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Well, you can find much better and cheaper VPS in America and Europe, but not in Asia. With Linode, users in Asia can get cheaper VPS with quite reputable company, not the "summer host" one.
Hope with the new $5 plan can bring some competition in Asia
i dont think so
their vps plan isnt that cheap.
Too late to try and re-compete IMHO, and it will take alot more than a ram bump to truly compete with the current mid-range competitors. Panel? Support Time? Network Quality? Disk IO?
But good luck to them. More competition can only be positive.
Linode has a GUI panel refresh coming soon, so will see. Still I prefer Linode over DO and Vultr myself
If you follow their network capacity/peering expansion plans, Linode is investing in improvements
Tbh, they don't really offer anything that'd make me forget their past with leaking customer data and being hacked multiple times. Must say that I like their panel though, no fancy frontend frameworks no flashy shit, simple and clean interface.
damn right!!
I think I was the only person who brought it up. Seems like memories have forgotten. Plus the whole DDOS during Christmas that one year
Let's get one thing clear about BurstNet. They didn't fail just because they couldn't compete or evolve or just because the service was bad. They failed because they sucked at everything. Their network sucked, their datacenter sucked, their hardware sucked.
They lost my server twice in as many months. I think they were using cheap consumer hardware. They seemed to have lots of outages due to UPS problems and whenever that happened the cheap hardware would often die.
I get the impression that you didn't read the full post. Yes, they sucked, but this didn't matter because they could compete on price... until they couldn't anymore, and then they folded.
In other words: yes, they did fail because they couldn't compete. Their service sucking was just one factor in that inability to compete.
While I do agree with AnthonySmith I actually do think that Linode pushes some competitors towards lower prices. Simple reason: The world we're talking about there isn't our LET world.
In their world, middle-class to "tech-savvy" companies, 5$ may be considered cheap.
Does Linode deliver, are they really up that game level? I don't know, probably not. But that wasn't he question.
This also another question, one that I personally find much more interesting (actually 2): How to differentiate yourself and, related to that, how will the VPS market evolve, how will it look like tomorrow? (Evidently Linode guessed wrong there)
At the LET end it comes down to being flexible and kind of smart and what relations one has. Usually it's a penny business. Getting 20 servers incl. CPU and, say 64GB RAM from a good (treating their equipment well) source for 600$ a piece rather than the usual 700 - 900 can make a major difference, up to the point of buying a VPS provider some lifetime.
Another factor, and a potentially disruptive one, is know-how bound into software. Pretty much the whole business segment uses the same few software packages, whsmc, panels,... that opens a danger, namely that it's hard to get a competitive edge.
Of course, all means have been tried. web-site design, image, PR, advertising, you name it. But those "soft factors" carry only so far plus they tend to be expensive and such even out of the reach of the smaller player.
The bloody basis is hardware, software, connectivity, and know-how, the latter one often not seen adequately in its importance; plus it tends to be expensive.
If you can run your server 4 years on average instead of 2.5 you obviously have an advantage. If you can max out the life time your disks (one of the bigger cost factors), yet never or very rarely have breaking ones online, you evidently have an advantage.
One thing I find particularly bewildering is that most providers have basically no bandwidth profile. They either go simply cheap or they go for the "best". Astonishing, as bandwidth is a very major cost factor.
What do I mean by "profile"? Well, if you are a medium european provider, chances are that 90% of your customers will have 90% of their clients in their own country and maybe a few neighbouring countries. At the same time there are small to medium or more regional carriers which need to be cheaper than the big players, at least in their own markets. So I think, it might be smarter to get most of your bandwidth from one of them providers rather than striving for nice connectivity all around the world. (Don't bring up the us-americans; they often do that, yes, but the reason tends to be that they are utterly ignorant and actually taking the us of a to be "the world").
Another point I find amazing an promising is network security, e.g. anti DDOS. It seems that the situation is very poor and at the same time costly at most providers. Quite many of them abuse their router, usually a 2nd hand cisco or juniper, as firewall, too. As for DDOS they pretty much behave like herd animals; always looking for the cheapest compromise and then running after that (example voxility).
