Smart A. S. blog

I’ve been using both services for private data and testing environments for a while now. This is going to be quick and short resume.

While plans I’ve used – “512 mb” from Linode ($19.95 p/m) and “ve Server 512Mb” from Mediatemple ($30 p/m) – have comparably equivalent hardware features (there is only one difference – you may get “burstable” RAM from Mediatemple, but that’s not the “real” feature and this is probably the problem despite the fact that it seems to be a real value added offer), there are tons of issues with MediaTemple.

Here are the issues that make Linode a real killer:

a) Pay for what you use (e.g. you create a virtual machine for $19.99 and cancelled a week later, you will get 3/4 of what you’ve paid back! MT will eat your money). This is actually what I believe is one of the best features for active developers. For example, usually I create proof-of-concepts or other stuff related to the client needs and sometimes it has to take one week only (e.g., it’s to be closed or moved to clients account). This is not about the money, but about the freedom of actions. I can easily deploy 10 VPSes farm and stress-test one of the solutions for a couple of days and it’s going to take approx $13 at Linode while

b) Stability. Linode’s XEN works stable, while MT Virtuozzo did not work well for me

c) Support. I’ve seen questions answered by Linode stuff within 5 minutes! Beat that!

d) Community. Libraries/tutorials, Forum, IRC and lots of other helpful stuff.

e) You can pick your own datacenter. While MT offers Virginia datacenter, Linode at the moment offers you choose from 5: four datacenters in 4 US states and 1 in the UK. You can easily test/simulate geotargeted load balancing and other features.

So, today I cancelled my Mediatemple service and “resized” my Linode maching to 1.5Gb plan.

ps. No holy wars or any offense meant. MT is a good VPS hosting provider, it’s just the features offered by Linode are really cool for me as a developer and probably for other developers.