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 ...)
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Lack of sales tax is US-specific, too which is, for me, quite strange. Amazon here pays 19% sales tax just like every other online and offline business and they end up somewhere in the middle of the spectrum (using price-comparison websites).
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 makes a ton of money. They don't make profit because Amazon's horizon is 100 years from now. They are trying to slowly drive all other retails into starvation by forcing them to operate at unreasonable margins (margins amazon is only able to break even at because of scale).
Talking about amazon as if they're a charity is not apt. Amazon makes a great deal of money and judiciously reinvests it.
They're a publicly traded company. However you want to characterize their strategy – and I think everyone agrees with your summary of their strategy – as a shareholder I'm not interested in 100 year time horizons because I will be dead by then.
The argument goes, no other company gets such a free pass from their shareholders. Amazon could be amazingly profitable right now; in real terms, shareholders are subsidizing their current strategy in ways that Apple or Microsoft or Walmart could never get away with.
So why are you a shareholder? Or why haven't you attempted to change the policies from long term thinking to quarterly thinking like most companies these days?
>They are trying to slowly drive all other retails into starvation by forcing them to operate at unreasonable margins (margins amazon is only able to break even at because of scale).
This is not true in the hosting arena, at least.
Amazon is like everyone else in this industry; when they came out, they came out with very compelling prices.
Well, costs fall with moores law. Amazon prices (especially bandwidth prices) have not.
There are... a lot of new entrants to the market, and they /all/ have prices that are dramatically cheaper than amazon.com. hell, most of them make me look overpriced, and it wasn't so long ago that I was the unreasonably cheap option.
>Whereas in low-end VPS services, the labour cost for Great, Responsive Service will quickly begin to approach your capital outlay.
begin to approach? You need... dramatic scale to spend more money on hardware than on support, even when you have pretty minimal support. I spend rather more on labour than on hardware.
I'm so far removed from hardware pricing these days that I didn't want to pretend that I knew how that business functions while pontificating about it on the internet.
Also, to be fair to airlines, they have immense labour costs.
>Also, to be fair to airlines, they have immense labour costs.
yeah. I also think that it's a good example of how some things? you can skimp on, while other things? not so much. I mean, if the airlines show that you can eliminate (or charge extra for) in-flight meals without disturbing anyone too much. You can even pack 'em in tighter (though, some people will pay extra for a little room.) - but yeah, you've still gotta keep the planes in the air.
Another interesting bit is that I'm not sure that it'd be cheaper to maintain airplanes to a lower standard, even without the customer backlash.
That's the thing; sometimes, the cheaper part is just as good- (for example, I think going supermicro is just as good as going dell, assuming the person assembling uses ESD protection.) - but other things? non-ecc ram, for instance, in my unscientific opinion, usually ends up being more expensive in terms of downtime and technician hours than ecc ram.
Of course, airlines are also almost all unionized; The hosting market is almost the opposite. Generally more is expected for less pay in the hosting market than of the same technical roles in other sectors. Traditionally, this means that many people start in the hosting market, then move up (certainly in terms of pay) into a corporate networking or corporate sysadmin role.
"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.
That is the question. They are the new kids on the block. I plan on moving some less critical projects to DigitalOcean. I'll be monitoring uptime very closely.
I'm actually experimenting with DigitalOcean for a side-project, but we've moved our main site on to dedicated hardware so no plans to try DigitalOcean for that.
I am also one of the happy linode customers for more 3 years, but I also think we shouldn't judge by using the price tag only - constructive competition is always good for us.
I still remember the old days when I switched from slicehost to linode, 30% (360MB vs 256MB instance) cheaper and later 50% (512MB vs 256MB)..
That's a BS argument, that's like saying Windows servers are better than Linux because they cost more. There's no reason to distrust them SOLELY because they are cheap. You're getting 1/4th the cores, that's why it's so cheap.
I disagree. Windows is a product, Linux is a project, so they're harder to compare when price is involved.
When you're comparing two businesses, you can safely assume that given the free market, most products with similar features converge to a similar price range. If a product offered by a company appears to be similar in features to another established product but does it at 1/4 the cost, it is completely valid to wonder what costs are being cut to achieve that price. Is it their infrastructure? Their support? Do they pay their team less? These are all valid questions, whether you are able to answer them given the available information or not.
This market is not established and is rapidly evolving. There's zero reason to assume pricing in the virtual computing market will stabilize anytime soon. Plus these services are not equal, he makes a pretty clear point that DO offers less in certain areas.
>VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?
You do realise that in the past user VPSs were rooted, Bitcoins stolen and Linode users had to find out from Reddit that their VPS was potentially hacked.
