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Linode.com server review

dknise

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Man I wish I had some affiliate link to post here ;), but I don't! When I find something really good I share it. In this case... it's a new server I got from Linode.

Lately I've been trying to find a reliable VPS host that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to get started and can be easily upgraded along the way.

I have tried Linux Distros and Windows Server 2008 deploy's from probably 10 different webhost's over the last few months... and this... this freaking takes the cake.

Two days ago, I got a Linode 1GB server that's month to month for $20 / month. For starters, their pricing starts at the highest, then is priced in terms of discounts for purchasing a 12 or 24 month plan. There's a 10% discount for a 12 month plan and 15% for a 24, which compared to other providers is phenomenal in it not being twice as expensive to be month to month. This made me comfortable with giving them a try.

All the servers are linux distro's that are accessed through an SSH connection to the terminal. Despite them being GUIless interfaces, check out the support documentation:
https://library.linode.com/

:cool:, oh me gusta, I have never in my life seen software documentation that perfect before! As a hugeee tech guy, I'm sure I could have even instructed a person who barely knows how to type to setup this server using their instructions.

All in all, the server took about 2 hours to setup including installing the full stack, transferring the database, and configuring phpmyadmin. When I finally went to test it I was expecting what I got from my AWS EC2 m1.small instance which was nearly twice as expensive... 5-6 second lag times on php pages that hit the database. What I ended up getting appeared to be just as fast as my localhost?? So I ran the diagnostics and I kid you not, I am loading pages 20ms faster from the Linode server than my own IIS localhost. :confused:

As for being GUIless, GOOD. It saves a ton of space on the hard disk as well as CPU usage allowing even a small server to have some serious kick. For the file structure, I'm SFTP'd directly in using FileZilla that allows me to instantly transfer over new files from the dev copy faster than I could if I had to remote in first. As for the database, phpmyadmin gives me quick access and you can still open up a port for a custom SQL manager if you so please. I never thought I would enjoy a 100% guiless server this much.

The best part about the whole thing? I started small... at their very smallest. On the server's dashboard it instantly graphs full stats include CPU %, bits/sec, and IO Blocks/sec. I can shut down, reboot, backup, change the linux distro, and even instantly upgrade and transfer my server to a bigger one at a pro-rated charge for the rest of the month at a moments notice. Even though I'm currently on the smallest, it seems like I could run quite a lot of database traffic through this before ever needing to get a bigger server. I'm going to haha, but the stats so far say it can handle a lot.

Why is this such a big deal? I have been trying for MONTHS to find a server this freaking good. I still need to look into their load balancer, but if they have dynamic scaling they may steal me 100% away from AWS which has been giving my server farm hell since the moment I got there. This post is the culmination of probably 200+ hours of research, experimentation, and hassle.
 
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What hosting co's have you used in the past? I'm with Mediatemple, have been for years.. (Still upset over the Godaddy deal though).
 

dknise

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What hosting co's have you used in the past? I'm with Mediatemple, have been for years.. (Still upset over the Godaddy deal though).
GoDaddy, HostGator, BlueHost, DreamHost, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, SingleHop, and a couple others. I was mostly hosted through Amazon Web Services for the majority of my transactional processing, but at least did extensive tests on the others or hosted small content sites with a MySQL database.

One month later and I'm still in love with the quality I'm getting from Linode. :cool:
 

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Agreed. Digital Ocean is also really good but still a bit untested and have had some issues (but cheaper as well).

I have my deploys fully automated with fabric[1] so all I do is run "fab deploy" in my command line and all my code is pulled down from github, packages are updated from my requirements file, database is backed up, and services are restarted. It's like magic.

I'm also using Vagrant[2] so my local dev env is the exact same as production.

I see no advantage of using cpanel or a shared host at this point.

[1]http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.8/#
[2]http://www.vagrantup.com/
 
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dknise

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Agreed. Digital Ocean is also really good but still a bit untested and have add some issues (but cheaper as well).

I have my deploys fully automated with fabric[1] so all I do is run "fab deploy" in my command line and all my code is pulled down from github, packages are updated from my requirements file, database is backed up, and services are restarted. It's like magic.
It's fantastic. This sounds like Digital Ocean and Linode both are offering a better experience than AWS. Not only were AWS servers slow, but I had so many errors connecting and disconnecting virtual drives to servers and dealing with "incompatibility issues." Now I can do all of it on multiple servers in under a minute. I'm like a kid in a candy store with a blank check.

