Linode Review

Looking for the place to host your project

When you start a project, which in the past used to be just a blog, maybe hosted with MovableType. Now it range from blogs, to complete Apps. No matter if you are working with PHP, Ruby, Python or anything else. The first thing you need to solve when you go on-line is where to host your project.

Some years ago, there was really a few options, now we have maybe too much of them. Where should you look to find the answer?

Nothing is absolute

I do not like when I read "This (put any solution here) is the best for this problem" without considering different variables. As an engineer I have learned that there are a lot of variables you need to address before you can come with an answer, in almost any decision you make in life.

Fixing some variables

I'm going to make some assumptions.

• You like to have full control of your project
• You do not have too much money to host it in a specialized place
• You have enough time to fix by yourself some issues
• You have the skills to fix those issues

With that fixed, we can now go onto the next section.

Best place to host a project

To me, this is simple: Linode (Not an affiliate link). Why Linode?

• Price: For only 20 dollars per month you get 512 RAM, 20 GB of storage, 200 GB of transfer. That is more than enough for a good percentage of well tuned projects. (And well tuned is a key word here).
• Stability: I have been with them since early 2009 and in all these almost four years, I have never saw an important outage of the service. Some minutes here or there, and very few not previously informed to me.
• Customer support: Every time I have opened a ticket, I have had the reply in minutes. I'm not talking about the solution, you know sometimes solutions take time, I'm talking about someone replying you, a real person. A real person who says he is working in your ticket, and that he will update you as soon as possible. The final solution anyway usually does not take too much time either.
• Focus: They offer VPS servers, they are good at that, no need to start creating more products. They just constantly improve what they are already doing well. I like working with specialists.

Other options

Before someone start pointing me in some other directions, to show me other options. I want to say that, given the assumptions made above I think Linode is your best option. If some of the assumptions above is not true you may have these other options, for specific solutions.

• Drupal Gardens: To host Drupal sites
• SquareSpace: To host professional looking sites
• WP Engine: To host big Wordpress sites
• phpfog: To host you PHP app in the cloud
• Heroku: To host your Ruby, Node.js, Java, Python, etc app in the cloud

And the list can continue, but those might cost you more, give you less freedom or both at the same time.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a good place to host your blog, website or app (or all of them), think about Linode.