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Slicehost.com vs Linode.com

  • Which one do you recommend?
  • Are there any major differences between these two?
  • What are your personal experience?
Jakub Arnold
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8 Answers8

33

I've used Linode for about a year now, specifically their Dallas DC. I have nothing but praise for them. The only thing they could do to make me happier is to make it free (but with their referral program it's been free for me for 6 months now!). I've blogged a bit about them:

Linode Review
Bring your Linode Home with You

There's comments on those articles from other users. In the interest of full disclosure, those articles link to Linode with my referral code - if you find the articles helpful, I'd appreciate the referral.

I've heard SliceHost is good, but there's been a few people that have came to Linode from SliceHost and been happier with their Linode.

Bala Clark
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Justin Ellison
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Some good comparisons between the two services (that aren't on the Linode or Slicehost forums):

Also, "RossH" posted the same UnixBench scores that David points to in his answer in the Linode forum, where it was mentioned that his host was shared with 36 other Linodes.

Community
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mwalling
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I can only speak about Linode. I am exceptionally happy with the Linode service. The infrastructure is top notch with highly reliable servers on fast connections. The Linode "dashboard" is great and offers everything you need to get started in minutes. The managed DNS is quick and easy, with four geographically diverse servers. The only problems I have experienced have been upstream network issues (two brief outages).

All that said, the very best part of Linode is the people. The staff are the best: skilled, responsive and available. You can phone, email, use forums or IRC. The Linode community is a great and helpful group. I would recommend Linode on that basis alone but you get all to the great technical work too.

You can read a little more on my blog: http://kovaya.com/miscellany/2009/01/host-sweet-host.html?sffp

Good luck with whatever you choose, I believe you can't do better than Linode.

7

I've been a Slicehost customer for about 9 months now and I could say many of the same (good) things about Slicehost that I see other people saying about Linode. The servers and connections are reliable and fast, and I don't remember there being any downtime since I joined up - but if there were, I'm confident that the support people would take care of it quickly and transparently since they were very good about a few questions I had when first setting up my VPS. There's also a great community forum where Slicehost customers can (and do) help each other out, and many of the employees pop in frequently to answer questions as well.

The one difference I notice between Slicehost and Linode is that Linode seems to offer more disk space, bandwidth, and RAM for the same price (at least on the cheapest plan). I'd imagine that there's something extra you get with Slicehost to make up for it but having never used Linode, I'm not sure what it might be.

Here are a few links to threads on the Slicehost forums that deal with this issue:

David Z
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I recently switched to Linode. However, my vps was down yesterday or today. I never received any email communication from linode. I found out the problem via the hard way. After contacting support about problem, I was given this link: http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4765

I know maintenance like this does happen from time to time. It would be more professional if they could notice their customers promptly. From the link to their forum, it seems that I am not alone.

After this incident, I cannot recommend linode to friends anymore. I used slicehost before and they sent out email notification before and after each reboot.

2

I've only used Linode and have been very happy with them; no complaints at all. I've been a heavy Rackspace user in the past, and they own Slicehost. Their tech support was generally decent, some major hiccups notwithstanding.

user5336
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I have been a happy slicehost customer, but lately am running into some obvious overselling issues on my 1G slice. Been in this biz a long time, and the life cycle from "great host" thru "sellout to big company" and on to "oversold servers" seems to be about 24-36 months from when I sign on... Must by murphy's law.

Anyway, I'll be ruining Linode next ;-)

0

I find rackspace/slicehost and linode to be equally great on service. I've used both, but generally lean toward Linode because they offer 32-bit instances which is ideal for low memory VMs.

I have a table that compares the differences between their base packages and pricing that you might like.

http://www.xenscale.com/docs/vps-comparison-matrix

Brandon Helwig
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