My go to for Linux VMs for over 3 years. Very simple to use! Flat pricing/no $#@! cost calculators. RTX6000 GPUs!!!!
June 10, 2021
My go to for Linux VMs for over 3 years. Very simple to use! Flat pricing/no $#@! cost calculators. RTX6000 GPUs!!!!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Linode
I mostly use Linode for test and development purposes although I also have my both my business and personal web/email server running on a Linode.
More recently, for personal/hobby use, I have been using their Nvidia RTX 6000 GPU VMs to render my Blender 3D creations in as it is a huge cost saving over using a cloud render farm and I can use whatever version of Blender I want rather than the old LTS version.
More recently, for personal/hobby use, I have been using their Nvidia RTX 6000 GPU VMs to render my Blender 3D creations in as it is a huge cost saving over using a cloud render farm and I can use whatever version of Blender I want rather than the old LTS version.
- Australian based datacentre
- Helpful customer services
- Very quick to spin up a new VM
- Competitive pricing structure
- Flat pricing structure. (I have developed a loathing for cost calculators over the years. Yes! I am talking about AWS and Google Cloud!)
- Nvidia RTX 6000 GPU VMs!!!
- A Graphical console (GLISH) that can be used for starting/debugging applications that require OpenGL
- The (new) 'create custom image' function needs a bit of work before it is useable.
- New accounts have limited features until a support requested is made to turn specific ones on. It would be useful to have an account page that tells you what is disabled so unpleasant surprises are not had at the pointy end of a deadline.
- Stackscripts would be better if it more info was transferred to the script. Eg the Linode Label given, plan requested, etc. But now I am just nit-picking
- I have ditched my 1200W server and I am now running a mix of Linodes and Raspberry Pi 4s. This is saving a fortune in power bills.
- I get to use a professional GPU for a few hours a month for tiny fraction of the cost of ownership of even a halfway decent graphics card.
- I can have a completely fresh machine for testing on demand without spending 20mins installing a new OS or worry that some stuff up with a long running development machine may be causing me problems.
I am still evaluating DigitalOcean Droplets as their pricepoint has moved more towards Linode, but so far I am leaning back towards Linode. They also don't have the GPU machines. But they do have a wider range of options for CPU. At present if you do lscpu on Linode it lists the cores as living on an AMD EPYC 7601 32-Core Processor.
Amazon Lightsail is a reasonable contender and at the moment they are offering a cheaper bottom end system. I just really don't like the AWS cloud manager and good luck ever getting support.
Azure VMs and Google Compute suffer from the same problem - there are a lot of forms and I could watch the intructional video on how to do the setup. But why should I spend hours learning their platforms when I can be up and running in minutes without doing any tutorials. Note: As with Linode, Digital Ocean is also pretty easy to create new VMs.
Amazon Lightsail is a reasonable contender and at the moment they are offering a cheaper bottom end system. I just really don't like the AWS cloud manager and good luck ever getting support.
Azure VMs and Google Compute suffer from the same problem - there are a lot of forms and I could watch the intructional video on how to do the setup. But why should I spend hours learning their platforms when I can be up and running in minutes without doing any tutorials. Note: As with Linode, Digital Ocean is also pretty easy to create new VMs.
I only have machines created and spun up when I need them and can recreate them using Stackscripts in minutes. So total cost of ownership is relatively low. I probably spend what I was spending on my old physical hardware but that is only because I keep finding new uses that my old hardware would not have been powerful enough to host.
Also, not having to worry about physical hardware is great. I haven't had to take the case off a computer in over two years!!!!
Also, not having to worry about physical hardware is great. I haven't had to take the case off a computer in over two years!!!!
For my business longterm uptime is not as critical as many, however, Linode has always been up and running when I needed/tried to access it.
I have had a few emails over the years saying my Linodes have been migrated for whatever reason. But I didn't notice any gap in service.
I have had a few emails over the years saying my Linodes have been migrated for whatever reason. But I didn't notice any gap in service.