If you trust Linode (or any VPS really) with mission critical stuff then you are (being) an idiot. I am sorry but you are.
Edit: The idiot is a reference to behaviour not anything personal.
And frankly I can't understand how a VPS provider can act in this way and still have people acting like they have great support. As a customer I found out from Reddit before Linode. That's a pretty disgraceful effort.
1) I don't think your comments labelling those who disagree with you as "idiots" is constructive or in keeping with the spirit of HN.
2) "Mission critical" to one person may mean something else to someone else. Depending on their requirements, those who consider something to be "mission critical" may be willing to accept varying levels and/or guarantees of uptime or security.
> 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.
All hosts have hardware and network issues. What matters is how they respond to them and that's why I would hesitate to move anything that matters to a new host before I was satisfied with their track record for dealing with unexpected problems.
I handle customer support for us in a helpful and compassionate way. The support we were getting from linode sometimes felt like they didn't even read what we wrote to them.
I'm seeing 24 support threads listed in Gmail with them from 5/21 to 8/31 for various networking and uptime issues.
"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
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.
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.
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-...
You raise prices, in this industry, by not lowering them as hardware/bandwidth prices fall, so it's pretty reasonable to think that prices are not going up.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 :)
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).
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.
Going off on a little tangent here: Listings at hosting "comparison" sites are more or less universally based on how much of a kickback the site owner is getting from the host, and/or how good of a promotional deal they can give their visitors when they sign up for that host.
Compared to these sites, this article is chock-full of data. And I don't see a referral link anywhere. :)
Most of them are, I replied a few comments above you in this thread because my startup's goal is to fix the pay to play hosting review space. You seem to have experience dealing with it and I would love to hear your thoughts.
Make it transparent. It keeps me honest and let's you verify. Also using tons of data. I've got somewhere near ~130,000 reviews in my database. Once it's setup, it runs itself, the costs are quite low. The marketing is honest reviews. Something nobody else can really claim, if I cheat, I lose my only advantage. Take a look at the linode page and tell me what you think http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/24/linode
I will be clear, I am not profit maximizing at all. The amount of companies trying to buy placement is staggering. It's very easy to understand why my competitors would do it. I could probably make 10x the money if I accepted their offers. But I don't plan on just doing web hosting forever, my goal is to scale the technology and review lots of things. If I sell out my brand now, who would ever use it later?
The trick is to do both. Create one site that's honest and pure (like you have), and a completely separate site where you sell higher placements to companies. You then don't care about what people think about the profit making page.
...and by so doing, make the world just that little bit worse off by making it harder for people to find and identify genuine information. Would that fewer entrepreneurs were totally okay with that.
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.
Hi there. I tried your Hosting Helper at that link, and couldn't get it to give any different results no matter what I entered in the various fields, or how big of a budget I selected. It always recommended shared hosting, with the same list of five recommendations. Is it supposed to do that?
Honestly, it needs a lot of work. It will recommend VPS/Dedicated stuff as well if you mark any of the check boxes. It's been a big issue trying to figure out how to automatically recommend what type of hosting someone needs. The majority of the visitors to the site need shared hosting and don't know it. So it caters to them for the most part. The underlying assumption is developers know what kind of hosting they are looking for on a macro level and can get straight to the data. But maybe that's not entirely true?
I am very open to new ideas and suggestions to improve it.
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.
> Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality.
I didn't say it would be easy... you'd have to have a somewhat subjective metric of "did a person answer?" and "did they tell me something useful?". Maybe you could use Amazon's mechanical turk or something like that...
Thank you for ServerBear, I use it all the time and send others to it often.
Can I give you a feature request? Can you track terms of service or somehow summarize them? I would love to filter/find hosts based on how liberal their terms are.
See also this comment/response from armored_mammal re: DigitalOcean's ToS:
That is a pretty good idea, I'll pop it into our roadmap. We've got a chunk of time allocated this month to work on some stuff & that's an easy quick win :)
Depeds how you define quality. Quality as in for developers? Sure windows is not preferred. Quality as in "Lets me do my things the easiest way when I want to browse internet, watch movies and most importantly, have a GUI that even my grandma can use". Windows wins hands down.
After I got my retina macbook, I disabled the 3G on my Cr-48 running Ubuntu (with Unity) and let my 10 yo daughter use it. At one point, all kids got all their screens confiscated, and it sat in my dresser for a few weeks. A week or so later, she started using my old white 2008 MacBook. It's got an Intel SSD and 4GB RAM: far superior to the Cr-48, minus the 3G radio.
