I don't see that distinction at all. Both Linode and DO provide persistent local storage. Both let you resize your server. And now, they're competitive on price; Linode even has hourly billing. Granted, DO has lower-end plans than Linode. But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.
> But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.
I'm not sure "disposable" is a good word to describe DO's approach. We do know that they cram a lot more people per host machine, though. That may be where the "treat VMs like cattle" statement was getting at.
You need only fire up a few instances of comparable type, get some CPU load, and watch some basic metrics to determine this for yourself.
I suppose they do it because load on a typical instance is low. Probably $5 instances are mostly hosting services like low-volume blogs, personal home pages, ssh/vpn tunnels, etc.
OTOH the lowest ($20) tier on Linode is probably used by more serious projects that, on average, exert considerable load.
> OTOH the lowest ($20) tier on Linode is probably used by more serious projects that, on average, exert considerable load.
I'm not sure about that. For me, I pay the extra few bucks on Linode for the customer service, stability, and the consistent performance. I'm not running my VMs ragged, I'm just willing to pay a little more for a higher quality service.
Anecdotally, it's a quality thing for me. Digital Ocean = Economy car, Linode = A nice Hyundai sedan or a higher end Accord.
Your anecdotes (just like everyones) are meaningless. If you some evidence that DO is inferior at the same price level as Linode then you should post it.
I was with Linode and had to deal with constant outages (at Fremont DC) and went through two major hacking incidents where I found out through Reddit instead of from them. I've never been with a worse provider than Linode.
Without anecdotes, HN would be mostly devoid of content. Let's not be silly.
> If you some evidence that DO is inferior at the same price level as Linode then you should post it.
I don't care to do this, I'm not out to prove anything. I'm here to share my experiences. Take them or leave them, I don't care either way.
If you are using DO and you like it, then stick with it. I've personally been happy with DO (for the price), but feel like you get what you pay for in this regard. Sometimes over-provisioned host machines, erratic network and disk IO, frequent maintenance windows, slow and hurried customer service.
All these anecdotes make one wonder why these people aren't simply going to hetzner and ovh and simply get a dedicated server for just slightly more (meaning $25/month).
Well for me, it's because although they're cheap and dedicated, servers, they aren't particularly good machines and the support is pretty much what you'd expect at that price (very basic).
That being said, I do think they're great value, and I have a reverse bidding dedicated server from Hetzner, that I use as a test and staging server. But I wouldn't dream of using them for production instances though - for the amount you'd have to pay to beef up support and get access to things like out of band console access, you might as well pay for a server from Bytemark.
Why not use this as an opportunity to make your server redundant ? If you don't have the time drbd + front-end load-balancers (e.g. on ec2, but just sending 403's, nothing else) , for example. Really interesting to setup, and there are plenty of cases where good support can't really help you either.
kimsufi is just OVH's budget brand (not that there's anything wrong with that, but your parent already mentioned OVH, so I thought some people might not know that they aren't really distinct)
For a while last year (at least several months), they only permitted kimsufi sale for EU and blocked PayPal payments from the US. You could only buy the 100$+ machines from OVH, not Kimsufis
I don't think anyone's ever gotten good hard numbers, but just from having seen a lot of people's anecdata over the years, my general impression is that Digital Ocean seems to have more short-term outages and to oversubscribe their boxes a bit more.
