Linode vs dedicated server provider

Two linodes on two different base machines would provide some additional security.

I have found that bargain servers are bargain servers. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. In general, it is older equipment that is still on the line, less reliable, slower, and has fewer resources than a newer system.

Linode is pretty hard to beat under pressure. They just proved their value with a recent downtime event.

You may not get front line support with a low priced server.

Just my 2 cents worth. YMMV

Jeff

Agreed. A bargain server like that probably wouldn't come with all the nice extras Linode offers, such as out of band console access and profile/image management. I'm in the process of moving a big webapp from a dedicated server at iWeb to a few Linodes.

Linode is a way better value, and at iWeb if I had had to reinstall the OS or do any kind of system recovery they would have charged an extra fee each time. What's more, I would be waiting on their techs instead of doing it myself. Also, support here is far superior. And it didn't help when I found out iWeb is a sponsor of uceprotect.

Sorry for the rant.

I find that offering questionable due to the specs being offered at that pricepoint… At that point, I'd think that the Linodes were a safer bet.

Do you really need two 720s? What are you doing that needs that much RAM?

@alemartini:

That's how I found a german provider offering dedicated servers with the following features:

* Intel® Core™ i7-920 Quadcore

• 8 GB DDR3 RAM

• 2 x 750 GB SATA-II HDD (Software-RAID 1)

• 100 GB backup space

• 2 TB/month traffic (100 MBit/s bandwidth)

• 4 dedicated IP addresses

They're offering that service for € 49/month.
Interesting. I found them as well - cheap, but bare bones. The basic package doesn't offer remote console, only web-driven hard reset. Once you add the Flexi-pack and the KVM-over-IP option, it's €83 per month - and there's a €149 set-up fee for the server and again for the KVM. Over a one-year contract, that's €108 per month.

I'm curious, what is it that you need to do that requires FreeBSD that won't work on Linux?

Just curious, that's all.

@alemartini:

That's how I found a german provider offering dedicated servers with the following features:

* Intel® Core™ i7-920 Quadcore

• 8 GB DDR3 RAM

• 2 x 750 GB SATA-II HDD (Software-RAID 1)

• 100 GB backup space

• 2 TB/month traffic (100 MBit/s bandwidth)

• 4 dedicated IP addresses

They're offering that service for € 49/month.

In addition to all the missing features and added fees mentioned earlier in the thread, that's almost certainly cheap commodity hardware. Certainly not something I'd want to run a mission critical app on (unless I had a few hundred of them in some sort of HA setup).

~JW

@alemartini:

So, if you needed to run two different operating systems at the same time, what would you choose? Two Linode 720 ($ 79,90/month) or a dedicated server like the one I've mentioned (< $75/month)?
I think the extra for the Linode's is worth it when you consider catastrophic hardware failure:

Linode: your VM's are moved to a new host machine and up and running where you left off give or take.

Dedicated: Hope you backup is good, wait for the hosting provider to provision new hardware, rebuild the host system, restore your VM backups and hope it all works the same.

@fukawi2:

Dedicated: Hope you backup is good, wait for the hosting provider to provision new hardware, rebuild the host system, restore your VM backups and hope it all works the same.

I'm very, very certain that a discount provider could get that done within 30 days - maybe in as short a time frame as two weeks with some FedEx parts shipping and extra fees.

Surely your customers would understand the delay.

James

No customer is going to "understand" a 2-4 week delay. Customer implies that they're paying something. 2-4 weeks of downtime is probably enough to kill your business, since most of your customers would probably leave.

For example, could you imagine your telephone not working for an entire month? Or your internet connection? Or your cell phone?

I believe zunzun's tongue was firmly in his cheek.

Perhaps, but I can imagine my internet connection not working for 2-4 weeks, because Bell has broken mine for 4+ weeks at times ;)

@Guspaz:

Perhaps, but I can imagine my internet connection not working for 2-4 weeks, because Bell has broken mine for 4+ weeks at times ;)

Gross.

Hi, I'd like to thank all of you for all the feedback that you've provided on this topic. I've found some really good points that are helping me in making this decision.

