What’s a good alternative for Linode these days? I just want a vps where I can install Debian, be root, and have a web and email server. A 4gb Linode has been enough for my needs for years.
Vultr is amazing on price/performance. I use it as a lab cloud, and for my more fun (or Windows) workloads. You slightly sacrifice reliability, but you get interesting options including odd OSes, and per-hour dedicated hardware. Definitely an innovative bunch.
DigitalOcean offers solid uptime, a more professional operation, and typically better performance than Linode in benchmarks (https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/screener). It has confusing marketing, but a good account dashboard and good docco/service. They're more in line with Linode, and will probably be the big winners if Linode/Akamai continue losing steam.
I wouldn't go with OVH, and I would use caution with cheaper providers, unless you're comfortable with the risk of hiring people who would willingly build wooden data centres with no fire safely. There is such a thing as "too cheap". (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-fire-rep...)
> The Bas-Rhin fire service says that the SBG2 data center had no automatic fire extinguishing system and no general electrical cut-off switch. The facility also had a wooden ceiling rated to resist fire for only one hour, and a free-cooling design that created "chimneys" that increased the fire's ferocity.
I recall seeing headlines here about the fires, but I didn't know their construction was this bad.
I second Vultr. They also have more advanced networking features, mainly BGP peering, that are uncommon with larger VPS providers. Their network seems super reliable.
Linode is still fine I think. A few months ago I looked around a bit for alternatives as I wondered if there are better deals out there, and nothing really jumped out as "wow, this obviously offers a much better price/quality service!"
DigitalOcean seems about on-par; OVH and Hetzner are cheaper but seem less reliable, etc. Much depends on your exact needs of course.
Who will know what Akamai will do in the future, but you can say "who knows what $anything will do in the future?" too. It's been a year and nothing has radically changed as near as I can tell. A naming rebrand is rather superficial.
Hetzner is nice and cheap and now has two US data centers, but you will need to contact support to get SMTP ports unblocked I believe.
If you had a 4GB/2-CPU Linode for $30, you could get an 8GB/2-CPU from Hetzner for €21.85 (~$23.45). If you were using Linode's shared-CPU nodes, that $20 4GB VPS would be €7.55 on Hetzner (~$8.10) or even €5.35 in their European data centers (~$5.74, their European data centers offer both Intel or AMD processors so you can get a 4GB/2-CPU intel box there, but in the US they're only offering their AMD servers which include 3-CPU so it's a tad more expensive due to fewer options).
DigitalOcean is the most serious developer-first cloud, in my biased opinion as an ex employee. I still use their cloud whenever I need to run something because I know it's mostly well built, price/performance is almost unrivalled. I'd run my stuff on DO before Azure all the time, and before AWS and GCP for most workloads where the DO feature set is sufficient.
I liked Linode but moved to AWS Lightsail several years ago. I like it, simple pricing, I use Google Domains though Lightsail gives you some with the VPS. I don't like the cloud pricing of Route53 which is why I use Google Domains. Otherwise I like the VPS style nature of Lightsail. For my own self-hosting, it's all I need.
I do understand.. and sometimes cheap is what you want. When you want something else -- like customer service, this is where mnx.io shines. I would consider mnx.io to be a boutique cloud provider, prioritize quality/reliability and customer service, allowing us to build close relationships with our customers. As a boutique provider, we know most of our customers by name and focus on providing the resources necessary to ensure reliable, long-term sustainability.
Well I don't know much about Linode customer service because it all worked fine for 14 years... only thing I got is "your node is going to be migrated in X days, or press this key to migrate it now" few times when they were upgrading for new hardware.
The one single issue I had 10 years ago was fixed within minutes of opening ticket too. So you're basically trying to advertise to a bunch of customers happy with service that's also cheaper than your service and offers more options (hosted databases, object store, DNS hosting)
That’s a great experience with Linode.. We’re certainly expanding our options and with our recent acquisition of Joyent’s Triton DataCenter it’s also 100% open source — maybe one day we get to talk again! Thanks for the feedback too.
To be fair I've traced malicious network attempts from Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Hetzner... pretty much everyone, I assume due to the prevalence of vulnerable wordpress sites becoming part of botnets.
All providers will get abused, the difference is in the response.
Namecheap lost all my 'loyalty' when I started tracing where all the SMS phish sites I was getting were hosted.
Finding out this was Namecheap didn't sour me. Finding out they don't take the sites down quickly enough* to be worth reporting put the wheels in motion to move all my domains off them.
Unfortunately I can no longer find what ticked me off in the first place as search engines are full of blogs writing about their recent email breach.
> Looking specifically at the number of campaigns hosted by NameCheap against its monthly median attack availability, we see that by mid-year the median takedown times were consistently in excess of 60 hours. This undoubtedly made NameCheap an attractive proposition to host phishing and may explain the rise in monthly hosted campaigns that followed for UK government-themed phishing.
I despise Oracle with every bone in my body... but I must admit their Always-Free tier is the best deal in the game. 4 ARM cores to divvy up among 24gb of memory however you please... oh, and you get 2 extra 1c1gb x86 servers for whatever else you need. You want that on AWS, it will run you at least $40/month. Plus you get a better management interface with Oracle to boot. For any cash-strapped devs trying to make a simple build server or setup a remote dev environment, this seems like the best option to me.
I depreciated like $15/month of Vultr VPSes last weekend by switching to their offerings. It's not the fastest but damn, it makes me wish it wasn't an apology for their crimes against FOSSmanity.
Have tried, it's literally impossible for me to do it. I must be on some kind of internal blacklist. It's the only experience I've ever had with a company that took my details and refuses to explain why they won't let me have an account.
DigitalOcean has been a good companion to Linode. It seems like many of the offerings are either on par or better, though some prices are a little higher.
I started migrating from Linode to OVH a while back (Probably a year and a half or so ago). Parked the migration for a while, and started in earnest again a couple of months ago. All told, my experiences with OVH have been fairly positive. There's a quirk here and there that annoys me, but the same is true for every cloud provider to some extent. Still, on balance, I'd have no problem recommending OVH.
If anybody cares to know, the single biggest annoyance I have with them is this: you can't launch a VPS that comes up with an ssh key pre-configured for passwordless ssh access, at least not the first time around. Unless they've changed it recently anyway, the option to specify an ssh key only appears in the menu for re-installing an existing VPS. For a brand new one, your options are:
1. Turn around and immediately re-install it, so they add the key for you
2. Receive the password for the newly created instance in an email, and use it to login, upload the key, and configure passwordless ssh.
I wound up writing a script to do the latter, so all I do is wait for the email to come, paste the password and IP into my script, and fire it off and it copies the key, and makes a few other small tweaks, then does sudo dnf -y upgrade, and then a sudo reboot.
Once all that finishes I use Ansible to do everything else. By and large it all just works and is fine, but not being able to have the VPS come up with the ssh key already configured initially still bugs me a bit.
