I've heard good things about Linode, but ultimately, why not get a dedicated server for just a little more money? I pay 30€/month for mine with Hetzner, yesterday there was another host with prices starting from 10€?
So what is the appeal of Linode? That you can upgrade to a faster server quickly?
- If you hardware says goodbye, your server says goodbye as well. It needs to be physically rebuilt. With Linode, maintenance time means your server shuts down here and reboots somewhere else.
- Can you reinstall your server, pick a new distro automatically?
- Can you add more memory or more storage to your server with a click?
I'm not much of an admin, but is it so much easier to transfer a virtual image to another server than to transfer an installation from one server to another?
Presumably as long as the server your VM sits on has more memory than your VM, you can increase memory easily. But the maximum might only be what a dedicated server would have given you from the start?
Edit: I just checked, seems Hetzner has a server with 16GB RAM for 49€/month (64$). The maximum Linode VM with 8GB sets you back 320€/month.
It seems the 49€ is the cheapest standard Hetzner server atm, but you can get cheaper ones via their auctions. Of course then if you need more memory you have to move server, not sure how complicated that really is...
Depending upon your provider, it can be trivial to transfer VMs from one host to another. So if you want more resources than the physical host has available, or there is a hardware failure you can be up and running again in minutes (and at the company I used to work for, we automatically did the transfer, so the customer didn't even need to get out of bed). Of course, you pay for that, both in performance and cost, but that's the decision you have to make.
So what is the appeal of Linode? That you can upgrade to a faster server quickly?