At the beginning of April, Linode introduced per hour billing for its cloud services. The provider has also been cooking up VPS products powered by SSD and double the original RAM offered for its cloud instances. This instances have now been made general available to developers with 64-bit servers being generally available to customers hosted at four of its data centers. There has been a surge of R&D efforts at the Linode fold, this is the result of a $45 million investment allowing the provider to match up the strength of Digital Ocean’s offerings.
Examining the effect of Linode’s swap to SSD now gives customers 2GB RAM, 48 GB SSD, 3 TB data transfer, 2 vCPU cores at $20/month. The same price gets you slightly less drive capacity at 40 GB SSD for Digital Ocean although the rest of the settings are pretty much similar to Linode. Although this does place both providers in direct competition, Linode VPS’s also come with load balancing, backup and analytics which are not included by its rival.
Linode’s data centers in London and Tokyo will only get the upgrades in the next 3 weeks for 64-bit instances. 32-bit servers should be upgraded in 2 months time.
