Cost and ease of development by not throwing thousand of options in front of your screen.

Last time, I checked GCP costed me $26 (+ hidden charges) for the same I could get on many other places for $7. Some of them provide instant customer support too and are better because it's not an outsourced customer center in India or other places.

Check out:

vultr: https://www.vultr.com

Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/

OVH: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/

DO: https://www.digitalocean.com

Some prefer managed infrastructure and want to write code. Though, you can do that via GKM but prefer more straightforward approach.

Nanobox: https://nanobox.io

Heroku: https://www.heroku.com

LastBackend: https://lastbackend.com

ML/AI

Paperspace: https://www.paperspace.com

Flyodhub: https://www.floydhub.com

Colocation for those who have big infrastructure needs and developers will cost them less.

Equinx: https://www.equinix.com

Datafoundry: https://www.datafoundry.com

Disclaimer: not associated with any of them. Have used some of them and for others, heard great things.

You can easily go lower for less support and most likely a shit interface with some reliability issues.

> ease of development by not throwing thousand of options in front of your screen.

This! i don't want to spend my life navigating the maze of options and hidden costs of AWS et al, this is important to most projects for two reasons - time and cognitive load... Until things get truly massive scale, it's not worth the brain drain and time is more precious. Navigating the interface of Linode is actually pleasant and takes minimum effort.

If anyone needs a reason not to use AWS for your boss in a nutshell: employee sanity.

Thanks a lot for the long list. I am in the midst of considering switch of hosting provider, so it is nice to know some of the options.

A couple of posters on HN say Vultr has intermittent internal network problems. I've found no wider mention of this - can anyone confirm? I ask as their High Frequency Computer looks (and in testing has been) good, but if the internal network blips then that counts for nothing in a multi-server setup.

We've had network issues as well as forced shutdowns that have corrupted data. Their support was also terrible. We only spent a few weeks with Vultr because of this.

Also: UpCloud https://www.upcloud.com

I have been keeping an eye on them too, along with DO, Linode, Vultr. If I remember correctly UpCloud has disabled HT due to Intel's security issues, so all of their Core are really Single Core and not a Single Thread.

They seems to be working hard [1] with 10! more DC planned in 2020. The entire Hosting market is growing like crazy!

[1] https://upcloud.com/blog/upcloud-secures-18-million-funding-...

+ https://render.com

(I am just a customer)

It's not "the same". GCP network quality and performance is much better.

Also www.wowrack.com

WowRack still has a notorious reputation for hosting spammers.

Egress traffic cost is massively higher on both AWS and GCP.

Instances of comparable power are somehow more expensive on both AWS and GCP.

Also, simplicity; AWS IAM is mightily complicated, things like Cloud Formation are totally non-trivial, etc. You can get going more easily with simple and moderately complex setups on Linode or DO.

Of course, AWS, GCP, and Azure have much bigger infrastructure, several availability zones, a lot of managed software (object storage, various databases, queues, email gateways, docker hubs, etc) which smaller players don't provide, or can't provide at the fault tolerance level which big players are able to offer. Something like AWS Aurora is hugely internally redundant to withstand link problems, node outages, etc transparently. If you want a thing like that, managing it yourself takes serious chops, and money.

At some level of evolution of your company you want complicated thing like AWS IAM, because manual management of access becomes much more complicated.

Everything is a tradeoff. Sometimes you are a large business and genuinely need an airplane, but sometimes you are a small shop and using a motorbike is much more cost-effective.

Linode gives me 1000GB of transfer for the $5 it costs me to rent a vm, while AWS would charge me $150 for just that bandwidth by itself.

Yeah, bandwidth costs is a thing that turns me off about AWS too and then a bunch of proprietary services too, so then you have to rewrite your application if you used some of them and wanting to move providers. However if you want to move fast and not worrying about some of the behind the scenes and have a budget for it, I can see how some large companies and well funded startups love AWS, even though there's sometimes cheaper and more open options.

Do you actually use it?

I’ve been a Linode customer for at least 5 years, and yes, I’ve used a large percentage of that cap on a few occasions. It’s real, if that’s what you’re implying. I use them over other options because their value and simplicity are outstanding.