Now I'm a bit curious about the hardware part. Someone mentioned that the given spec is "cheap commodity hardware".

All the information I have about my Linode instance is what's shown on linode.com front page (ammount of RAM and storage), and what I can see by issuing some commands (for example, that my Linode is on a quad-core Xeon running at 2.27 GHz).

How do I know that Linode is using first class server equipement instead of white boxes? I mean, is there an official server spec that shows that their servers aren't cheap hardware? I apologize for this question if it's already documented somewhere or if it has been discussed before.

Thanks again,

Alex

Unless they've changed their policy fairly recently, Linode uses SuperMicro servers. I don't think it's documented anywhere other than a very old entry in the Wiki. Sometimes, they sell off the old servers to make way for new kit.

There's some amusingly old hardware information archived in the Wayback Machine.

BTW, Linode uses dual-CPU servers. Currently they use quad-core CPUs, meaning there are 8 cores total, though your node only has access to 4.

Linode probably uses rackmounts rather than whitebox ATX simply because it's cheaper; Linode colocates all their hardware, so it would make much more sense to use small rackmount boxes rather than huge whiteboxes.

SuperMicro is affordable, but not low quality. They're pretty decent.

The super cheap dedicated servers are probably better value for money, but just remember that hardware can fail.

I know that Linodes aren't immune to the problems, but you've got less hassle when things go wrong. If there's hardware issues on a cheap dedicated server then you'll have to send a support ticket and pray that they answer it in a reasonable time, which sometimes doesn't include out of hours support. If your server goes down on Saturday you might not get a working server until Monday morning unless you pay extra for it.

Whilst I don't mind doing the sysadmin work on a physical server, it's one less headache to admin a virtual server and concentrate on the software side of things.

Out-of-band console access is worth its weight in gold (well, since it weighs nothing, I guess it's worth more). Good luck finding that on a $30 dedicated server!

I personally would have no problem with a company using standard off the shelf commodity hardware as long as they don't have excessive downtime and, when they do, they can restore everything quickly and accurately. I mean, really, what is wrong with using two desktop computers for web servers if they are configured and working for redundancy?

@carmp3fan:

I personally would have no problem with a company using standard off the shelf commodity hardware…

I believe there's a little company somewhere on the internet that uses commodity hardware - disk drives etc. I think they're called Google or something like that :wink:

It works for Google because of scale.. If a few percent of their 100k machines in a center are down, what's the harm? It's all a cloud, doesn't matter any. When you're talking about dedicated hardware though, it doesn't work so well - if I'm renting a server, I want higher availability than the spare machine I have plugged into my cable. Hence going with a high performance VPS like Linode. :)

Rent a cheap dedi from someone using commodity hardware, you're going to be regretting it the first time something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong!)

I know where you are coming from, but I disagree. The high availability is not a hardware problem. It is a configuration problem. The reason commodity hardware works for Google is not because of scale, it is because of configuration. Assuming $1,500 for a mid- to high-end desktop system, I could buy anywhere from two to seven desktops for the cost of a single server. That gives me plenty of systems to build high availability into the configuration.

The only thing high end server hardware provides you is more time between failures. That means, when your server is down your site is still down. Now, if you had configured the system for high availability then you could lose a server and still be available.

It's all configuration, not hardware.

@carmp3fan:

It's all configuration, not hardware.
Hardware is not completely absolved. Failures do come in twos, more than I ever would have thought before working around a large-scale deployment.

Choice of hardware is still quite important when planning a deployment. Even if you've planned for failure, replacing said failed components can cost a company its bottom line.

Hardware fails no matter the configuration. I know that, but in a proper high availability configuration the probability that enough systems (2 or more) running the same services will fail within a relatively small amount of time is low to very low.

Failures occur no matter the hardware. That is why I plan for high availability whether I am using $1,000 desktops or $10,000 servers.

As far as the choice of hardware, I do agree, but probably not to the extent you think. In my previous message I estimated $1,500 for a mid- to high-end desktop system and not a $400 low-end desktop system. Buying high-end desktop parts is still cheaper than buying most low-end server parts.