Linode finally goes SSD and updates service plans

I have been on Linode since 2012 and have been very happy with the service. Although, I started with Linode right before Digital Ocean started becoming known in the marketplace.

Digital Ocean’s plans seemed a little better as far as pricing and resources, not to mention their biggest selling point was SSD storage. But I stuck with Linode mainly because I didn’t feel like remigrating a site that I had just moved off of terribly slow shared hosting.

Also, as I indicated earlier, the service with Linode was excellent. So I didn’t want to switch from VPS provider to VPS provider even though the resources for my specific service plan were starting to lag behind the other VPS offerings out there as the months rolled on.

Thankfully, Linode just recently (April 2014) updated their infrastructure for SSD storage and bumped up the service plans so they are on par with pricing of Digital Ocean and other VPS providers.

My $20 a month now nets me 2GB RAM, 48GB SSD storage, 3TB outbound data transfer (inbound is always free), and 2 CPU cores.

The only bad part was that I had to pretty much redeploy my entire VPS because I was running 32-bit Linux and Linode required 64-bit VPS images for the new deployment cloud.

But with some quick tar-gzipping of critical directories and some ‘slow’ offsite scp transfers, a deployment of a clean 64-bit Linux VPS, another round of scp transfers, and some unpacking of tarballs, I was able to get my VPS back online in about an hour.

During this time, I also took the opportunity to switch from Oracle MySQL (Community Edition) to MariaDB. Since I had to also install Apache httpd, a SQL server, etc., to get my web site back up, I figured it was a good time to just install MariaDB instead before restoring the MySQL database backups.

I had been wanting to get away from MySQL for quite some time as MariaDB has continuously progressed and has become widely accepted in the community, while MySQL continues to lose a lot of luster due to Oracle’s handling of the application. So part of the silver lining of this late night Friday sysadmin work is that I finally got to migrate to MariaDB.

Anyway, if you’re one of the many still using a shared web hosting service like Dreamhost or Bluehost, it’s about time to switch to a VPS. The monthly cost of a VPS can be as low as that of shared hosting, and offers way more flexibility and control.