Similarly with Hetzner, they give you 3 TB with their 2.5 € VMs and let you use it.

Unfortunately I've noticed that their "unmetered pipe" offering is quite a downgrade, as it's only 10 Mbit.

EDIT: Sorry, I'm wrong. All dedicated servers have 1 Gbit unlimited uplinks. I'm not sure why I keep getting confused on this point, their support has confirmed this fact many times to me.

The problem is Hetzner's sever are in EU only. Although I guess they could be used for cheap file server?

On my part, I prefer Linode now simply because I won't support a company as openly monopolistic as .. those guys .. if I can avoid it. Also, maybe a little superficial loyalty. Linode was the first provider I found with KVM support when it was a new feature in QEMU, but that reasoning is long expired.

Small thing perhaps but Linode offers new OS image so much faster than anyone else as I have seen them release CentOS 8 image pretty much on the day it was released and DO hadn't got it the last time I checked after a month or so.

When a company has a room to care to the detail like this, you can feel they're not crushed by support requests which may mean they're doing things right.

This is because DO uses cloud images from upstream projects where possible. They weren't available for CentOS 8 until recently.

I like Linode and DO and have my issues with the big cloud players, but I don’t see them as monopolistic at all? There are multiple highly competitive offerings in the market, each competing on features and cost. You have lots of choice and even vendor lock in is somewhat mitigable if you want to put the effort in.

ah- i meant i don't like those guys ' who rebuilt downtown Seattle in their own image.. (it's silly, I know, but I hate to write corp names as proper nouns once they start to abuse peoples trust, and HN is filtering the asterisks I would have used on another medium. ... i mean a$$azon is openly monopolistic.. that works.)

I personally would say simplicity and up-front pricing. I don't need to make a spreadsheet to figure out what I'm going to pay to host a simple web site or project.

Yes, up-front pricing is very essential. I don't want any surprises. If there's a chance for that, I won't be using the service at all.

Cost is a huge factor if you move a decent chunk of data. For $80 a month I have 4 VMs of various sizes and 8TB (pool) of bandwidth. 8TB of bandwidth by itself is $560 a month of AWS.

Cost and ease of onboarding. For $5/mo you get 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD, 1TB egress quota. Try calculating the egress cost alone for GCP or AWS.

Amazon LightSail gives you 1 CPU, 1GB RAM, 40GB SSD and 2TB transfer for the same price.

Amazon Lightsail launched way after Linode and DO have been established in the low-cost segment, and it was slightly more expensive than Linode and DO when it launched. It appears they've lowered their prices again in order to capture the market but mind share is still low.

Last time I tested it Amazon Lightsail was also way slower.

It is. The "1 vcpu" is basically a lie. They throttle Lightsail viciously based on use.

> mind share is still low.

I can tell that - many people in this thread are using “AWS” as though it’s synonymous with “EC2”.

I assure you that the majority of users in these discussions is perfectly aware of the extent of the AWS ecosystem.

I like the AWS ecosystem but I wouldn't touch it for anything that doesn't pay me back for monthly rent.

I build things with consideration to platform and vendor lock ins. Kube, containers, etc have resolved many deployment issues for me. For other things like authentication, logs, database, analytics, cache, search etc. There is parse, elastic/solid, postgres, redis, logio, ackee etc

Obviously, there are still many spaces left which AWS cover but most applications don't need them. Compliance is a big hurdle for businesses which they pay for. For individuals experimenting, not so much.

For me it's about price transparency. 2-ish years ago I was launching a web app and needed somewhere to host the data and processing. Cost was a major factor.

It took me a while to even find GCP's cost calculator and the AWS one required me to make an account before using it. I spent days looking through documentation an learning all the nomenclature ("elastic beanstalk - seriously??") so I could even start to understand the calculator. Their structure is incredibly convoluted (compute+load balancing+database+database storage+block storage+content delivery+container managment...), making it near impossible to know how much I would end up spending. Not to mention that the prices and performance vary wildly (reserved vs hot vs cold compute).

My rough estimate would've put me at around 3x the cost compared to Linode and I'd be living in fear of the bill every month. Linode told me exactly how much of what I would be getting and how much I'd have to pay - in words, not ec2_t2.micro_us-west_reserved.