Funny thing is, that there are quite decent carriers selling DDOS protected bandwidth for decent prices but those tend not to be the super big international players.
My current prediction: The panel. Whoever comes up with a really good panel that is also secure (read: no php crap) and reaches deep into the infrastructure will have the edge.
That ball keeps bouncing. DO many seem like the king at what they do today but I can easily see them having problems in the future. Same with OVH. Stuff changes fast. DO has a large infrastructure they need to maintain now. So they will run into the same problems that Linode did when it came time to evolve.
Linode has always had a good name -- they provide infrastructure for TheOnion, WPengine and quite a few others.
I think this comes down to getting their clients in at an earlier stage. Where AWS/DO/Vultr do well is they have captured the developer market. Linode, with a higher price point, was reliant on end users moving to them at a latter stage. Now with the $5 instance, Linode suddenly becomes a compelling provider for everyone.
Does it steal from LEB? No, I don't think so, and I don't see the market being pushed down much further, unless we can suddenly increase the density of virtual machines, while not impacting power/support/bandwidth costs.
I have been using them for a year now, and this new $5 price is a killer!
And by time I think they only advance and reaching more and more clients.
For the down site, I hate that they don't have proper DDoS protection.
What @OnApp_Terry said.
Linode have some great names using them.
Last I recall Linode was not so in-deep with investors like DO. For some people that's important. Rather see a self funded than a super VC.
I use all three for work (Linode, DO, Vultr). Linode always inspires more confidence, been longer with them. Their performance never disappoint.
With Vultr, well they do Windows VPS REALLY good. The performance is amazing in those Windows boxes. For me that's a winner.
Is it? I rarely use support, they are certainly fast, sub 60 seconds to tell you it's an unmanaged service. But I don't hate them for it.
Ah BurstNET, back in the day it was all the rage to get your decent spec servers from Rackshack or the Planet and your loose ends from Burst. I will give them one thing though, Burst always offered shit service from 2000 all the way through to their demise.
I miss Rackshack
Lunanode: https://www.lunanode.com/pricing
I think they're amazing because they have volumes, and you can resize your VPS as you want. I like it because you can have low RAM and decide to use a volume as your root and make it 10 GB or 100 GB. You often can't choose your root disk size with other cloud-ish providers. There's no automated backups like DO, but you have access to their API (they use OpenStack) to do that if you want. You can do snapshots for volumes.
I guess they're probably a lot smaller than DO / similar, so that's a con. But I feel like Lunanode has most of the same features and a lot of other features DO / similar don't.
Actually, it is the cost of fraud that is the biggest IMO, once we got that under control, things became sustainable, i.e. chargeback, support and clean-up costs went seriously down. It is the first thing to watch if you have a small team, policing the user base is complicated, from DDoS (both ways), breached VMs and scripts, "miners", to spammers and "VPN providers".
The LEB market is considered an easy prey by some people, rightfully so, because you need more than a savvy technical mind to run this, you also need security and marketing people. All-in-one wonder pro kind of person is very rare so you need at least a couple.
Definetly not. They are more competitive than ever. That doesn't mean they REKT the competition. For example, OVH has more resources for a much lower price. But their storage space and network is lesser than linode's
That pretty much sealed it for me. I use them from time-to-time to spin up a remote desktop instance but, seeing such a presumably large & established company not employing DDOS protection doesn't make much sense when a number of their smaller competitors even offer this, even if it's a paid option.
DDoS protection is more or less a market gimmick which can only protect against some small scale stuff unless costing an arm and a leg.
Refusing to play into the DDoS arms race is the sensible option, sooner or later the authorities will have to employ their dragnet usefully for a change, not only against their citizens, but against some criminals too. The "we pretend we don't see them because they are good for business" kind of thing does not work anymore, the "we don't know which" oligarchies are testing these weapons to put down the internet when it suits them, after all, the internet has been thought as a resilient communication system in DARPA times, and some people are testing ways to put it down, this should raise some flags, it is mostly out of our hands with the chinese deploying millions of IoTs in waiting and the russians busy to harvest all data possible and nuke the rest.
