This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Vincent Woo. Original Post: Linode and Slicehost VPS Review Feed Title: Undefined Range Feed URL: http://www.undefinedrange.com/categories/ruby-on-rails.rss Feed Description: Interesting things I experience with Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Vincent Woo Latest Posts From Undefined Range

I've been a customer of Slicehost for a couple of years and Linode for a few months. They both provide great value but the little details might persuade you to pick one or the other. Thought I'll share some observations:

RAM

The main bottleneck for my projects is that my Rails apps are RAM hungry. Linode wins out since they offer roughly twice as much RAM for the same price as Slicehost. Furthermore, Linode offers the option to add more system resources, such as RAM, to the VPS. At prices like 90MB RAM for 5/month or $60/year, it's only good for a temporary fix but at least the option is there. The only point that Slicehost matches Linode on is that they too offer 32bit and 64 bit Linux versions. Important since Rails uses roughly half the memory with 32bit Linux instead of 64bit Linux.

Eivind Uggedal has some great performance benchmarks where Linode comes out on top.

Support

Had no need to contact support except once for Slicehost. There was some unexpected downtime so I went into their irc chat, and found out they were already fixing the problem. A minute later, VPS was back up. Very happy with the courteous and speedy communication there.

Notification of system downtime.
http://status.linode.com
http://status.slicehost.com

Web Admin Interface

Both VPS providers offer DNS services managed by their web admin interfaces. This is a nice feature that have worked well for setting up subdomains, SPF records etc. The only Linode downside is that DNS record changes can take up to 15 minutes to change at the authoritative servers while changes takes effect immediately at Slicehost. This is only a minor annoyance as changes still need additional time to propagate through the other DNS servers.

Sometimes it is useful to grant limited access for coworkers to access the admin web interface. At, Slicehost, user accounts are created with either Billing, Systems, or Admin roles. Linode user accounts, on the other hand, are much more fine grained on a per VPS or global level: allow DNS changes, access to billing/invoices related functionality, ability to cancel the hosting account.

Data Centers

I currently have VPS's in several of the available geographical locations. Ping times and traceroutes from Vancouver, Canada:

Documentation

Highly commendable is that both Slicehost and Linode has thorough and up-to-date tutorials on a wide variety of system admin topics. The guides are constantly updated as new OS versions are released. Both also have active forums with helpful users.

Community

Looking at the past year in their respective blogs, they both contributed greatly back to the community. Linode sponsors Rails Rumble (past four years), and other conferences and events. Recently, Linode upgraded all plans with about +42% RAM for new and existing customers with no price increase.

The Slicehost blog contains lots of documentation updates and new kernel and supported OS version announcements. Other than that: Full 32-bit Images Now Supported, New Slice sizes, price changes and bandwidth increases and Sponsoring Redis development.

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