Linode: great value, competitive cost, and essential if you need complete control, but want to get up and running quick
January 26, 2021
Linode: great value, competitive cost, and essential if you need complete control, but want to get up and running quick
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Linode
We use Linode across the organization to support multiple sites, in conjunction with a physical host provider that we use for our legacy sites. We also use Linode when we need to get something up and running quickly, like when we need to test upgrades before deploying to production. With a few clicks we can get a staging server up and running and began testing.
The admin panel is quite easy to use (we use Plesk on our physical host provider), and the documentation is excellent. Billing is also clear, with no hidden fees. They also have an analytics panel to view your bandwidth usage.
If there is one major issue I found, it's that when I clone a production site to set up a staging site, I noticed MariaDB always gets corrupted. This is an easy fix by backing up the /var/lib/MySQL directory and then uninstalling and re-installing MariaDB, but it's an annoyance. I haven't gotten to the bottom of why this continues to happen.
The admin panel is quite easy to use (we use Plesk on our physical host provider), and the documentation is excellent. Billing is also clear, with no hidden fees. They also have an analytics panel to view your bandwidth usage.
If there is one major issue I found, it's that when I clone a production site to set up a staging site, I noticed MariaDB always gets corrupted. This is an easy fix by backing up the /var/lib/MySQL directory and then uninstalling and re-installing MariaDB, but it's an annoyance. I haven't gotten to the bottom of why this continues to happen.
- Easy to use.
- Quick.
- Clear billing and usage stats.
- Cloning production sites (always causes MariaDB corruption, requiring a re-install).
- It allows us to upgrade our WordPress install quickly by bringing up a staging site for testing and then quickly destroying it once we're done. Much harder to do on our physical host.
- Cost is a lot clearer and cheaper than our physical host.
- We can deploy test servers easily, and since the cost is pro-rated, it always ends up being cheaper than using our physical host.
We use DigitalOcean for one of our sites. Unfortunately, the admin panel is not nearly as advanced and easy to use as Linode, and whenever we restore from backup, we have to run fsck, because there's always hard drive corruption, which we don't have to deal with on Linode. We've been slowly migrating away from DigitalOcean to Linode.
The cost is clear and upfront. They also allow you to track your bandwidth, so you can check if you're going above the limit. However, for an average organization like us, it's hard to reach the quota, even on our busiest site. With all the value they bring, Linode is one of the cheaper cloud providers out there and server performance, even on their lower tiers, is excellent.
In the 2 years I've been using Linode in my current organization, we've had a total of 10 minutes downtime from Linode, due to a hardware failure. Most of the time, if there is an issue, like with our backups, we don't even realize there's a problem. It's always Linode contacting us to inform us they've detected an error and are fixing it. Our Linode sites are the few sites where I feel I can go to sleep without having to worry about waking up to a major issue, like a sudden failure or DDOS attack.