Hmmm, these prices aren't that competitive with dedicated servers.

$479 will get you a dual-quad core dedicated with 16GB of ram these days. Even the lower end ones (2880MB) you can rent a 4GB SoftLayer box for the same price.

FDC Servers (fdcservers.net) is another good option for high bandwidth sites. 100 meg unmetered line (you can push 15 - 20 TB/mo) - good colo and dedicated server pricing.

VPS should, in theory, be higher reliability, since the virtualisation layer makes it easy for them to move your VPS between physical hosts in the event of hardware problems.

It also makes it easier to scale up and down as needed.

However, you could always do that yourself with physical boxes too.

VPS should, in theory, be higher reliability, since the virtualisation layer makes it easy for them to move your VPS between physical hosts in the event of hardware problems.

However, you could always do that yourself with physical boxes too.

I get AWS, AWS is scale on demand + multiple datacenters. I get the lower linode pricing levels, they're a good deal.

The large ones make no sense to me. If you're paying monthly for a bigass machine then linode is way overpriced vs. dedicated. If you need to scale up really quick then linode won't work because they bill monthly. They have redundant DCs but if one got knocked out I imagine there'd be a scramble to use all the available ones if a DC went down.

My understanding was that if you only needed a vps for five days then you're only charged for five days. Their prices are given as monthly but they measure your usage daily.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the linode FAQ says:

How am I billed?

We currently offer monthly, annual, and 24-month billing cycles. If you are interested in pre-paying, open a support ticket and we can accommodate you. When you sign up, your first invoice is pro-rated until the end of the month. After that, your subscription is automatically renewed on the first of each month (for annual accounts, on the anniversary of your first full month).

Taking another look at the linode site I can definitely see where the confusion might come in as it's difficult to find any indication that costs are calculated daily. However I did find the following, again from the FAQ:

Can I upgrade my Linode?

[...]

Removing resources pro-rates the balance of the month back to your account so you only pay for the time you've used them.

Edit: I've just gone into my linode account and the removal link does give you a figure for how much you'll get back. You pay for a month in advance but if you don't need the full month you can remove the linode and get your money back for the time remaining.

Now you can run more than one Rails app on your server!

I know this is flippant, but if you're quite keen to run more than one Ruby web app, why not try ActiveRecord (so you get the Rails ORM) with Sinatra? It's a pretty lightweight solution.

Honestly, I was trolling and expected to be modded down to -8 pretty quickly. It's funny how many of my dead-serious posts get modded down and how many of my trolls get modded up.

It's somewhat sad, actually.

If that's the case, you should know better than to post it.

It's apparently what people want to read.

The key to being a successful author is to write stuff that people want to read.

I love the clever quips over at Reddit as much as the next guy, but I've come to enjoy HN's higher level of expectation out of its responses. Just because people are modding you up, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to uphold that standard.

Agreed. If I want to read trolls and mindless comments I'll go to Reddit/Digg.

Ironically this discussion is uninteresting and a waste of space.

What keeps me coming back to Linode is the administration interface / console.

The Plesk, cPanel and Virtuozzo consoles provided to customers by other VPS hosting companies are horrible in comparison.

Slicehost's RubyOnRails based interface is too simple and doesn't provide anywhere near the functionality that Linode provides.

For low end stuff, linode is great.

Awesome additions, shame the bandwidth doesn't go up proportionally but tops out at 2GB, but we can't always have everything :)

Linode still rule.

edit: Oops, meant 2TB

Of course it's 2TB (2000GB).

I use Linode for some of my lower end services

But what happens when your application requirements don't scale as a power of 2 ??

I need a low powered box but with 1TB of storage. 1TB storage is not even a possibility with any of the King Sizes. Amazon S3 at 1TB would be to slow, as there are many many documents all being randomly fetched.

I guess I have to go with Colo/Softlayer unless HN friends have some better suggestions??

The blog post or signup form should really mention that the trailing number is the amount of RAM, in MiB, for the node, and that larger nodes get proportionately more CPU as well (assuming that's true).

Unless you back up to the home page, the charts on the blog post and signup form make it look like the only advantage from (say) 5760 to 14400 is plus-384GB of HD space for $480/month. You can't even click from the node-selector on the signup form to mode details about the nodes.