it for the kind of stuff I'm doing now.
I've tried slicehost, linode, and mosso (now rackspace - cloud servers) they were all pretty similar. I think the new linode pricing now matches the old mosso pricing.
Not only that, but Linode doesn't cap bandwidth based on node size. I've been able to get up to almost 200 Mb/s out of a Linode 360 whereas the smallest slice (256) is capped at 10 Mb/s
After conducting the tests outlined here (http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison) I switched from Slicehost to Linode. Apart from two network outages in their Newark datacenter I've been very happy with the switch.
Do you have any metrics for this? I have found issues with all the data-centers. NJ seems the most problematic from experience, followed closely by Dallas, which your data does confirm.
If you click on any of the Linode links, you can see when outages occurred, how long they were, and usually an explanation of the outage (if Linode provided one to me)
Yeah, I'm glad they have the linode.typepad.com status blog - when Dallas is down, I can't connect to members.linode.com or status.linode.com to see what is going on! I know DOS attacks aren't their fault, but we've had a few more interruptions recently compared to usual.
The transfer is a bit poor on prgmr though. $20 gets you 160GiB vs 200 on Linode. Also overage charges on Linode are pretty cheap (half what they are on slicehost).
This is true; But good support is a difficult (and thus expensive) problem; I'm providing a alternative where if you are willing to have slower ticket resolution, you get a discount.
Interesting. Lots of disk space and bandwidth, too. Looks like their acceptable use policy is a bit strict and baroque, tough. I'm also guessing the admin interface doesn't give nearly as much control as linode's (no other VPS providers I'm familiar with do).
200GB of traffic included seemed good at the time, but it doesn't already. I'm seeing (and using) more offers lately that have much more traffic included.
Their traffic allotment is fairly generous compared to comparable services. Sure, if you compare it to something like 1and1 with 'unlimited' for $12, maybe not, but you don't get the same control and reliability for something like that. If you compare it to how much it would cost to serve the same requests on Amazon S3, it's much cheaper.
It's true that price isn't everything, and to some degree, web hosting is a funny market: it's really easy/visible to compete on price/features, but you only notice the service when things go awry (at least for someone like me who doesn't particularly need hand holding), and then you really want to be dealing with people who know their stuff and take their jobs seriously.
That said, I've never got the impression Linode was giving me anything less in terms of service than similar outfits.
That's true. On the other hand, Linode is competitive on price and service. Every ticket I've submitted has gotten a response within a couple hours. That's pretty good considering how much I'm paying. Honestly, I don't know why someone would get a vps from a different company.
I'm happy you are happy, and am not trying to convert you to Slicehost. That said, a bit on my thought process: I've been with them for years, switching costs are non-trivial in terms of my time (and switching could break stuff), and I have absolute and total confidence in them to treat me well.
I just checked my email. In the last year, I've had three incidents with Slicehost, all connected to issues experienced when migrating VPSes. All were resolved in minutes.
Not to knock Linode, or Rackspace Cloud, or EC2, or whatever, but none of them have ever been in the foxhole with me at 3 AM when the server was down and got it back up before customers noticed.
I think both have great support. They both have active and lively IRC channels where staff hang out. It's usually very quick to resolve issues with slicehost and linode.
The pain point for me at slicehost was bandwidth - they charge a lot, linode charge a little. Also far more options on linode etc etc once I moved that all added up to a better experience.
I haven't checked for a while, but when I compared Slicehost and Linode pricing, they were about the same. I stayed on Slicehost for that reason. Slicehost has been great to me, and I like their IRC channel. I see no reason to switch. I guess I'll go compare again soon and if there's a big difference I'll be obliged to switch (very poor), but I haven't had any trouble with Slicehost.
What is preferable about Slicehost compared to Linode? They seem extremely similar to me (I've researched it a fair amount), except that Linode's prices are way better.
I've been with Linode for over a year and never regretted it. This RAM upgrade and a disk space upgrade earlier certainly help!
I think that many choose Slicehost because they don't care about price all that much and/or believe it will be more stable (which may or may not be true)
I, for one, prefer to use VPS that is cheaper than that, offers more traffic and I believe will still be good enough.
...despite Rackspace's well-publicized downtime, which has prompted prominent sites to move away from them?
