I’m incredibly happy with Linode VPS Hosting for the past 5 years. I honestly don’t even like telling people about them because I don’t want this company to grow, get bought out, or decrease their quality of service like GoDaddy or any of the EIG hosting companies. Linode has 0% downtime or constant upgrade/migration issues and what not. It has been one of the best decisions of my life.
But they’re not just great on their own but also compared against others like Digital Ocean, Dreamhost, Lightsail, OVH, Ramnode, Scaleway, etc. Please go see for yourself. They’re consistently topping benchmark charts for performance everywhere and even their $10 VPS plans are out-performing $20 VPS plans from other companies. They have better CPU, better features, better performance. Some people may complain about their GUI but I actually like it better.
In any case…here’s the one reason I feel they’re the best. Every person that I’ve hired to work on my server or website has ultimately switched over to Linode. It’s the funniest thing. Programmers, designers, sys admins….they’ll tinker around and then tell me they’ve decided to give Linode a try.
Anyway, if you’re interested to see why they’ve been the best for years, here’s my Linode referral link
———– My original review below ———
After having so many problems with VPS.net, I decided to go looking for a new VPS host. A lot of things had changed since I first got a VPS and so I had to read up a few guides. I had many concerns that ultimately lead me to choosing Linode.
VPS vs cloud
So there’s all this talk about cloud hosting. It’s unlimited, scalable, and has virtually 100% reliability. You only pay for what you use…but then that part scares me. I get constant spikes in traffic here and there, and I hear busy websites might end up paying more for cloud. The support guy at my old webhost told me VPS is faster than cloud. I was already happy with VPS service so I figured to leave it as is. I used VPS because it was fast and cheap, I never cared so much for root access or having complete control to my server.
Managed vs Unmanaged
Managed was having a support guy available whenever you need to make changes or configure your server, etc, etc. But I only need the server to run. I’m not hacking into it regularly and so un-managed made more sense (and was $100 cheaper per month).
Different Hosting Providers
The big names floating around were VPS.net, Amazon (cloud), Slicehost (now Rackspace), PRGMR, Linode. Amazon had cloud which I didn’t want. Rackspace only offered “managed VPS” solutions which started at $150/month — too high for me. VPS.net was shitty. PRGMR was ultra barebones which scared me a bit. Linode was the popular one and highly recommended. I also found many benchmarks where Linode performed well. After reading around, I decided to move my website to them and I’ve been very happy since. I hired a server admin to migrate my site over and was very glad to hear him say the new Linode VPS was much faster and more responsive than the old VPS.net server.
LINODE WINS. (goodbye VPS.net)
But VPS.net has a shiny website! I love shiny stuff! *shinnyyyyy* 8-o
Hi Johnny, thank you as usual. I went through your referral link to linode, but it seemed to me that they offer a simple click-to-install-wordpress application. Is it really necessary a sys admin to hire or am I missing anything important?
If you have around any detailed guide I’d be happy to go through! Thanks!
Hi Paolo,
What you need is a control panel. If you have no idea of what you’re doing. Try CyberPanel, it’s awesome and free. Install that onto your Linode VPS.
Hi Johnny
I just went over your Linode link. At https://www.linode.com/pricing/, which one do you use? Any addons such as Node Balances, Backup? For CyberPanel, do you install it yourself or is it better to hire a sysadmin to do so?
The way you’re asking this, you need to get a sys-admin or simply go with something like Cloudways. Start small and work your way up. Or join my Facebook Group and poll the community to see what they use.