Moved to Linode

I recently made the switch from SliceHost to Linode. I made the switch because RackSpace bought SliceHost, and they’re moving everyone to this cloud computing model. While the talk is that it will cost me less–and I believe it likely does–I hate the fact that I feel like I’m being nickeled and dimed. Moreover, if I had to pay for everything I had now (the bandwidth, the storage, the cpu time), it would cost me more.

As a result, I made the switch to Linode. I looked around at several other places, a couple of which were cheaper. But at the end of the day, Linode was the only one that had all the features I wanted, and the reputation to go with it–how many companies do you know that pass the savings down to the users?¹. To be honest, if you compare the setup, I get more from Linode for the same price at SliceHost… Linode is very competitive. So I went with Linode.

It was easy to sign up and get started. I ordered a node in their New Jersey datacenter, but I did test the bandwidth to a couple of their datacenters. They were all fast and finished the 100MB download within 100 milliseconds of each other. It was painless to get the node up and running, and it didn’t take long to transfer all the data over. The only hiccup was mine. I wanted to get rid of the Gallery2 instance, and host my website slightly differently. Those changes took about a day. My wife and I tested them out for a couple of days, and then pulled the trigger and changed the DNS to point to the new server.

If you’re shopping around for a new VPS provider, consider Linode. So far, the server has been more responsive, the control panel is awesome, and the few question I asked tech support came back with answers quickly. If you do sign-up, please use a link from this article. It contains a referral code and will give me a discount on my hosting expenses.