One of my local competitors recently, proudly, informed me that they were about to launch a new hosting service supported by Rackspace. I smiled, and congratulated them, and started planning the marketing campaign I'd like to run when Rackspace goes down and takes my competitors' clients with them.
> Rackspace's downtime just makes more noise because lots of well-known sites are hosted there.
Not as many as there used to be.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but it's one thing when my site goes down because I did something dumb, and a whole 'nother thing when a site goes down, these days, because a data center is having a problem. I just don't understand why someone would assume that downtime was inevitable and not choose to minimize that risk as much as possible.
Some would suggest that the best way to minimize that risk is not to look at who hasn't had downtime in the last two years, but instead to host your app with more than one provider.
(of course, if you take that route, you probably want to go with two different low-cost providers.)
Excellent comparison, and jibes with my own experience switching from Slicehost to Linode -- noticeably improved performance in CPU and IO. I've started recommending Linode, and now that they've upped the RAM, I will recommend them even more.
I've had sites on linode and slicehost, and have found Slicehost to have less downtime, packet loss, network problems (unreachable), and so on. I'm satisfied with both, overall.
That is very curious I've had a linode in dallas for a long time (2 or more years) and the only downtime that I have experienced on my server is from those few (I think it has been less than 10 times and they weren't more than a few hours) times everyones dallas linode went down.
I have one in Dallas, too. Nothing curious about it, take a look at http://linode.typepad.com/
Perhaps my requirements or expectations are higher than your own. The downtime hasn't been excessive, but sometimes, it is down for an hour before I see anything on their status update blog, and meanwhile, I'll have received a few notes from site users and advertisers.
There are three incidents listed in the past two weeks of packet loss, routing issues, and so on for 1-3 hours. There were other issues in May, I don't know where those are listed now.
Yes, it's only going down for a couple of hours at a time. Considering I'm using the server for images for a medium traffic website - an hour or two is VERY noticeable to my customers, and as noted, it adds up to more than the downtime on my Slicehost account (St. Louis).
Actually, HN did not switch over (at least, that comment didn't say it switched over). It says the main YC site WWW.ycombinator.com (and NOT news.ycombinator.com) switched, and that news.yc is serving just static content from slicehost.
Just sent SliceHost an email, got an answer within minutes:
Hi Alex,
Unfortunately, we don't have any word on future pricing at the moment, but we are aware of Linode's recent price drops.
Thanks,
--
Tim - Slicehost Support
Slicehost, much like Apple, doesn't want customers who primarily care about how much server space they are getting for the money.
Slicehost sells themselves on having superior support. (Now, I don't know if Slicehost support is /actually/ that much better than Linode, but if it is, the price difference could be a reasonable price to pay for the customers who need the most help.)
My sole reason for picking Linode for hosting was RAM, as there was no one else out there who matched the RAM for the price. And now, WOW, I am a very happy customer. Thank You, Linode!!!
I switched from Webfaction to Linode about six months ago, because the WF server I was on kept experiencing hard drive failures leading to an unacceptable amount of downtime. Once is tolerable, but they should have replaced the drive then. They didn't, and two months later it failed again. Again they tried to repair the filesystem. It failed two days later again. When I challenged them on this, they admitted they knew the drive was bad, and that it had no redundancy (seriously?!!!), but blamed the guys managing the hardware (which is evidently NOT Webfaction). Not to mention a ridiculously slow control panel at random times.
Linode has been a dream-come-true. I pay only a few bucks more a month than I did for my Tier-4 plan at Webfaction. Plus, I'm back to managing my own server and no longer have to deal with all the Apache port-forwarding weirdness, local profile software installs, etc.
I've used other VPS hosting companies in the past, but Linode blows them all out of the water. Their VPS infrastructure is very well engineered, and fast. Nobody can touch their price/performance ratio. EDIT: BTW - I am excluding OpenVZ-based VPS's which come with a number of issues that I don't care to deal with.
Interesting experience. I've got three or four sites on Webfaction. So far, ssh on a shared server plus the admin panel has been a sweet spot for me between configurability and not having to manage my own server. However, I've noticed an increase in downtime periods over the past few months and I'm starting to have concerns about the reliability of the service.
I don't know about nobody, but it seems very good. I downsized one of my machines from a dedicated server at Softlayer costing $234 a month to a ~$40 a month Linode and.. it's doing fine! (Though it's not like I was maxing out the dedi.)