I've used Linode in the past but most of my non-GCP workload is in Digital Ocean now. It's just simply cost. I have some one-off services that run async and need RAM. It's much cheaper on DO.

I keep everything directly user-facing (ie, must-be-always-available) on GAE. Which is expensive, but nobody has to wear a pager.

I work fulltime on an ecommerce platform deployed in AWS and part time on a number of small side projects on a Digital Ocean droplet. Managing infra on AWS is a big, complex undertaking with lots to learn. With my droplet I need to know some bits of Linux sysadmin (how to update it, install fail2ban and other small things). Deploying is via a bash script that basically builds, tarballs, scp’s then restarts server.

Basically for small, simple applications, Linode or DO are great. They’re simple, the pricing is simple.

For more complex applications with lots of components, service buses, microservices etc, bigger cloud services offer you lots of features, but it gets difficult to operate if you’re just one guy (IME).

Been hosting my project there for the last 8 years. During these, I have at least two times failed to have enough money on the bank to pay their service. Instead of shutting me down they prorated it for the next month. With AWS and GCP I would still be trying to talk to a human. Thanks linode!

You cannot hard stop billing, at least that i have found. So keeping to a hard budget on AWS/GCP is not possible, be careful.

Simplicity in cost and more user friendly features.

Very predictable how much you'd pay by spinning one up as bandwidth is a pooled limit among all your machines, so you won't pay until you exhaust the pooled monthly limit, and they don't charge you for disk IO and performance/cost ratio has been better.

You'd question why you'd pay more for less performance.

Will ec2 ever be able to boot into recover mode easily? Linode allows you to boot into recovery mode by attaching your disk and also easily access your console from browser in case you screw up networking or firewall to lock yourself out.

They provide easy daily/weekly backup instead of making you write script to take ebs snapshot manually.

Maybe my AWS knowledge isn't caught up but AWS feels like everything is for you to manage.

Also they don't do weird stuff like GCP resetting the hostname on every reboot but things are how you'd expect.

Perf+capacity / cost

DX/UX/UI

Fit small to medium business (i.e. better resource management decision. Yes, that imaginary scaling thing)

Price predictability

---

Launching a production on DO: 1 LB + 2 droplets + 1 managed PG. That's pretty much to cover a huge portion of problem space you are solving for customers. Mostly enough for a sustainable business.

I want to run demo software on a JVM, and the box beefy enough to do that is MUCH cheaper on Linode.

I can believe that Linode is cheaper than EC2, but isn’t Amazon’s LightSail a similar price?

Similar price, but LightSail severe throttling disk and network IO

Cost and freedom.

You start using GCP/AWS/Azure, you're going to start using managed databases, security groups, etc. These are really nice. They can save you a lot of time as a startup. ... They are incredibly difficult to migrate. If you use terraform, it does support GCP/AWS/Azure/DO/Vultr, but you'll have to rewrite everything for each provider.

For really simple providers (just a VM; in AWS, just EC2) you can still write all your own Ansible/Puppet/Chef (I recommend Ansible) to setup your servers for you. You can do your own databases, but there is complexity in scaling, multi-read only workers, etc. Managed solutions are nice in how they handle that for you and you really only need to do off-site backups. But the advantage is, once you have it all written and figured out ... you can move it anywhere.

As a startup, you want to get everything fast. So you're going to get locked in (most likely). That's fine if you start making money. If you want to start cutting costs later, it's not really going to matter who you originally started with. You're going to be rewriting a lot.

There are a TON of tradeoffs going in either direction. Linode/Vultr/DO really appeal to people self-hosting or startups that have infrastructure people from day one who can stand up things, platform-independent, from day one.

DO has started offering managed databases and load balancers. Now we see Linode offering DDOS (maybe saving you money from paying CloudFlare)? Everyone wants to get to the point where they can at least offer the minimum AWS/GCP/Azure stack (web + DNS + load balance + firewall + database .. maybe throw in some managed k8s like DO is doing now?)

It's really all about tradeoffs. What time do you want to put in now so it's easier to migrate later?

