Update: There’s a more recent version of the data below at http://blog.jeffreymcmanus.com/projects/hosting.
Linode announced that they’re increasing the amount of RAM by a lot (like 40%) on all of their virtual server products today. I’ve been watching pricing for a few of these services for about a year now and I’ve made a few posts comparing pricing. Today, for most servers under 8GB of RAM, Linode is a better value among the services we’re tracking. Here are the details:
| RAM (MB) | HD (GB) | Bandwidth (GB) | Price/Month | Cost/RAM | Notes | |
| Amazon EC2 Large | 7680 | 850 | 1024 | 248.88 | 0.0324 | |
| Amazon EC2 Extra Large | 15360 | 1690 | 1024 | 497.76 | 0.0324 | |
| Amazon EC2 Small | 1740.8 | 160 | 1024 | 62.22 | 0.0357 | Maybe buy Linode 1536 instead |
| Linode 512 | 512 | 16 | 200 | 19.95 | 0.0390 | Best value for this size |
| Linode 768 | 768 | 24 | 300 | 29.95 | 0.0390 | Best value for this size |
| Linode 1024 | 1024 | 32 | 400 | 39.95 | 0.0390 | Best value for this size |
| Linode 1536 | 1536 | 48 | 600 | 59.95 | 0.0390 | Best value for this size |
| Linode 2048 | 2048 | 64 | 800 | 79.95 | 0.0390 | Best value for this size |
| Linode 4096 | 4096 | 128 | 1600 | 159.95 | 0.0391 | Best value for this size |
| Slicehost 15.5GB | 15872 | 620 | 2500 | 800.00 | 0.0504 | Buy Amazon EC2 Extra Large instead |
| Slicehost 8GB | 8192 | 320 | 2500 | 450.00 | 0.0549 | Buy Amazon EC2 Large instead |
| Slicehost 4GB | 4096 | 160 | 2500 | 250.00 | 0.0610 | Buy Linode 4096 instead |
| Slicehost 3GB | 3072 | 120 | 1800 | 190.00 | 0.0618 | Buy Linode 4096 instead |
| Slicehost 2GB | 2048 | 80 | 1200 | 130.00 | 0.0635 | Buy Linode 2048 instead |
| Slicehost 768 | 768 | 30 | 450 | 49.00 | 0.0638 | Buy Linode 768 instead |
| Slicehost 384 | 384 | 15 | 225 | 25.00 | 0.0651 | Buy Linode 512 instead |
| Slicehost 1.5GB | 1536 | 60 | 900 | 100.00 | 0.0651 | Buy Amazon EC2 Small instead |
| Slicehost 1GB | 1024 | 40 | 600 | 70.00 | 0.0684 | Buy Linode 1024 instead |
| Slicehost 512 | 512 | 20 | 300 | 38.00 | 0.0742 | Buy Linode 512 instead |
| Slicehost 256 | 256 | 10 | 150 | 20.00 | 0.0781 | Buy Linode 512 instead |
The chart is sorted according to best value, defined in terms of cost per megabyte of RAM per month.
This time rather than placing the data in a chart like I did last time, I calculated it in a spreadsheet so I could come up with a total cost per megabyte of RAM per month. I also included pointers to which product is the better value choice at each price point, so, for example, if you’re thinking about getting the smallest Slicehost machine, you’d actually be better off with a Linode 512, which provides twice the RAM for $0.05 less per month.
As in the past, I’ve stacked up two VPS hosting providers (Linode and Slicehost) against Amazon EC2. (I didn’t do Rackspace Cloud this time because I have yet to hear much about the reputation of that service, and they charge for bandwidth and storage separately so it’s more difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison. Amazon EC2 charges for bandwidth/storage separately, too, but they provide a handy calculator for that and I couldn’t find anything comparable for Rackspace. Also, Slicehost is owned by Rackspace now.)
As in the past, everyone’s battling for supremacy at the low end but Amazon is still a better choice if you a) need a larger machine, b) need a guaranteed level of CPU, or c) need some of Amazon’s programmability features such as the ability to spin up new virtual machines automatically or if you’re going to use their automatic load balancing feature.
I’d been thinking about using Linode for a while and today’s pricing changes compelled me to sign up for an account for a few upcoming projects we’re working on. So far, so good — I like that Linode’s control panel is a little more granular than Slicehost’s, although I was initially tripped up by the fact that they don’t automatically boot a new instance for your when you provision it.
It’ll be interesting to see what Slicehost does in terms of pricing now, since they haven’t done anything significant there in the year since I’ve been paying close attention to these products.
Related posts:
You might want to take a look at Site5 too – they recently launched their VPS hosting services and seem pretty competitive – http://www.site5.com/vps/normal/ . I’ve used them for hosting web/email for a number of years and have been very happy with them. Support (if/when you need it) is top notch.
Hey Jeffrey, thank you for the write up! If you weren’t already aware, we have larger instances available which are not advertised on the homepage. If you’d like to include these in your list you can find the details on the signup page: https://www.linode.com/signup/
Hi Jeffrey, nice chart. For completeness, you could also include the four other EC2 instance types, and you could also compute pricing using our Reserved Instances.
Yeah, I was thinking of including the hi-mem and hi-CPU instances but they’re far outside the use cases that I’m interested in. We use VPSes almost exclusively for QA and staging servers, so Amazon’s low end is sort of like everybody else’s high end.
I omitted every kind of pay-in-advance discount (including the EC2 reserved instances and other discounted products like Linode’s) for simplicity this time around.
I’m close to making this little project into a stand-alone web site, so it’ll be easier to include lots more providers and products.