Linode is my favorite go to provider for virtual private servers. I have been using Linode in production for more than 2 years and I have yet to face any trouble such as down times etc. You can find the reviews I done here and here . I know linode is expensive but their service is purely unmatched by its rivals. Linode has perfected the VPS industry. Their control panel is simply awesome and its still wondering how they pull of things like Ram,HDD bumps every year or so by only requiring a simple reboot of the VPS that you are using. They have 6 data centers around the world and they have hardware uniformity on all data centers.
Last week Linode announced a series of upgrades to its service by giving us 10X bandwidth upgrade. You can see the official announcement here. They have completely overhauled their network architecture by using redundant Cisco Nexus series routers. And they have done that without even clients knowing it. No downtime or packet loss during the upgrade. I know they can pull this kind of stunts thanks to their servers having dual NIC’s but still its amazing how they upgraded thousands of hosts on 6 data centers without even causing a blip.
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And now Linode has announced second iteration of its “NextGen” overhaul. Now they have increased the usable core limit from 4 to 8. And they are upgrading every host node to latest Intel E5-2670 8 core 2.6Ghz processors which got 20MB cache. And disk drives are also getting upgraded to the latest generation.
3rd step of NextGen seems to be a double the RAM upgrade. Linode’s were handing over flyers on SXSW 2 weeks ago and here it is
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We can hope that this upgrade will land as soon as next week or so and its simply going to be awesome. While this is really good news there is a problem that everyone might want answers for. Until now Linode servers seemed to have 24GB of RAM and they have put 40 512MB VM’s to single host node. But these newer processors are twice as fast as current Linode processors ( L5520 ) and support boatload of RAM. Linode might install maybe 96GB of RAM on newer host nodes and put 80, 512MB hosts on it. Its still unclear what will happen and we will have to wait until the official news lands on.