A Fair Desire

About a year ago, I decided I needed a "real" server somewhere to host some projects which extended past just websites. (For basic websites and domain registration, I am still using and can recommend Site5.com. They are very cheap, but you still get a shell account and have a lot of flexibility.) I started looking around, and I narrowed my choices down to Slicehost and Linode. Now, this was a year ago, so I do not exactly recall why I chose Slicehost over Linode. I believe it was because their prices were closer than they are currently, and I liked Slicehost's website better. Yes, I do indeed make decisions based on things like that, sometimes.

I signed up for Slicehost's least expensive account, but after a while I realized I really needed more memory. Upgrading was no problem, but then I was spending more on it than I really wanted to. Not too much later, I started going through my monthly spending and seeing where I might be able to save some money. I looked into Linode and saw their lowest account (the same price as Slicehost's) would probably be sufficient for me.

The thing which is not apparent is that Slicehost runs 64-bit servers, and installs 64-bit Linux distributions. There are, apparently, ways to install 32-bit versions, but it is not the default and may not be officially supported. This means that, not only do you pay more per MB of RAM on Slicehost, you also use more for running the exact same applications. That was enough to convince me to move over to Linode.

After signing up for a Linode account, I realized there is very little difference between the services. Both have clean, but bare-bones management web interfaces for your servers. Linode offers a bit more insight into your CPU, network, and disk io activity, with some nice graphs. You can also upgrade individual aspects of your account. For example, if you just need more hard drive space, you can upgrade just that, instead of paying to upgrade everything.

Both Slicehost and Linode are meant for people who basically just need a Linux server hosted out in a real datacenter, and that is what they provide, along with fancy tools for managing those servers (cloning, rebooting, upgrading). But you do not get anything like cPanel...although you could install it yourself, if you wanted.

One other thing I really like about Linode is that you can choose which datacenter your server will end up in. I was able to choose one that is relatively nearby. If you want to have redundancy, you could pick two datacenters which are far apart. Right now, they have servers in four U.S. cities and one in London.

I should point out that both hosts have a good set of documentation and articles to help get you started. Since most of these are actually just general guides for different Linux distributions, you can use either one to figure out how to do different things. Slicehost has its articles here and Linode has its library here.

Anyhow, I have not had any problems with Slicehost or Linode, but Linode is simply a better value right now. Also, keep in mind that you can get a discount from Linode by paying for a year or two in advance. You can do month-to-month billing on either host.