While re-arranging the garage, I found some USB speakers and ran across the Cr-48, and set it up for some music in the garage. My daughter immediately wanted it back. She prefers Ubuntu with Unity to OS X and prefers the Cr-48 even though she agrees it isn't as snappy as the MacBook.
The FUD surrounding Microsoft Windows is misplaced. Microsoft Windows is a quality product. It is the desktop computer with the Apple OS at far distance. I can understand Win3.1 and Wind95 were frustrating. I regularly saw the blue screen of death because screwed it up with several game installs. I never had an issue with WinXP or Win7. It looked decent, the apps worked. For XP, I have seen others that go several viruses. They were regularly on suspect porn sites. They never received the security updates. They never setup a username password and they installed any application they could click on. Is it really Microsoft's fault that some dumb users ruin their experience because they trust any website they visit? Plus, that was mostly Win95, maybe WinXP and never Win7.
McDonald's isn't a quality product even though it is mass produced and a lot of people like it. Why isn't quality? Because analysts have questioned the quality of the meat in their products. Is meat? People who overeat the food might develop illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. That is a low quality product.
Microsoft Windows is a quality OS. A lot of people like it. A minority don't like. They have the top leaders of UI design and OS engineering working on the product.
If Windows is not a quality product? Then how do you define quality?
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for answering. In my case, I'm looking more at the Hetzner VPS offering, because it's in the same price range and has better specs than the equivalent Linode.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Hey there - thanks for the response, but I've already wasted at least 15-20 hours over the last year communicating with Rackspace techs, management, and senior management (so I'm told). If you truly believe you can actually do something to fix all the problems, let me know.
Like I said, Rackspace's model of hiring great people and giving premium service worked great in the old days pre-cloud, but now the people are poor quality as the company has grown, the underlying tech is horrible, and the billing and other services so bad that you can't justify the premium prices anymore.
Rackspace servers and service (in all forms) are considered harmful. Just go with AWS or Linode.
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.
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.
I've been using rackspace for a year now and have had a great run of it. I did get a call early on, but I did not register as creepy. The service has been great, except for one ubuntu kernel bug caused by me using an old image to build some servers on their new openstack systems. That was confusing.
I really like openstack. As a python hacker, it's the bee's knees.
Thanks for the kind words. We were able to get everything sorted with the kernel bug? Please let me know if I can help with this or anything else. shaggy@rackspace.com
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadHN 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?
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?
Yes. If you do the math they actually do break even and manage to squeeze some profit.
I wish this had been a $20 vs $20 plan comparison.
(I'm assuming lower is better for encoding time.)
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.
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.
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.
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...
Talking about amazon as if they're a charity is not apt. Amazon makes a great deal of money and judiciously reinvests it.
The argument goes, no other company gets such a free pass from their shareholders. Amazon could be amazingly profitable right now; in real terms, shareholders are subsidizing their current strategy in ways that Apple or Microsoft or Walmart could never get away with.
This is not true in the hosting arena, at least.
Amazon is like everyone else in this industry; when they came out, they came out with very compelling prices.
Well, costs fall with moores law. Amazon prices (especially bandwidth prices) have not.
There are... a lot of new entrants to the market, and they /all/ have prices that are dramatically cheaper than amazon.com. hell, most of them make me look overpriced, and it wasn't so long ago that I was the unreasonably cheap option.
begin to approach? You need... dramatic scale to spend more money on hardware than on support, even when you have pretty minimal support. I spend rather more on labour than on hardware.
Also, to be fair to airlines, they have immense labour costs.
yeah. I also think that it's a good example of how some things? you can skimp on, while other things? not so much. I mean, if the airlines show that you can eliminate (or charge extra for) in-flight meals without disturbing anyone too much. You can even pack 'em in tighter (though, some people will pay extra for a little room.) - but yeah, you've still gotta keep the planes in the air.
Another interesting bit is that I'm not sure that it'd be cheaper to maintain airplanes to a lower standard, even without the customer backlash.
That's the thing; sometimes, the cheaper part is just as good- (for example, I think going supermicro is just as good as going dell, assuming the person assembling uses ESD protection.) - but other things? non-ecc ram, for instance, in my unscientific opinion, usually ends up being more expensive in terms of downtime and technician hours than ecc ram.
Of course, airlines are also almost all unionized; The hosting market is almost the opposite. Generally more is expected for less pay in the hosting market than of the same technical roles in other sectors. Traditionally, this means that many people start in the hosting market, then move up (certainly in terms of pay) into a corporate networking or corporate sysadmin role.
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.
With that said, would you trust a $5/mo. VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?