I'm also using Vagrant[2] so my local dev env is the exact same as production.
I just checked out there site... and I still have no idea what it is? :hilarious: I'm running IIS7 on my Windows 7 dev machine and Debian 7 / Apache on my servers, so I run into a lot of errors when syncing. It sounds like they solve that problem... I just can't figure out how haha.

I see no advantage of using cpanel or a shared host at this point.
Same, I only see huge disadvantages to it.
 

healthstatus

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Linode also allows for a private network that does not use any of your "public" bandwidth allocation. I have a separate DB and email server to go with multiple webservers, so I can tune each Linode to its task, they talk to each other on the private network side, which is a big security boost.

Finally, something me and @dknise can agree on.
 

Milkanic

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I just checked out there site... and I still have no idea what it is? I'm running IIS7 on my Windows 7 dev machine and Debian 7 / Apache on my servers, so I run into a lot of errors when syncing. It sounds like they solve that problem... I just can't figure out how haha.

Yeah, they don't explain it very well on the site.
Vagrant is basically a wrapper of https://www.virtualbox.org/.

You can quickly spool up VMs, share them, install packages via a config file, share local folders to the vm, etc.
basically it makes local linux VMs awesome and takes away all the headaches.
 
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AllenCrawley

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Huh? :confused:









Lol, thanks for posting your review. Although this is all greek to me I still appreciate it and I know others will appreciate it as well.

Now, I have decided to switch over to LiquidWeb here when my current hosting package with DreamHost comes up for renewal.

I have no clue what you guys are saying about Linode except I can see you highly recommend it.

Would someone like me, with no understanding of anything you all have discussed this far, benefit from hosting with Linode? Here's what I care about... security, speed, uptime (the 3 reasons I'm leaving dreamhost). Oh and I want to be able to quickly launch websites without crazy hassle. Is Linode overkill for me?
 
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healthstatus

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Would someone like me, with no understanding of anything you all have discussed this far, benefit from hosting with Linode?

Hey Allen, Linode or Netsonic would be high on my list for all the things you outlined. Netsonic individual support was better than what I found so far on Linode, but the private network and the ability to scale and add servers on the fly is why I am at Linode. As you know, I have a pretty good size site traffic wise but by being able to have multiple servers for a low monthly cost and tune each one to its task is awesome. You can pick which operating system you want, if you are a CPANEL junkie, then you can install it if you want, or use Webmin or any of the other GUI control interfaces. As @dknise mentioned, the documentation is fantastic at Linode, just had one situation that wasn't really covered well (upgrading RAM on a Linode). They could do a little better explaining the graphs they have, my Linode runs anywhere from 85% to 310% CPU (is that like giving 110% effort), but it is all very well executed. My security guy was so excited when I went with Linode that I almost had to give him a pill.

I can setup a new apache site in about 10 minutes, add the DNS in the Linode manager, pop over to Webmin, create a new database, and configure apache, hit the apply changes button and it is ready for me to push Wordpress or whatever over to the new directory.
 

dknise

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Linode also allows for a private network that does not use any of your "public" bandwidth allocation. I have a separate DB and email server to go with multiple webservers, so I can tune each Linode to its task, they talk to each other on the private network side, which is a big security boost.
Finally, something me and @dknise can agree on.
:D Setting that up was really a lot easier than with AWS too. It was like butter.

Milkanic said:
You can quickly spool up VMs, share them, install packages via a config file, share local folders to the vm, etc.
basically it makes local linux VMs awesome and takes away all the headaches.
Gotcha. I really wish I could use Linux full time and ditch Windows 7, but I could never get three monitors to work with it. Can you use multiple monitors with the VM? I have VirtualBox for OSX use, but it's always been single monitor.

AllenCrawley said:
Would someone like me, with no understanding of anything you all have discussed this far, benefit from hosting with Linode? Here's what I care about... security, speed, uptime (the 3 reasons I'm leaving dreamhost). Oh and I want to be able to quickly launch websites without crazy hassle. Is Linode overkill for me?
It really depends if you're doing shared hosting or a VPS and if your website is data driven or not. For a VPS, Linode is priced at about 40% the cost of LiquidWeb, and also comes with terabytes of data transfer, not gigabytes. If it's not dependent on a backend database, and you're on shared hosting, you'll do just fine. If you need a heavy backend database and to handle lots of transactions, you'll need at minimum the VPS to offer a great front end user experience. I think Linode can do this better, but it does have a slight learning curve.

https://library.linode.com/getting-started
Luckily, Linode's documentation is GREAT. It fully instructs you start to finish how to setup your first server, and after that, how to use that image to create new ones. You can also still install cPanel and phpMyAdmin after the server is setup, to have the same user experience as you would have with LiquidWeb, but without the overhead cost in performance added by their network.

