Linode vs DigitalOcean?

[hxQ&S8ZaVn9e]

Hi everyone! I've read a lot about each company and I already have a DigitalOcean droplet that I think is okay for development work but am tasked with creating a new site for a local business and am considering Linode due to the great reviews. Both companies are in budget and have great tutorials and documentation. Anyone here have one of each to compare? DigitalOcean performance is 'okay' and is on the cheap end of things but Linode seems to be more enterprise/premium which also draws me to it.

I think I have narrowed it down to these two companies but may consider other reputable suggestions too in the same price range. Need 1GB RAM at minimum (2GB for comfort). Storage requirements aren't high, 30GB or less I would imagine. Bandwidth requirements are unknown as the site doesn't exist yet. The company needs to be real, have real staff and not ran by a teenager, haha! Preferably the company is already widely used and known, I don't want to risk upsetting a client by skimping or choosing a bad provider to get them setup on. That is why I prefer to stick with large known companies, I do not mind paying more for something good.

 

[HalfEatenPie]

Haha well just letting you know ahead of time, Linode and DO are basically at the same price point.  10 dollars per gig.  However they do have different distribution of other resources, such as Linode offers more HDD space and CPU usage.  

It seems more people consider Linode more premium than DO.  I can't say I disagree with them, but the lack of paypal support for Linode is one thing that kinda annoys me.  

I'd also suggest you put a few other providers in there like RamNode, BuyVM, *cough* Catalyst (I work there), and such.  

 

[DomainBop]

It seems more people consider Linode more premium than DO.  I can't say I disagree with them,

I disagree with them.  My Linode in Tokyo had several outages during the 5 months I used them and it's uptime was near the bottom of all providers I'm using.  It was retired on January 31st...RIP.

creating a new site for a local business

Location?

business orientated suggestions (as opposed to developer orientated which DigitalOcean and Linode tend to be):

East coast, Central, Canada (Orlando, Dallas, Toronto): Atlantic.net

West coast (San Jose): Nephoscale <--99.95% monthly SLA and they do issue credits if it falls below that

Europe (Amsterdam): CloudVPS.com

Europe (Italy): IWStack or CloudFlow

Europe VMware (Italy, Czech Republic, Germany, UK. France): ArubaCloud

US (Virginia), Europe (Netherlands, Germany): Leaseweb

Pricing on all of them for 1GB is similar to DO/Linode or slightly less depending on the plan.

 

[HalfEatenPie]

I disagree with them.  My Linode in Tokyo had several outages during the 5 months I used them and it's uptime was near the bottom of all providers I'm using.  It was retired on January 31st...RIP.

Hm.  Well when I used to have my Singapore DigitalOcean VPS it was riddled with packetloss and downtime (network downtime mostly).  

 

[drmike]

I wouldn't trust DigitalOcean with anything.  Biggest hype company in the industry.  Fine for sandbox for personal development.
 
Little gets said about their founders and their prior fails including being hacked and having 1000 servers wiped, inclusive of their backups or unable to restore or other ahhh time shall limit issues... And they seem to have been involved if not owning a company that did a runner of folks and was mixed up in adult hosting in a bigger than life way.
 
Unsure who did due diligence on DO when venture money was being considered, but I would have recommended not funding them.  What did they have?  A half baked $250k invested panel?  Come on their prior / related company is all up in your face at the door about WE ONLY DEAL WITH 10K a MONTH AND ABOVE CUSTOMERS.   Typical big city bullshit. Hype.
 
Me, I think @hxQ&S8ZaVn9e is going about it all wrong.
 
Tasked with doing something for a local business.  Does that business have customers that are local too?  Then how about dealing with a datacenter and/or provider in that region?   Find one with peering to the internet providers that matter there.  Otherwise you have hosting a gazillion miles away, undue latency, etc.     If the company requires out of region fallback redundancy, sure then you can consider some entity like Linode or one of the 20k other VPS hosting companies out there.
 
 "I don't want to risk upsetting a client by skimping or choosing a bad provider to get them setup on. That is why I prefer to stick with large known companies"

Sheer size of a company or their wide brand recognition means really very little.  There are super premium companies that will be super responsive and super costly always.  Those are personal services per se with dedicated humans just for you.  If you aren't going to that level, then you are in the general customer pool and how responsive or effective is pot luck, even at very good companies.  Linode isn't going to resonate with a normal business, but I bet you GoDaddy rings a bell from their commercials on the idiot box.  Would I go host with GoDaddy? No.  Get my point?