I now have several Linodes, a couple in London, all the rest in Atlanta (which, by my research, seems to be the best US data center for them).
Disclaimer: Linode advertise on my Web site now, but I pay for my hosting and chose them independently - no deals :-)
Same here; Linode has one my heart for three very important reasons, that will mean a lot to anybody looking for small-scale hosting:
1. Proper provisioning. They aren't the cheapest option in the market, but they actually provide what you're paying for. I've never had CPU, disk, or memory contention issues on my Linode because they packed too many instances on a host.
2. Great peering. Their network guys know what they're doing, and it shows in the low latency I've seen on my server hosted there, even coming from Japan.
3. Great staff. I wanted to set up my DNS with a wildcard MX record for subdomains, so that I could route mail without having to manually add MX records for every new account. The RFC for DNS allows this, but the Linode DNS management interface didn't... until I contacted them and asked for it. Initially, they gave the 'sorry, but we don't support that' line, but after I pointed out the relevant bit in the RFC, the feature was added within two days. I have never had a hosting provider respond like that.
Linode is still second to Chunkhost in terms of value at the low-end, free-beta and beta tester discounts aside. Chunkhost has had 512mb for a year now, and still offers 20% more disk space. In my experience Linode's network speeds to be much less consistent and, at their peaks, considerably slower.
Yes, all this probably change when Chunkhost goes stable.
I like chunkhost and have a vps there, but the admin interface is still incredibly rudimentary. You can't really do anything other than reboot, create, destroy and reimage. Still, I'm a happy chunkhost customer, I think they have great potential and recommend them to anyone who is looking for a simple, cheap VPS.
I have a question about VPS, hope someone could help and not be much offtopic:
I have a dedicated server (in Softlayer) with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3220 @ 2.40GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB (which I only use 5 or 6, so it's not an issue) and 2000Gb transfer. Price is 189$ a month.
Is it worth to switch to Linode's 4GB ram plan? I was thinking in getting a new server in softlayer with 12-16GB ram.
tl;dr: is it worth switching from a dedicated to a vps with similar specs?
Depends on how process hungry your server is, if you constantly maximizing quad core xeon server, then its not a direct comparison in processing. But if you are using processing speed of a dual core, then I think you should move.
They might give you four "virtual cores" but its not a direct comparison to a xeon server. In everything else, memory space and transfer, you are better off moving.
That depends on what % of your cpu you're using, and how sensitive you are to disk bandwidth. Look at what fraction of the host machine you get ("How many Linodes share a host", http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm ), do you use more than that fraction of the resources that would be shared (disk I/O, CPU time)? How much is having a nice web interface for rebooting and such worth?
> Linodes of the same plan are grouped together onto a host. We adjust the number of slots on each host according to its resources and hardware specification. On average, a Linode 512 host has 40 Linodes on it. A Linode 768 host has on average 30. Linode 1024 host: 20 Linodes; Linode 1536 host: 15; Linode 2048 host: 10; Linode 4096: 5.
Does this mean that a 512 host has 40*512MB = 20GB of physical RAM? If it is less than that, then where does the 512 figure come from?
I believe the current Xen hypervisor uses about 128MB now, but yeah — I sincerely doubt it's out of strict necessity, but out of wanting to ensure not to overload each machine with too many nodes. They wouldn't bump down to 22GB because I assume their mobos are dual-channeled.
Or, they're fibbing a bit by using that "on average" language, and they actually have more like 42 or 44 nodes, but wanted the nice round numbers for the marketing copy.
Edit: Oh, I didn't check the username. I imagine you'd know better than I.
if you're concerned with CPU performance at all, then stick with dedicated. VPS is performant, but i think you can yield a decrease of 10-30ms in pageload times from dedicated.
On a well run VPS, CPU is rarely the problem. Often it's better than a dedicated, because it's a much bigger box, and you can often burst to use more cores. (of course, if everyone else is using a lot of cpu, then CPU can start to suck, too... but my experience has been that CPU is usually not a problem.)
We've done some performance and price comparisons of different providers including Linode and Slicehost (a.k.a. RackspaceCloud). In that price range there are a lot of options you could consider with cloud providers. Although cloud is generally (but not always) multi-tenant, many provide dedicated CPU cores so CPU performance is very predictable. One advantage to cloud also, is that oftentimes the OS runs of an external SAN so if the physical host machine does fail, it can be immediately migrated to another host with very little downtime. There are other benefits like backup images and instant upgrading.