So it's really up to you. If you just need to host some html or static pages that won't get a lot of traffic, I wouldn't go through the hassle. If you're expecting a massive number users, a need to scale, and to handle large numbers of database transactions, your product would benefit greatly from it.

Goodluck! I kept rewriting it to make it not sound to technical and I hope it helped. If you have any more questions ask away. :)
 
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Milkanic

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Gotcha. I really wish I could use Linux full time and ditch Windows 7, but I could never get three monitors to work with it. Can you use multiple monitors with the VM? I have VirtualBox for OSX use, but it's always been single monitor.


You generally don't remote desktop into the VM. You use ssh on the command prompt to do everything and you have access to the VM file system through windows explorer.

It's like having a linode server running on your local hardware.
youtube vid on it:

 

dknise

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You generally don't remote desktop into the VM. You use ssh on the command prompt to do everything and you have access to the VM file system through windows explorer.

It's like having a linode server running on your local hardware.
youtube vid on it:

Ahhhhhh now it all makes sense haha
 

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Hey guys,

What would your server architecture look like with Linode as you start and then scale? What would you start with and what would you add? More web servers, multiple DB servers/instances/whatever, load balancers, etc?

I know it would vary based on what type of site you're running, let's say this is a SAAS app for example.
 
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dknise

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What would your server architecture look like with Linode as you start and then scale? What would you start with and what would you add? More web servers, multiple DB servers/instances/whatever, load balancers, etc?

I know it would vary based on what type of site you're running, let's say this is a SAAS app for example.
GREAT question and you're entirely correct, but I'll give a rundown anyway. We'll use a SAAS app as an example.

Let's say when you first start your service, you know the entire thing could be handled from their smallest server for $20 a month. Do it. Build your traffic to the point where you need a bigger server. At that point, you can save the server image, and relaunch it onto their bigger instance for $40 a month. You could really do that all the way up to their highest server, the 16GB of ram for $320 a month, by doing the same process. The total downtime while doing the server switch is literally only like 30 seconds, it's beautiful.

So you've now maxed out the capacity for their highest server, which means you're really doing business. What next? As healthstatus has done, it's standard practice (not just for scalability but for performance and security) to place a database exclusively on it's own server. This allows the server of the database to exclusively focus it's resources on running the database, and the other servers to focus on the dynamic scripting engine such as PHP. I'd probably put the database on a 4GB instance and split the web traffic onto two 8GB instances using their NodeBalancer, which is essentially the same thing as a load balancer. To allow each of the web servers to locate the database, Linode allows you to configure your own private network using static IP's over a LAN. In your database connection script from your web service, you just replace the server "localhost" with this IP address, and all the servers then point to it. For pushing web updates to all the servers, there are more tools and even some built in tools within FileZilla that make it just as easy as transferring to a single server. Since this is still a pretty small project, the database server is the only single-location server, so it can also act as the email and file storage client for saving user files and sending out emails.

At this point, you can manually add more linodes to the node balancer or take them off, but what if you want to scale dynamically? Linode has awesome documentation on how to setup your balancer to dynamically add more servers when needed. The only last step when traffic is huge is to segment out the email to it's own server if you're emailing enough and segment out the file storage so each one of the three processes (database, email, and file storage), has it's own server.

And just for kicks, say you were running a PHP / MySql stack and you completely crashed your database server on the huge 16GB linode... you should look into MySQL Clusters, which allow you to host a single database across multiple servers. If you get to this point... you are officially winning at life.

https://www.linode.com/nodebalancers/
https://www.linode.com/api/nodebalancer
https://library.linode.com/networking/configuring-static-ip-interfaces
http://www.mysql.com/products/cluster/

TLDR: I get carried away :hilarious: <3 it
 

Milkanic

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Good overview. I'd setup a multi-tenant architecture in the early stages to use a separate schema for each client.

Great article on it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479086.aspx

I'm a Django/Python guy so I'd follow pretty close to what Instagram has setup but obviously on a much smaller scale and with DigitalOcean or Linode.

http://instagram-engineering.tumblr...ers-instagram-hundreds-of-instances-dozens-of

I'm on DigitalOcean right now but am going to test performance on a Linode env this weekend. Linode offers 8 CPU cores on their $20 plan (1GB memory) vs 2 CPU cores at DigitalOcean (2GB memory) so it really depends if you site is CPU or Memory bound which is a better bang for the buck.

