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Cheap, Fast, Stable. Pick 2. No, pick 3!
March 17, 2021

Cheap, Fast, Stable. Pick 2. No, pick 3!

Harald Kubota | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Linode

Linode runs for many years all of the infrastructure we need for our web pages and all our public Internet-facing applications. While over the year we used other providers in additions, none were better. It's nice to be able to provision VMs all over the globe, just like we can do with the usual cloud providers, and yet due to their scale, we still feel we get much better and much more personal support when needed.
  • Pricing and pricing structure.
  • API access and API documentation.
  • Simple yet effective UI.
  • Kubernetes offering.
  • I'd love to see managed DB capabilities offered.
  • NodeBalancers are surprisingly expensive compared to VMs.
  • VPC like GCP does (crossing sites).
  • Stability for our Internet-facing services.
  • Cost savings.
  • Flexibility to provision a handful of servers temporarily.
For simple VMs or Kubernetes, Linode is cheaper and it also has consistently good performance. As long as this is what you need, you get all you'd want.
AWS and GCP shine when you need their other services. Oracle Cloud was bare bone and expensive. Droplets are easy to start with, but get expensive fast.
I only one issue with hardware failing. I got a nice email explaining the situation, what was done (moved my VM, restarted it).
Once predicted hardware failure was expected and again I got a nice email explaining the situation and what will be done, but I had the choice to change the timing if needed.
Once I had a question and it was answered within few hours. And it was not a "we received your email" type response, but the actual answer.
This is top level support. For a cloud provider, this is outstanding.
The predictable costs of Linode infrastructure (VMs, storage, network) makes it very simple to do budgeting for our infrastructure. Other cloud providers seem to prefer to have VMs provisioned for minutes and hours and then they are very cheap, but for 24x7 and varying workloads, the costs get less predictable and usually they are significantly higher.
It's easy to get another set of servers on Linode as I know it'll not increase much.
Infrastructure uptime means we can serve our customers 24x7 as it should be. This is nowadays not a big problem of course as setting up a HA environment is standard nowadays (some servers, some load balancers, some DNS entries, replicated DBs), but having rock solid infrastructure you can mostly depend on, just simplifies your life and reduces outages or near-outages.
The stability we saw in the last 9 years also means we don't have to use another cloud provider as a Plan B.
Backblaze, Cloudflare, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google Compute Engine
If you need a VM, or some for running Kubernetes, Linode is my recommended place. You don't get all the bells and whistles the other larger cloud providers offer, but if you don't need those or you don't want those due to lock-in, then you get rock solid performance and great support here.

Using Linode

Linode is perfect for what it offers: The UI is a great start. Managing DNS is straightforward. The API is simple and well documented. Everything just works. The performance of the VMs is good and global coverage is more than sufficient for me. Private Layer 2 networking is the only feature I miss which would be really adding value.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Lots to learn
  • DNS management via UI.
  • Kubernetes with its hosted management plane.
  • Costing structure.
  • Layer 2 VLAN.
  • Regions for Object storage very limited.