Linode Raises the Bar

Over the last month, Linode has announced several major upgrades to their infrastructure that significantly raises the bar to compete in the VPS provider market. I moved from hosting my own servers out of my home office to Linode last summer and was happy to switch. Now Linode has improved the network, CPUs and RAM in every plan for essentially the same monthly price.

A quick summary for those who don’t want to follow three links:

In early March, Linode announced an upgrade to their networking infrastructure that resulted in a 5× increase in throughput (from 50 Mbps to 250 Mbps) and a 10× increase in monthly bandwidth allowance.

In mid March, they doubled the number of virtual CPU cores, from 4 to 8. For both of these upgrades, all that was needed was a simple reboot.

Yesterday, they announced a doubling of RAM. New and existing plans start at 1 GB, going all the way to up a behemoth 40 GB server. This upgrade requires a migration and some downtime, so planning might be a bit tricky, but it’s a small inconvenience to double capacity. RAM is often more important than CPU when it comes to website capacity planning.

(And if you’re wondering about disk space, they seem to bump that up regularly, too. Most recently was a 20% bump in December 2012, and 25% in July 2011 before that.)

I’ve recommended that my customers use Linode for several years now and have not been disappointed with them. Uptime is great and their support people have been quick and helpful the few times I’ve had to use them.

If you’re looking for a good place to host a server, use my affiliate link and I’ll get a credit if you stick around for three months.