I still remember the old days when I switched from slicehost to linode, 30% (360MB vs 256MB instance) cheaper and later 50% (512MB vs 256MB)..
When you're comparing two businesses, you can safely assume that given the free market, most products with similar features converge to a similar price range. If a product offered by a company appears to be similar in features to another established product but does it at 1/4 the cost, it is completely valid to wonder what costs are being cut to achieve that price. Is it their infrastructure? Their support? Do they pay their team less? These are all valid questions, whether you are able to answer them given the available information or not.
You do realise that in the past user VPSs were rooted, Bitcoins stolen and Linode users had to find out from Reddit that their VPS was potentially hacked.
If you trust Linode (or any VPS really) with mission critical stuff then you are (being) an idiot. I am sorry but you are.
Edit: The idiot is a reference to behaviour not anything personal.
And frankly I can't understand how a VPS provider can act in this way and still have people acting like they have great support. As a customer I found out from Reddit before Linode. That's a pretty disgraceful effort.
1) I don't think your comments labelling those who disagree with you as "idiots" is constructive or in keeping with the spirit of HN.
2) "Mission critical" to one person may mean something else to someone else. Depending on their requirements, those who consider something to be "mission critical" may be willing to accept varying levels and/or guarantees of uptime or security.
Look at Cloudflare's handling of their incident. Then look at Linode's.
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.
Here's an uptime report of our hosts on Linode from Pingdom: http://i.imgur.com/KggJZ.jpg
I handle customer support for us in a helpful and compassionate way. The support we were getting from linode sometimes felt like they didn't even read what we wrote to them.
I'm seeing 24 support threads listed in Gmail with them from 5/21 to 8/31 for various networking and uptime issues.
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
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.
"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-...
I think it would more fair though to compare a $20 Linode with a $20 offer from another provider.
* http://vps-list.cryto.net/index.php?action=list
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.
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).
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
I might consider moving off Linode for pricing alone.
Also, see: http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean for interesting benchmarks over time (with all the standard caveats, yada yada).
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.
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.
I did not say anything about the article being spammy. I said "hosting comparison companies". The article is quite obviously on someone's blog.
Compared to these sites, this article is chock-full of data. And I don't see a referral link anywhere. :)
I will be clear, I am not profit maximizing at all. The amount of companies trying to buy placement is staggering. It's very easy to understand why my competitors would do it. I could probably make 10x the money if I accepted their offers. But I don't plan on just doing web hosting forever, my goal is to scale the technology and review lots of things. If I sell out my brand now, who would ever use it later?
"one of these spammy hosting comparison sites..."
http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting
I am very open to new ideas and suggestions to improve it.
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.
I didn't say it would be easy... you'd have to have a somewhat subjective metric of "did a person answer?" and "did they tell me something useful?". Maybe you could use Amazon's mechanical turk or something like that...
Can I give you a feature request? Can you track terms of service or somehow summarize them? I would love to filter/find hosts based on how liberal their terms are.
See also this comment/response from armored_mammal re: DigitalOcean's ToS:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5207693
That is a pretty good idea, I'll pop it into our roadmap. We've got a chunk of time allocated this month to work on some stuff & that's an easy quick win :)
+1 Linode.
While re-arranging the garage, I found some USB speakers and ran across the Cr-48, and set it up for some music in the garage. My daughter immediately wanted it back. She prefers Ubuntu with Unity to OS X and prefers the Cr-48 even though she agrees it isn't as snappy as the MacBook.
McDonald's isn't a quality product even though it is mass produced and a lot of people like it. Why isn't quality? Because analysts have questioned the quality of the meat in their products. Is meat? People who overeat the food might develop illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. That is a low quality product.
Microsoft Windows is a quality OS. A lot of people like it. A minority don't like. They have the top leaders of UI design and OS engineering working on the product.
If Windows is not a quality product? Then how do you define quality?
I'm considering switching to DigitalOcean just for the backups. Are these included in the cost?
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.
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.
Linode was a great provider, but now I can manage my own VMs using Xen myself.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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
Background - my employer hosts on dedicated servers at Rackspace and we're considering using more of their cloud offering.
We're moving away as quickly as possible to Linode and AWS.
Like I said, Rackspace's model of hiring great people and giving premium service worked great in the old days pre-cloud, but now the people are poor quality as the company has grown, the underlying tech is horrible, and the billing and other services so bad that you can't justify the premium prices anymore.
Rackspace servers and service (in all forms) are considered harmful. Just go with AWS or Linode.
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.
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.
I really like openstack. As a python hacker, it's the bee's knees.
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.
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