Or you could look at this as a potential huge revenue boost for a company that you do business with. It's also a company that has a history of increasing the services they provide without increase the cost to the end user.
The added revenue from this promotion will only increase their ability to serve you better in the future.
That's irrational. You found the service valuable at the price point you paid. They're running a promotion where new customers get a credit. Another persons deal doesn't make yours less valuable... it's perception.
So fix it. You see something happening which makes you feel bad, presumably you don't want to feel bad, so find the bug in your thought processes and correct it.
How would you like to feel instead? Happy that the trade you did was fair at the time, and also happy for the people getting a good deal? Sounds good.
There's your unit test: imagine linode offer. Current result: feel bad (q: how, precisely?). Desired result: feel good.
Now all you need to do is fix it as if you were fixing a bug report - explore why and how you feel bad (observing what actually happens in your head instead of what you think ought to be happening) and what you would need to change (in your head, not in the world) so you can feel good instead. Keep trying things and rerunning the test of imagining the linode offer as a check of whether you have successfully changed anything.
The essence of mindhacking in one HN comment. You could pay a therapist loads and not get to that heart of the matter, which is the old stereotyped Buddhism trope that the world is fine and if you feel bad, it's your job to fix your feelings, not the world.
They might which would be nice, but I haven't even rebooted to take advantage of the ram increase from summer yet. Turns out the key to scaling is to have no users :)
I'm feeling the exact same way with Amazon's AWS's pending free tier. I'm an upstanding guy but it kind of makes you want to re-register under your wife's name, doesn't it?
I just signed up the other day! :( Oh well. I'm happy now that I have a local datacentre (UK). Also that my new server hasn't been added to SORBS' DUHL (the 3 weeks it's been taking Slicehost and SORBS to work things out there has been killing me, and finally gave me the momentum to move to the lower cost provider for the same specs).
I've been using Linode for over a year, and I have to say they really are the best when it comes to VPS. The distribution choices are great, the emergency AJAX shell is great, and everything (in my experience) is automated to the point where I haven't even logged a support ticket yet.
If anyone has any hesitation about switching to Linode, I've been using them for the past 2 years and have had an exceptional experience. This is after using both Slicehost and Media Temple - Linode has been the most reliable for me so far, in terms of both performance and speed/latency. Their control panel is also pretty sweet, I'm not sure if you can see a demo from the main site but if anyone wants, I can post a couple of screenshots.
Screen shots would be nice - I've been thinking of moving over from Mediatemple DV but do not really want to spend too much time configuring a server from the command line.
Sorry to read you're thinking of leaving us! Have you been unhappy with your (mt) service? If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know by calling or messaging us on Twitter (@meditatemple). We'd be happy to hear some feedback or offer some support/advice.
I imagine this is prompted by Amazon's free usage tier. I hope it's successful for Linode, though with the AppSumo credit and now this I can't help but feel a little envious of the new users.
Does anyone know how Linode's latency from Chicago compares to Slicehost (which is 20ms round-trip for me)?
At work, I'm stuck with servers that are 100ms+ away, and they are unusable over ssh with that latency. I'm willing to switch to Linode, but only if I get box-under-my-desk-like speed :)
Forgive me for being kindof ignorant here, but wouldn't this be pretty heavily dependent on your connection? If you're close (logically, as in network hops) to their datacenter?
dude I tunnel into their cali DC and work over ssh from Dunedin, New Zealand and it's fine. That's a distance of 11,500km. Latency may not be your biggest problem
They're going to get more than 1000 people signing up.
The order of magnitude above 1000 people will probably more than make up for the $100,000 they stand to lose.
Extending this idea, if I was the person involved with this deal, I'd also include current customers.
If they allowed this, the order of magnitude of new sign-ups (above 1000) would only be increased.
People who sign up for a second Linode are worth just as much as people signing up for their first Linode - there's potentially less risk, because current customers already have an established relationship with Linode, and are most likely to continue using their services once the credit has been spent.
It's not even costing them $100,000 to do this. What does $100 of service cost linode- probably very little. That's about 4 months worth of the basic hosting plan, which is 1/40 of a server (so their FAQ says). The cost to linode for this promotion is probably much lower.
This doubly makes me wish they offered this to existing customers buying new nodes, however it's extremely similar to the Amazon deal a few weeks back.
I think they're more hedging their bets on customers using the service for a few months and replacing their current (if they have it) host with Linode and once their credit runs out being so invested in Linode as a service -- realising it rocks and having their stuff all there -- they won't have a reason to move and if they choose to it'll be a pain to do so.
True, but if they extended the deal to current customers they'd still have the same outlay ($100,000) but the buzz + new signups would be increased.
I suppose it could be argued that current customers are more likely to sign-up for a second linode independently from any offer; but in counter to that, some current customers might be dissuaded from signing up for a second linode in the near future because the perceived value proposition has been lessened.
I think allowing current customers to sign up for a 2nd linode would be a win-win for Linode (and people like me who currently use them).
It scares me when they come out with great deals like this. Will there be a tipping point, when Linode cease to be great because they're overstretched?
GP may have meant "great" in terms of support; that's one of the most often-cited benefits of Linode over other providers. They appear to give a crap about their customers and are very responsive over several open communication channels (forums, IRC, etc.). That may or may not scale if they were to someday have 100x the customers.
Linode hasn't been best lately. They suffered far too many outages and network issues (especially Fremont data center). We have been seriously considering moving to a dedicated setup because of network issues. (Also the fact that they are inflexible -- we want RAM but not hard disk capacity; they can't help us).
Hurricane Electric 1 in Fremont is, IMHO, a notoriously bad DC - I wouldn't host anything in there regardless of whether it was with Linode (I'm a fan) or another provider.
If Fremont was a random choice of the 4 US DC's Linode offers, I would consider putting in a ticket to be moved to another one of their DCs (they'll do it painlessly for free).
You can add additional RAM in the Extras menu on your Linode. It's expensive and it only lets me add like 300 MB more Ram to a 1GB Linode but they aren't completely inflexible.
The ram additional prices are linear with the next tier linode, so if you want more ram you are better of just buying the next tier and getting bandwidth/harddrive space for free.
This applies to all their extra pricing (other than ips and backups).
I'm upset with the outages but I'm more likely to move my freemont server back to dallas than switch hosts.
Is it me or putting the figure "100,000", is meant for people to mistake it for "100.000"?
But, if I'm not mistaken, there is nothing like it in reality, it should really be "100,00" unless the Fed are planning to introduce new currency that is 1/10 of a cent...
I take it a lot of people are going to be sitting with their mouse poised over the submit button as 9am rolls around, and if you're lucky, you'll get the 100$? Surely there's a better way to handle this; it's sort of an annoying gamble, imho.
Huh, so I was going to ask today whether Linode or EC2 made sense for running a personal server. Thanks Linode, you hopefully just made my choice easier!
As somebody with a Linode and an EC2 account, here are some other things to consider:
- Linode's DNS manager is pretty decent, and I've historically used it for both Linode and EC2 machines.
- EC2 t1.micro instances are frustratingly underpowered if you have a CPU spike, and they may "freeze" for as much as a second at time. I'm not convinced that Amazon is price/performance competitive at the very low end.
- EC2's ability to back up volumes to S3 is very handy.
- EC2's ability to spin a new system up alongside your old one, transfer the old IP address to the new system, and then spin down your old system is great.
So if what you want is a low-end Linux box that's online 24 hours a day, Linode can be an excellent choice. And a $100 credit will go a fairly long way.
They really are great for people who have been sitting on the fence.
But new customers who recently signed up... those new customers all feel shunned and wish that they had of waited.