Linode VPS Hosting

I’m home sick today with a nasty sinus infection, so I thought I would make a quick post about Linode. Last week (maybe two weeks ago now) I decided to give Linode a test drive by signing up for a Linode VPS 512. The increase in traffic to this site and the discussion forums has been significant enough over the past 6 months that I’ve been trying to stay ahead of the curve rather than falling behind (I personally hate a slow site). I’ve been coming up against my 40GB/monthly transfer limits with RIMU hosting even after setting up a CDN so I went looking for alternatives and found Linode.

I ran some quick and dirty benchmarks using Unixbench (1 parallel test) and here’s what I found;

Note: I currently use the IBM x345 Series server as my test and development server so I don’t have to worry about destroying my live production server.

A number of the servers above are virtualized with either VMware or XEN and some are physical. I’ve provided some comparison data in servers 1-4, the two of interest are 5 and 6.

You can see from the numbers that the Linode server beat out the RIMU server by quite a margin. I also chose to have the Linode server placed in their Newark, NJ data center which is geographically closer to me in Pennsylvania than the Dallas, TX data center that my current VPS resides in. With that location change I noticed a big delta in the RTTs to/from the two locations. From my Verizon FiOS home broadband I get around 50ms to the Dallas, TX data center while I’m getting around 20ms to the Newark, NJ data center.

There are other pros and cons between RIMU and Linode which I won’t completely go into here but in my specific example it was the storage and transfer bandwidth that caused me to look elsewhere. I have nothing bad to say about RIMU, they’ve given me more than 18 months of great service.

Last week I moved the blog (that’s this site) to the Linode VPS and it seems to be running great. If everything continues to run smoothly I’ll migrate the discussion forums and remaining sites over to Linode and cancel my RIMU account over the next two weeks.

Have you noticed the speed increase or any other issues with this site?

Cheers!