Linode is Truly a Great Hosting Company

Migrated to new cluster no questions asked; got performance boost!

I have been using Linode as a hosting provider since July, 2010 after I outgrew WebFaction's shared plans. Overall I have been extremely happy with the service, reliability and support, so happy in fact I have prepaid for over a year.

Lately however I have been reaching my memory limit and hitting the swap space; running for fun a Minecraft server will do that.

It quickly became apparent that any disk IO would bring the sites served from that VPS to a crawl. Doing some IO benchmarking tests revealed a worrisome statistic:

root@)root@shared-hosting-1~>$  dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 26.3025 s, 7.7 MB/s
rm: remove regular file `test'? y

That is correct, lously 7.7MB/s copy test. Having access to Linode and burst.net servers I run the same VPS benchmark on them with following results:

Linode VPS #1

root@klisrv01~>$  dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 3.15058 s, 63.9 MB/s
rm: remove regular file `test'? y

Linode VPS #2

root@klisrv02:~>$  dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 13.6833 s, 14.7 MB/s
rm: remove regular file `test'? y
root@klisrv02:~>$

Linode VPS #3

root@klisrv03/>$  dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 13.4197 s, 15.0 MB/s

Burst.net VPS #4

root@klisrv04:~>$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 3.72182 s, 54.1 MB/s

Burst.net VPS #5

root@269622:~>$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 4.51529 s, 44.6 MB/s
rm: remove regular file `test'? y

I forwarded the above along with a polite support ticket asking to be moved and with no objection was offered a migration to a new cluster. The migration itself was super easy - just press the big notice button - and resulted only in about 30 minutes of downtime.

Post migration results

The moment of truth we have been all waiting for, ... running the above benchmark command results in:

root@shared-hosting-1:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 2.41932 s, 83.2 MB/s
root@shared-hosting-1:~#

Just freaken gorgeous! Absolutely monumental, increase works out to be over 10 times more than before migration.

Final thoughts

If awesome service is important to you do give Linode a try, I am always tempted to go dedicated server or find a cheaper VPS - but what I would be saving in costs or getting in extra hardware specs I would be trading for excellent support and reliability, and that in my books is not worth doing a switch for.

The reason I have access to two burst.net servers is that we gave them a try as a cheaper alternative a while back and decided against: burst memory = bad and hardware stability issues.

Do you use my referral code: 7d884fa5262b62b8735502da003fee34061db49b so that I do get a small kick back for a sign up.