Linode: a simple VM hosting service where you get a great product for a reasonable price
September 25, 2021
Linode: a simple VM hosting service where you get a great product for a reasonable price
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Linode
We use Linode for hosting multiple projects that require simple virtual machine environments. In particular, it is useful for some of our smaller and/or more custom projects. Its affordability, plus straight forward setup process makes it appealing when compared to more expansive service offerings like Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services.
- Extremely simple setup.
- Backup snapshotting as an add-on feature.
- Recovery controls for systems that are inaccessible via SSH.
- Web interface design is clunky.
- Knowing when to upgrade VMs is often unclear.
- Pricing for some features feel poorly gradated.
- Allowed a team of 6 developers to work against one $10/mn VM instead of each requiring $1,000 in developing hardware for each developer.
- Allows multiple web projects to be hosted, along with simple Jupyter notebooks, as an internal sandbox instead of the dev/DevOps time required to do that using multiple services or internal resources.
- Allows customers to have a well known server expense cost prior to billing.
Linode is a simpler solution than Azure Virtual Machines. Its low cost, predictable billing, is a win for clients and its dead-simple setup is easy to get up and running quickly without training, reading copious numbers of potentially out-of-date blog posts, or going through certification processes. Linode delivers a generic VM with a recent version of ubuntu within a few minutes of signup.
Most of our Linodes are a simple $10/month small VM. We have neon aspects of them, such as storage, on an a la carte basis, and every time I've known my cost upfront and been able to easily decide if the upgrade was reasonable from a cost perspective or not.
We've never had highly mission-critical/high-uptime applications on a Linode VM. Not that I wouldn't. They've always been highly reliable, communicate about downtime and upgrades, and provide options to reduce any downtime due to required upgrades, etc. We've never had a time where the reliability of Linode ever negatively impacted our business.
Do you think Linode delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Linode's feature set?
Yes
Did Linode live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Linode go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Linode again?
Yes