As someone who sells VPSs for a living, well, I'd want a pretty significant discount to take a VPS over a dedicated server of the same specs. The big problem with VPSs is I/O. If you have a 1TB disk and you split it so that two servers are using it, each server, sure, gets 500gb, but each server gets /way less/ than 1/2 the I/O performance. When you have more than one server hitting the same disk, all your sequential transfers become random transfers, and random transfers, especially on the SATA that nearly all VPS providers use, suck.
One thing I personally like about Linode is that they continue to contribute code, sponsor conferences, and otherwise support the open source community. Of course there is a certain amount of self interest involved, but not every VPS hosting company gives back like this.
I first found out about Linode by participating in Rails Rumble, which they were providing hosting for, and switched to them from Slicehost after last year's competition. They offered 3mo free to any competitors who wanted to sign up. I sent in a support ticket and it was dealt with in literally 15 minutes. I've been extremely happy with them ever since.
I was on Slicehost, and I really struggled with whether to change to Linode. It's not that I was having any problems with Slicehost. I loved it. I just kept looking at that extra RAM on Linode, and all those data centers.
When they got the UK data center, that clinched it. I had been hoping to someday expand to UK, so when Linode did that, I changed over that day.
A stupid question: why are the bigger linodes relatively more expensive? You get 512MB for $19.95 and 1024MB for $39.95. If you buy 2x512MB, don't you get twice as much CPU too?
Linode is pretty much a pay-per-use service in the guise of a VPS host. You use twice as much resources, you pay twice as much. You stop using your VPS for a day, your account is credited back for that day. Overage charges are very similar to regular charges. And so on.
So you can compute roughly the same number of digits of pi on 2x512 machines as on one 1024 machine? i.e. you get the same number of execution threads/cycles?
No, CPU seems to be an exception. Even on the smallest plan, you can often burst all the way to 400% (4 cores). So it depends on what other customers are doing, and if everyone else were idle, you'd get the same CPU in both plans. But the host machine is at least an 8-core beast, so one person bursting to 400% doesn't affect other customers as much as it would in other hosting platforms. Also, the main bottleneck in a VPS setup is RAM and I/O. Personally, I've never had a CPU shortage in the two years I've been with Linode ;)
Their FAQ has a section on how many instances are on each host, which is 40 for 0.5GB and 20 for 1GB etc (ie, 20GB of customer instances per host, regardless of instance size). Which would mean that when you go for twice as much ram, you also get twice as much of everything else. The front page lists disk space and bandwidth, and these also scale linearly with ram size.
>You get 512MB for $19.95 and 1024MB for $39.95. If you buy 2x512MB, don't you get twice as much CPU too?
If their setup is the way I think it is, your 1024MB instance will have twice the cpu 'weight' as each 512MB instances, so, /in the case of contention/ the 1024MB instance will have twice as much cpu time as the 512.
Of course, my experience has been that cpu usage rarely goes above 50% on most VPS servers, so it makes less difference.
this lack of a 'bulk discount' is something I've given a lot of thought to. I do give a bulk discount that can seem pretty dramatic, in part because I assume the same amount of support on a $8 VPS as on a $68 VPS. -
What I've found is that this is not what many customers assume. Many customers assume that if they buy a larger, more expensive VPS from you, that they will get a higher level of support, even if ram/cpu/disk is deeply discounted on that large VPS vs a small VPS. So from that point of view, adding in a 'bulk discount' doesn't make any sense, because you end up spending just as much money supporting one large (and very demanding) customer as many tiny, undemanding customers, so from that point of view, Linode is doing the exact right thing.
Now, I've tried to tackle this by being more explicit about the "you are paying $4/month for support." bit. I'll be opening orders for large customers again later this month, I hope, and we'll see how well that works.
Another possibility is that Linode sees support costs as fixed... in many ways, they are. You need to acquire a good team, train them in customer service, and then have enough of them that at least one is on line at any time (I'm not quite to that last part yet, which is part of why I need to insure that my prices fly beneath Linode's.)