Hosting, when it matters is a personal fit.  Find the fit and don't easy shop on the internet.  Contact local hosting companies and local datacenters.  Heck your local telco/internet provider might run a good hosting business.   Get out, see some real people since this involves real people and local.

 

[Clinton]

We use linode for quite a lot of offsite stuff and they've generally gotten worse over the years. Their support used to be a lot more helpful and personal. I haven't used DO so I can't say anything about them.

 

[winnervps]

I don't know why, but I'm in the "mood" of choosing DigitalOcean.

Don't like staff attitudes of Linode. (this is just my feeling.... reading thread over some forums).

I love DO which stay humble.

 

[Hxxx]

I wouldn't trust DigitalOcean with anything.  Biggest hype company in the industry.  Fine for sandbox for personal development.


Little gets said about their founders and their prior fails including being hacked and having 1000 servers wiped, inclusive of their backups or unable to restore or other ahhh time shall limit issues... And they seem to have been involved if not owning a company that did a runner of folks and was mixed up in adult hosting in a bigger than life way.


Unsure who did due diligence on DO when venture money was being considered, but I would have recommended not funding them.  What did they have?  A half baked $250k invested panel?  Come on their prior / related company is all up in your face at the door about WE ONLY DEAL WITH 10K a MONTH AND ABOVE CUSTOMERS.   Typical big city bullshit. Hype.


Me, I think @hxQ&S8ZaVn9e is going about it all wrong.


Tasked with doing something for a local business.  Does that business have customers that are local too?  Then how about dealing with a datacenter and/or provider in that region?   Find one with peering to the internet providers that matter there.  Otherwise you have hosting a gazillion miles away, undue latency, etc.     If the company requires out of region fallback redundancy, sure then you can consider some entity like Linode or one of the 20k other VPS hosting companies out there.

 "I don't want to risk upsetting a client by skimping or choosing a bad provider to get them setup on. That is why I prefer to stick with large known companies"


Sheer size of a company or their wide brand recognition means really very little.  There are super premium companies that will be super responsive and super costly always.  Those are personal services per se with dedicated humans just for you.  If you aren't going to that level, then you are in the general customer pool and how responsive or effective is pot luck, even at very good companies.  Linode isn't going to resonate with a normal business, but I bet you GoDaddy rings a bell from their commercials on the idiot box.  Would I go host with GoDaddy? No.  Get my point?

Hosting, when it matters is a personal fit.  Find the fit and don't easy shop on the internet.  Contact local hosting companies and local datacenters.  Heck your local telco/internet provider might run a good hosting business.   Get out, see some real people since this involves real people and local.

Damn if you dont trust a multi million funded company... Then i dont know what you trust. Probably nothing.

 

[drmike]

Damn if you dont trust a multi million funded company... Then i dont know what you trust. Probably nothing.

I trust companies ran by humans that are accessible and who actually do the work.  Places I can send a message to someone or pick up the phone if really needed and get something done and not be a fish in a vast ocean playing ticket hockey... Yes, DO's support when I've tried it has been responsive.  Perhaps I'll test them again soon.

I've seen ample horrors in all my years with large companies.  At some point a shop like DigitalOcean is going to prune customers on that $5 side and it won't be pretty.  Why?  Because it's hard to sustain real business and return money to investors when you are running one trick operation (i.e. selling VPS at low cost + panel).

Since they are a real business you start looking at per employee costs that are $100k a year.  Run 130 employees at that rate and you get, $13 million in staffing alone.  Folks don't make $100k, but all the associated costs of employees ads up and why people try to not have employees.

I am fond of boutique operations.  Those with passionate tight teams.   Those with actual interest in what they do.  Those that do their numbers to afford the income scenario they want and make it happen.

When I see price wars and lowest pricing, I see people who lack anything of substance to compete on.  The model is low price and super high volume to attempt to make it work.  As a result, many racks of gear, many regular failing parts, degraded systems daily....

If I were going to "trust" a big company, who has a proven track record?  How about IBM?  They aren't going to disappear any time soon.  Softlayer, which they own, prices a VPS with 2 Cores + 1GB of RAM + 25GB of disk + 5TB transit outbound at $42.60 a month.

Want 100GB more of storage + $10 a month.  Want a gigabit port +$20 a month.  IPv4 IPs are $1 each.

