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Ask HN: Anyone using Linode to host large systems?

4 points by gwnywg ↗ HN
Hi HN,

I'm about to start working on a side hustle and my pockets are not deep. The niche I aim for has speciffic understanding of data privacy and security, this will result in many vm's I'll have to deploy and maintain. Also I need to be able to deploy VM's in Sydney as well as in Europe, both in UK and in EU.

My pockets are shallow and I have to save on hosting. Also each instance can be very small, I have conducted some tests and it seems I will be able to utilize $5 nanodes from Linode. I looked their API and also their Ansible collections- it looks promissing.

Can you share your experience with Linode? Or maybe you have good experience with other provider you can vouch for? I'm happy Linode user since 2011, though to date I was only spinning 1 or 2 instances at a time.

7 comments

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re-thc
If privacy and security are a concern, Linode doesn’t support a lot of these features out of the box.

It may not matter and you may be able to DIY, but e.g.

- encrypted volumes

- confidential compute

- more detailed coverage on certifications e.g. SOC2 and equivalents (not everything is covered etc)

- support for SSO and other authentication mechanisms

- private VPC (all instances are currently public)

There’s likely more and Linode is decent for small businesses but definitely not if your focus is security and data privacy.

gwnywg
Thanks, indeed privacy is the thing though I'm OK to DIY whatever it takes as long as instance itself will not have some holes I can't patch or mitigate. What do you mean 'all instances are public'? I thought it's possible to purchase instance without public IP
re-thc
> I thought it's possible to purchase instance without public IP

Last I checked, no. Beta / coming soon perhaps.

tamimio
I heard some are complaining after they got acquired, especially on bigger instances.

As of alternatives, I usually host my stuff, as you can’t have a good performance on a VPS without paying premium, so if performance is your priority (as you don’t have any specs listed. hard to tell if you are focusing on CPU, RAM, etc.), I don’t think $5 or any entry level VPS will do.

gwnywg
Thanks! I'm going to run simple CRUD app, most funciness sits on FE. My rough estimate is the service will only have to sustain ~3k users overall, max ~10-20 simultaneous users.
kimburgess
Another host to consider with AU presence (both Sydney and Melbourne) is Vultr.

Not associated, but have been using them for some personal infrastructure lately - it's a really nice platform. If you have strong isolation requirements they have bare metal options too.

gwnywg
I'll was not aware of them, thanks for sharing!