The only good bet in this is not to bet at all. A big attack will take you down no matter what, do you want to keep inflating the bubble or lobby your congress people?
All this, but in the LET market for many providers it takes a lot of strength to start saying no to the segments that cause that.
Getting clients from LET is not hard, weeding out the ones you don't want is where the line is drawn and few, certainly new startups can't bring themselves to cross as it looses income.
This is a mistake many people make and they fail as a result. Anyone which launches a venture should start with that in mind, the cost of fraud greatly outweighs any potential benefit from easy customers. One in 100 chargeback will eat all your profit and then some, but the rate is more like 1 in 10 if you allow everything in.
I asked uncle about the chargebacks we had and the last one was in October... Now, this will work, once you are there you can lower the prices and give deals to the customers in good standing, nevermind the 50% you have to put aside for fraud and disruptions due to it.
Reputation drives it as well, not so much having a "great provider" reputation. But the one that lets people know if you do bad things you will get spotted quickly and shown the door, your revenue does not have greater relevance than our will to keep a clean house.
I actually want to talk about the future of the low end providers?
The large companise have been reducing the price to preempt the low-end market.
Meh, I don't see that happening. I like the low end stuff better. I don't care for slickness and for now I don't need enterprise features. I'm not a big believer in cloud services as we have them today, expensive places to deploy large service clusters. For bigger stuff I'd rather use dedicated servers, and I agree that low end hosts aren't able to match the economies of scale of the big companies for dedis, especially in EU. But for smaller stuff I prefer working with them to dealing with some big bureaucracy.
Me neither, they do not care, however, there are full cloud providers within LE market price range. Also small companies offering them.
There are even some dedi providers, although not even close to OVH or Hezner scale.
Yes but I prefer the LE hosts to the cloud hosts even at comparable pricing. There's less of a corporate black box behind the scenes. Cloud hosts have more features that are potentially useful and that I'd like to see LE hosts adopt, but I'm ok without them for now.
Right now the LE dedi market mostly isn't attractive compared to the big EU hosts, though recently there's been some interesting offers from Colocrossing resellers. I'm not sure what's going on with that and I wonder if anyone has theories. They are nice folks, but I don't know how it will shake out in the end. It's maybe less crazy than the series of CC-sited and later assimilated VPS hosts of a few years ago.
I'm sorry but, that sound much like asking me why I lock my doors or purchase a burglar alarm. If someone is sneaky enough to pick my locks or strong/crazy enough to knock down my door and ignore any alarm that sounds, then they'll do so. I can ask for better law enforcement but, in the meantime, I'm not going to throw my doors open and let anyone in. I see this being analogous, particularly with a company that has already dealt with a huge series of attacks that lasted for 12 days.
When we originally hosted there Jon was very pushy to get us to resell their dedi's on the basis of extremely deep discounts to make up for it. I don't think the companies reselling them make a lot, probably $5/month per dedi at best given:
For some they're treating it as a way for brand recognition or to pad votes during the polls. You can see that the dedi's aren't in any other market since the cost of power in Buffalo is like half what it is in LA/TX.
I dunno, it seems lethal. You sell 50 of those things on an average $5/month profit margin and you have to provide support/etc for a massive $250/month pay day. If your goal is to get bought out I guess that's one thing but just seems like a good way to burn yourself out.
Francisco
I've been wondering about this. Is OpenStack that hard to figure out? Does mnx.io somehow have more knowledge or resources than other LET hosts? I know ZXHost is using Ceph if that counts as well.
I'm puzzled by this whmcs and panel thing too. Why is there such a monoculture? Is there more happening behind the scenes in that stuff than I realize? Whmcs and Solus both seem like standard CRUD apps to me, though Solus also has to deal with some virtualization apis.
And what real difference does the UI skin mean anyway? Much of the interesting stuff that LET hosts aren't doing needs hardware (i.e. money) that they don't have. E.g. very large servers with hourly billing, like OVH 256GB instances.