A good VPS host with room for improvement
March 23, 2021
A good VPS host with room for improvement
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Linode
We use Linode to host our own services and services for clients, including web applications, communications services, source control, and streaming media processing and distribution.
- Most communication: Maintenance, vulnerabilities that may impact us, etc.
- Reliability: None of their data centers have burned down.
- Most of our problems have been resolved promptly.
- No U2F authentication
- No ISO mounting or iPXE scripts
- Quirky DNS+DHCP
- Outages affecting few customers are still outages. Communicate about those too.
- Saved $70/mo for one client by switching from Linode Volumes to B2.
- Much easier to predict costs than AWS/GCP, and much cheaper bandwidth at low volume.
- DigitalOcean Droplets, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google Compute Engine
DigitalOcean had very bad communication both internally and externally. Vultr had good features but could not answer questions about Spectre/Meltdown with any specificity. EC2 and GCE's unpredictable costs and higher bandwidth fees make them annoying or expensive for most of my use cases. Linode is the unpolished, quirky, boring-in-the-good-way option.
It's a VPS host. You pay monthly. Your total cost of ownership is the price times the months you have it. You've got the same proportional related costs and disaster recovery costs like any other way of putting your stuff on the internet.
The only significant problems I've had with Linode's reliability have been IPv6 routing/peering, and only one incident lasted long enough to have a business impact. It was mid-day, which is luckily our off-hours. No notice on the status page or in the control panel, but a "known issue, expect a resolution soon" according to a support ticket response.