You need to have enough people to handle peaks, and support is very peaky, so unless you queue it up (causing latency and customer dissatisfaction) much of the time, many of your support people are going to be idle (or working on non-support stuff)
even so, the greater your customer's support demands are, the higher your peaks will be and the more support people you need, so I think the former is far more likely than the latter.
In terms of iPhone apps, linode easily beats slicehost. Nice graphs for CPU, network, etc. And last i looked, slicehost required you to make a URL with you API key and mail it to yourself, which is a huge PITA.
I wrote the Slicehost app. Would love to add graphs, but that data's not available yet in the API. As for the email link, that's because the app came out before the iPhone had a copy/paste feature. You don't need that anymore with copy/paste.
Do you know why slicehost doesn't just make their private API key a link in the slice manager? I'm also curious what extra level of security the API key buys. If I lose my phone people can still mess with my slices.
I thought the iphone app was a slicehost product - but are you saying you just developed the app as a customer? That's mighty generous...
164 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadThis price difference is pretty tempting. Does anyone that's made the switch from Slicehost to Linode care to tell us about their experience?
http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1392700
Dallas: 99.959% Newark: 99.971% London: 99.986% Fremont: 99.992% Atlanta: 100%
I've heard from others here that Atlanta has been a very reliable LN data center for them as well.
If you click on any of the Linode links, you can see when outages occurred, how long they were, and usually an explanation of the outage (if Linode provided one to me)
Depends if you need ram/disk/transfer though.
200GB of traffic included seemed good at the time, but it doesn't already. I'm seeing (and using) more offers lately that have much more traffic included.
$0.10/GB if purchased in advance, $0.15 retrospectively.
Also, if you have multiple linodes your bandwidth is pooled.
http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#what-if-i-go-over-my-monthly-n...
That said, I've never got the impression Linode was giving me anything less in terms of service than similar outfits.
I just checked my email. In the last year, I've had three incidents with Slicehost, all connected to issues experienced when migrating VPSes. All were resolved in minutes.
Not to knock Linode, or Rackspace Cloud, or EC2, or whatever, but none of them have ever been in the foxhole with me at 3 AM when the server was down and got it back up before customers noticed.
The pain point for me at slicehost was bandwidth - they charge a lot, linode charge a little. Also far more options on linode etc etc once I moved that all added up to a better experience.
I've been with Linode for over a year and never regretted it. This RAM upgrade and a disk space upgrade earlier certainly help!
I, for one, prefer to use VPS that is cheaper than that, offers more traffic and I believe will still be good enough.
One of my local competitors recently, proudly, informed me that they were about to launch a new hosting service supported by Rackspace. I smiled, and congratulated them, and started planning the marketing campaign I'd like to run when Rackspace goes down and takes my competitors' clients with them.
http://reports.panopta.com/cloudharmony/
> Rackspace's downtime just makes more noise because lots of well-known sites are hosted there.
Not as many as there used to be.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but it's one thing when my site goes down because I did something dumb, and a whole 'nother thing when a site goes down, these days, because a data center is having a problem. I just don't understand why someone would assume that downtime was inevitable and not choose to minimize that risk as much as possible.
(of course, if you take that route, you probably want to go with two different low-cost providers.)
And, oddly, according to your link Rackspace Cloud Dallas has 100% uptime which 1) I don't think is true and 2) doesn't seem to support your point.
There are three incidents listed in the past two weeks of packet loss, routing issues, and so on for 1-3 hours. There were other issues in May, I don't know where those are listed now.
Yes, it's only going down for a couple of hours at a time. Considering I'm using the server for images for a medium traffic website - an hour or two is VERY noticeable to my customers, and as noted, it adds up to more than the downtime on my Slicehost account (St. Louis).
Slicehost sells themselves on having superior support. (Now, I don't know if Slicehost support is /actually/ that much better than Linode, but if it is, the price difference could be a reasonable price to pay for the customers who need the most help.)
Linode has been a dream-come-true. I pay only a few bucks more a month than I did for my Tier-4 plan at Webfaction. Plus, I'm back to managing my own server and no longer have to deal with all the Apache port-forwarding weirdness, local profile software installs, etc.
I've used other VPS hosting companies in the past, but Linode blows them all out of the water. Their VPS infrastructure is very well engineered, and fast. Nobody can touch their price/performance ratio. EDIT: BTW - I am excluding OpenVZ-based VPS's which come with a number of issues that I don't care to deal with.