> Now we see Linode offering DDOS (maybe saving you money from paying CloudFlare)?

I work for Cloudflare, and we do not charge you money for our DDoS protection. It's free and included on every plan level including our free level, and the protection you get is equal to the protection our enterprise customers get.

In other product features we have we also work hard to make sure we do not charge you for any bad traffic, i.e. our HTTP rate limiting product has the pricing structure designed so that you aren't paying for the traffic stopped by it.

Pricing really isn't the issue here, but where Linode and other hosts adding DDoS protection helps is in the scenarios where your origin / host IP or provider is known. In those scenarios attackers may directly attack the host.

Just as elsewhere in security, you are as strong as your weakest link, and I am really pleased to see hosting companies expand their DDoS protection.

The various disclaimers: I am the engineering manager for DDoS protection at Cloudflare, and I run a little farm of machines at Linode :) I'm happy on both fronts with this announcement from Linode.

As a very satisfied CloudFlare customer (read "leech", since I'm using the free tier), I have seen your dashboard serve 300 GB of data for me some days, which never reached my server because of caching. It would be nice to be able to see a list of the ten most bandwidth-using URLs for a period, so I can maybe save you some bandwidth in case it's an attack or something similar.

Currently, since I use caching, I never see what consumed the bandwidth, so I don't know what file people are downloading so much.

(P.S. Hey David, long time! I hope everything is going well)

Consider that a feature request heard, I'll make sure the product and engineering managers who do the HTTP and cache analytics know about it.

Mind if I put them in touch with you?

And hey again, long time no speak... if you're in London let me know. Otherwise one day I'll make it to wherever you are in the world now.

Thanks! No, I don't mind at all, thank you.

I will let you know next time I'm in London, it's been a while. I'm still in Thessaloniki, let me know if you're ever around!

After your seed round this simply doesn’t hold up. If you’re making money the upside of the modern cloud is absurd, and cloud-to-cloud portability is a design pattern choice. There is zero lock-in with appropriate architecture decisions.

> There is zero lock-in with appropriate architecture decisions.

Sigh, you don't know what you're talking about.

Everything past "make VM" is lockin. Firewall rules, be they security groups, NACLs, or what have you are different for each platform. Each service you use is lockin. Even the build scripts themselves are lockin. The users within the console, and all their associated permissions are lockin.

Do you want load balancers? AWS - so.. thats ALBs, or NLBs, or CLBs? Or did you want to spin up a bunch of dinky ec2 haproxy dockers? Does your application use sticky sessions or have session data? That limits you in a bit of ways.

There is no neutral way to talk about network, compute, storage, and api assets that don't involve lockin of a great deal.

Perhaps you like problems?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3654110 Compromised Linode, thousands of BitCoins stolen (2012)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3655137 Linode Manager Security Incident (2012)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756 Linode hacked, CCs and passwords leaked (2013)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7086921 An old system and a SWAT team (2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10825425 Linode DDoS continues – Atlanta down for 16+ hours (2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10998661 The Twelve Days of Crisis – A Retrospective on Linode’s Holiday DDoS Attacks (2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 Security Notification and Linode Manager Password Reset (2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806686 Linode is suffering on-going DDoS attacks (2016)

> why would I want to use Linode over GCP or AWS?

If you include dedi providers like OVH into this comparison, you probably just wouldn’t.

Nobody's perfect, and Linode clearly had growing pains. Can you point to anything in the past four years? If not, I'd give them another chance.

Why would you “give a chance” to a commodity provider that had no differentiation but does have a bad history?

They’re not really cheaper, their hardware isn’t better, and they’ve shown a willingness to toss security out the window. Doesn’t strike me as deserving of “a chance”.

Because they're a small, bootstrapped company in a tough industry, and I figure I should treat them the way I'd want to be treated?

I get that, but there's such a thing as being so open-minded your brain falls out.

Comparison with dedicated servers is comparing apples to oranges, but except that line your comment has a pretty strong point.

Is it though? There are some very specific use cases where dedicated servers won’t work, but those are certainly a small minority of Linode customers.

Stuff like Terraform works just fine with OVH dedicated servers, so that can’t be the problem either.