The great thing about using automated deploy scripts (Fabric) is all I have to do is update a few variables in my script and I can change providers in an hour or so. No jacking around with Cpanel or anything.

http://www.blitz.io/ is great for testing this type of stuff btw.
 

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This is my kind of thread!

I came in here wondering why DO wasn't mentioned, then... it was. I have not used Linode yet, but im sure it's a fair offering. The thing for anyone reading this thread that isn't a developer or tech savvy, these hosts are not for you. They are "developer" hosts where you get raw servers and little admin graphic interfaces.

I personally have used DO for things but i do not have any of my sites running on it because of the amount of sites i run from a single server. For me these days the time saving from doing things manually via SSH has out surpassed the fun of it and the cost saving. I am rolling my dedicated server from HG over to a SSD VPS from knownhost after some research however. So I will see how that goes. The other nice thing about having managed hosts like liquidweb (knownhost oes not have it) is their DNS servers and other services they run for you. softlayer and liquidweb have huge advantages to business in terms of having all the enxtra tech availible if you dont want to run it off of your machine.
 
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Since i got you guys here @dknise @Milkanic @healthstatus

I only ever use raw servers or if it calls for it WHM/Cpanel. I've obviously dealt with every panel there is out there. But what do you all think is the best free panel to install on a raw server?

Yesterday a client came to me and wanted me to config a DO droplet with zpanel... which i have never heard of. I know there are a ton out there, so I was curious as to what you all have used.
 

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I use webmin, easy to add apache sites or edit apache config files, manage mysql or PostgreSQL db, firewall, users, logs, email. Not a install Wordpress, kind of control panel, more of a higher admin level tool
 

dknise

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I only ever use raw servers or if it calls for it WHM/Cpanel. I've obviously dealt with every panel there is out there. But what do you all think is the best free panel to install on a raw server?

Yesterday a client came to me and wanted me to config a DO droplet with zpanel... which i have never heard of. I know there are a ton out there, so I was curious as to what you all have used.
I'd actually be interested in this question myself... as I only really have experience with cPanel and raw hosting. I use FileZilla for data transfer, which is ten thousand times easier than cPanel's File Manager, and install phpMyAdmin so I can connect to the database from any computer if need-be. Besides that, I use HeidiSQL for database management. Pretty much anything you'd want to do, like change Apache settings, can be done through FileZilla.
 
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Milkanic

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I haven't used panels in a while but zpanel looks like the up and comer and learned some lessons from the issues of cpanel (http://www.anchor.com.au/hosting/development/we_hate_plesk_and_cpanel)

You guys should definitely check out Fabric/Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt. They all basically do the same thing but in different languages and are amazing.

My deployments looks like this with Fabric (fabfile.org):
1.) Sign up for server on DigitalOcean or Linode and get IP.
2.) Populate a settings file in my local directory with above IP and credentials
Code:
FABRIC = {
    "SSH_USER": "", # SSH username
    "SSH_PASS":  "", # SSH password (consider key-based authentication)
    "SSH_KEY_PATH":  "", # Local path to SSH key file, for key-based auth
    "HOSTS": [], # List of hosts to deploy to
    "VIRTUALENV_HOME":  "", # Absolute remote path for virtualenvs
    "PROJECT_NAME": "", # Unique identifier for project
    "REQUIREMENTS_PATH": "requirements/project.txt", # Path to pip requirements, relative to project
    "GUNICORN_PORT": 8000, # Port gunicorn will listen on
    "LOCALE": "en_US.utf8", # Should end with ".utf8"
    "LIVE_HOSTNAME": "www.example.com", # Host for public site.
    "REPO_URL": "", # Git or Mercurial remote repo URL for the project
    "DB_PASS": "", # Live database password
    "ADMIN_PASS": "", # Live admin user password
}
3.) Run the below in the same directory
Code:
Fab Setup
4.) Fabric then installs updates, installs Nginx, PostgresSQL, memcached or anything else I want. I could install cpanel or zpanel here as well.
5.) Any settings files use templates like below that I can update and the placeholders like %(host)s gets populated from the above settings file.
https://github.com/waylybaye/fabric-template/blob/master/fabric_template/nginx.py
6.) Then run the below and all my code gets pulled off github and down onto the server. Fabric then restarts all services.
Code:
Fab Deploy

I rarely have to remote/ftp into the server and any changes I want I just update my local files and run Fab [command] again. Everything is in source control so I can quickly change hosts and just update my setting.

Example fabfile to install newsblur RRS reader and a bunch of dependencies:
https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/master/fabfile.py
 

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