I don't know about nobody, but it seems very good. I downsized one of my machines from a dedicated server at Softlayer costing $234 a month to a ~$40 a month Linode and.. it's doing fine! (Though it's not like I was maxing out the dedi.)
I now have several Linodes, a couple in London, all the rest in Atlanta (which, by my research, seems to be the best US data center for them).
Disclaimer: Linode advertise on my Web site now, but I pay for my hosting and chose them independently - no deals :-)
1. Proper provisioning. They aren't the cheapest option in the market, but they actually provide what you're paying for. I've never had CPU, disk, or memory contention issues on my Linode because they packed too many instances on a host.
2. Great peering. Their network guys know what they're doing, and it shows in the low latency I've seen on my server hosted there, even coming from Japan.
3. Great staff. I wanted to set up my DNS with a wildcard MX record for subdomains, so that I could route mail without having to manually add MX records for every new account. The RFC for DNS allows this, but the Linode DNS management interface didn't... until I contacted them and asked for it. Initially, they gave the 'sorry, but we don't support that' line, but after I pointed out the relevant bit in the RFC, the feature was added within two days. I have never had a hosting provider respond like that.
New prices: http://www.linode.com Old prices: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kVmwiN5...
Yes, all this probably change when Chunkhost goes stable.
I have a dedicated server (in Softlayer) with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3220 @ 2.40GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB (which I only use 5 or 6, so it's not an issue) and 2000Gb transfer. Price is 189$ a month.
Is it worth to switch to Linode's 4GB ram plan? I was thinking in getting a new server in softlayer with 12-16GB ram.
tl;dr: is it worth switching from a dedicated to a vps with similar specs?
They might give you four "virtual cores" but its not a direct comparison to a xeon server. In everything else, memory space and transfer, you are better off moving.
a part from this, linode service and facilities (such as instant backup and restore) are great, don't know about softlayer's
Does this mean that a 512 host has 40*512MB = 20GB of physical RAM? If it is less than that, then where does the 512 figure come from?
Or, they're fibbing a bit by using that "on average" language, and they actually have more like 42 or 44 nodes, but wanted the nice round numbers for the marketing copy.
Edit: Oh, I didn't check the username. I imagine you'd know better than I.
It's disk I/O where VPSs start to really suck.
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma... http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in...
When they got the UK data center, that clinched it. I had been hoping to someday expand to UK, so when Linode did that, I changed over that day.
If their setup is the way I think it is, your 1024MB instance will have twice the cpu 'weight' as each 512MB instances, so, /in the case of contention/ the 1024MB instance will have twice as much cpu time as the 512.
Of course, my experience has been that cpu usage rarely goes above 50% on most VPS servers, so it makes less difference.
What I've found is that this is not what many customers assume. Many customers assume that if they buy a larger, more expensive VPS from you, that they will get a higher level of support, even if ram/cpu/disk is deeply discounted on that large VPS vs a small VPS. So from that point of view, adding in a 'bulk discount' doesn't make any sense, because you end up spending just as much money supporting one large (and very demanding) customer as many tiny, undemanding customers, so from that point of view, Linode is doing the exact right thing.
Now, I've tried to tackle this by being more explicit about the "you are paying $4/month for support." bit. I'll be opening orders for large customers again later this month, I hope, and we'll see how well that works.
Another possibility is that Linode sees support costs as fixed... in many ways, they are. You need to acquire a good team, train them in customer service, and then have enough of them that at least one is on line at any time (I'm not quite to that last part yet, which is part of why I need to insure that my prices fly beneath Linode's.)
You need to have enough people to handle peaks, and support is very peaky, so unless you queue it up (causing latency and customer dissatisfaction) much of the time, many of your support people are going to be idle (or working on non-support stuff)
even so, the greater your customer's support demands are, the higher your peaks will be and the more support people you need, so I think the former is far more likely than the latter.
Do you know why slicehost doesn't just make their private API key a link in the slice manager? I'm also curious what extra level of security the API key buys. If I lose my phone people can still mess with my slices.
I thought the iphone app was a slicehost product - but are you saying you just developed the app as a customer? That's mighty generous...
That's great! My 720 just went to a 1024. Thanks, Linode!
Anyone have a referral code they would want to me use?
Please and thank you.