... http://www.softlayer.com/virtual-servers

 

[Hxxx]

Good thing opinions and preferences are just that. Fair enough.

 

[DomainBop]

If I were going to "trust" a big company, who has a proven track record?  How about IBM?  They aren't going to disappear any time soon.  Softlayer, which they own, prices a VPS with 2 Cores + 1GB of RAM + 25GB of disk + 5TB transit outbound at $42.60 a month.

To quote many a WHT signature spammer, "if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."  It would be better to pay Peer1 $86.40 for 1 core + 1GB RAM + 17GB disk than take a risk on a budget brand like Softlayer

Damn if you dont trust a multi million funded company... Then i dont know what you trust. Probably nothing.

In corporate America there is more times than not an inverse relationship between size and trustworthiness.  Exhibit A

 

[yomero]

Quick opinion.

At work we use Linode for some projects. Only the Dallas location because is the nearest one (routing) for us. We have several boxes there, and almost zero complaints. A couple of hiccups maybe in the past year. Some emergency migration and some packet loss maybe.

The support has been helpful when needed, and even they did some sysadmin tasks when requested.

 

[TierNet]

Linode and DigitalOcean are definitely two very compettive VPS Hosting providers. Both of them offer similar specs at almost same rate but DigitalOcean is offering more bandwidth and have some really high end plans.

 

[DomainBop]

Linode and DigitalOcean are definitely two very compettive VPS Hosting providers. Both of them offer similar specs at almost same rate but DigitalOcean is offering more bandwidth and have some really high end plans.

Linode's top plans offer far more resources than DigitalOcean's top plan:

DigitalOcean 64GB RAM, 640 GB SSD, 20 cores, 9TB bandwidth, 1Gbps,  $640

Linode 64GB RAM, 1536 GB SSD, 20 cores, 20TB bandwidth, 40 Gbps in/8 Gbps, out  $640

Linode 96GB RAM,  1920GB SSD, 20 cores, 20TB bandwidth, 40 Gbps in/10 Gbps, out  $960

Linode also offers managed services for $100 month (per VPS) and a high availability managed load balancer service ("nodebalancers") which DigitalOcean doesn't.

 

[hxQ&S8ZaVn9e]

Okay so a lot of opinions. Is there any other companies that are already well established? I think I have until this weekend to order something. I would prefer to do business with a properly ran company and not a random cheap low end or whatever company offering oversold services that might be ran from someones bedroom, lol. Because of that I do not mind paying a little more for that piece of mind. 

 

[DomainBop]

Okay so a lot of opinions. Is there any other companies that are already well established?

The companies I listed earlier are all well established and owned by companies that have been in business from 10 years (CloudVPS's parent) to 21 years (Atlantic.net, Aruba.it/ArubaCloud).  No bedrooms or 1-man shows in the lot, but a few company owned datacenters, and a couple of hosting industry giants (Leaseweb and Aruba.it-largest web services co. in Italy), and a lot of enterprise level clients.

Nobody's mentioned them yet, but Vultr (owned by the Choopa people) is on the same level as DigitalOcean.

 

[VPSbell]

I have been a customer for DO Vultr and Linode and most of the time  was spent with DigitalOcean and I would vote for vpsie over all of them for reasons like, 

Only one offering 100% uptime SLA, unique offering , scaling resources up/down is based on cpu, memory, and disk not one package up in tiers, fastest SSD speed - I get about 550MB/s on average while I used to get half of this with digitalocean, They are selective on clients they take on and they only allow invitations to join so they eliminate low end spammers, fraud etc., they offer phone, live chat support , adding private IPs, public IPs is automated you don't have to change any settings, unique premade applications that doesn't exist in DO nor Vultr such as PrestaShop, ClearOS, SugarCRM, Zenoss monitoring, cPanel premade etc.... 

Backups and restore as well as provisioning is faster as well.

I been with them for over 4 months and I never has a moment of downtime while compared to over 38 minutes combined with DO.

There is an online comparison between the 3 of them somewhere but I can't find the link at the moment.

Hope that helps

 

[robbyhicks]

We haven't had any issues so far with Digital Ocean (West) in production, coming from Rackspace (Central), where it seemed they had an issue or scheduled maintenance every 2-3 weeks.

 

[samK]

DigitalOcean is incredibly simple with just enough of what most users need to get by, whereas DigitalOcean is incredibly simple with just enough of what most users need to get by, whereas Linode has a good deal more on offer, but strives for simplicity and ease-of-use as well