Last week, Linode announced hourly billing for their servers; this week they announced that they’re putting SSDs in all their servers, doubling RAM for all plans, upgrading network capacity, and slapping in hot new CPUs as well. This is just…wow.
For the one essential service I run (not this blog), I use a Linode server for production (because of performance), and have backup and test servers on AWS (because of hourly billing). Because I have the server setup all scripted with Chef, getting a new machine up and running is easy, but having two different control panels is slightly annoying. With hourly billing on Linode, I’ll just move the backup and test server over there. And moving from spinning disks to SSDs is going to make some of the DB queries a lot faster. Very nice.