If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have been a long time advocate of Linode and I have written many reviews about them, here and here. I have been using Linode to host not only this blog but the websites of the company I work for. And it requires stability and uptime because even the billing systems are hosted online. Linode has been great for past 3 years that I have been using them. And lately they have announced their NextGen upgrades . They have doubled the available CPU cores from 4 to 8 and doubled RAM, increased bandwidth and announced the plans to upgrade the host nodes to latest XEON E5-2670 8 core processors. And they have said that they have upgraded disks on the newer host nodes to latest enterprise 15k RPM drives and they aren’t going to use SSD’s anytime soon because of unavailability of professional grade SSD’s for reasonable price.
Yes that’s completely acceptable reason not to switch to SSD’s. But the problem is that disk speed is really low on Linode’s new hosts. I have been getting 60MB/s > speeds from newer hosts every time I test using
I know that some might argue that these speeds aren’t bad, and yes its enough but this is 2013 and these speeds aren’t acceptable anymore when you are comparing with hosts who use SSD’s and even enterprise drives. Old XEON L5520 hosts that were there for a longtime had consistent speeds than this and everyone expected it to improve when Linode announced shiny new hosts but it isn’t. Earlier Linode hosts had 24GB of RAM ( L5520 ) and they were telling that 40, 512MB VM’s go per host node. But newer XEON E5 processors allow up to 750GB of RAM according to Intel Linode should at least be using 64GB or 128GB of RAM per E5 host to capitalize on the cost, thus increasing the number of VM’s per node. This should be the cause for slower disk speeds.
Disk speed isn’t only the reason I moved out. I have been seeing 20% or more CPU steal at any given time on my upgraded linodes. I still have a non upgraded 512MB linode and I never saw any CPU steal on that VM. Everyone is fighting for CPU and this results in slower speeds. Don’t trust what I say, just take a look at serverbear unix bench scores for linode. 1GB linodes has higher Unixbench scores than the 8GB linodes and its totally unacceptable. And average disk speed is under 85MB/s. I had a 4GB linode and I wasn’t really happy for what I’m getting.
So I have moved out 3 ( 1, 4GB and 2, 1GB ) of 4 linodes I had and I still have not upgraded 512MB linode sitting on the London datacenter which has 595 days of uptime at the time of writing. It handles the important stuff and doesn’t need much performance. So i’m keeping it with linode because I trust them with their stability.
Verdict
Don’t get me wrong. I still like Linode and it’s stability. Linode has a great control panel and backups system which just works. And support is helpful and quick when you need them. It’s just the performance that bothers me. I still recommend linode if you want uptime and stability instead of cutting edge performance.
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