Linode NextGen

Tuesday, April 09 2013

As of today, Linode announced the completion of their upgrade effort, dubbed “Linode NextGen“. Upgrading an internaitonal fleet of servers is nothing to sneeze at, but they succeeded with flying colors.

In the last few months, we saw Linode:

Double the amount of RAM per instance
Bump all instances up to eight virtual cores (from four)
Invested heavily in improving their network
Bump instance outbound cap by 5x
Increased outbound monthly transfer by 10x

They have allowed much higher usage of their resources without compromising on performance. This wasn’t a matter of just upping the quotas and calling it a day.

Why does it matter?

One only need take a look at lowendbox or ServerBear to see that there are plenty of affordable options for VPS providers. Linode is still nowhere close to being the cheapest, but that’s not really Linode’s game. They’re going to give you something a little faster, a little more roomy, and they’re going to keep you happy wth their support. While it’s entirely possible you’ll find someone with similar specs, you’ll be hard pressed to find a competitor with the strength of this offering from top to bottom (price, hardware, network, service/support).

Linode has traditionally been a little more expensive, very developer-centric, and has (in my experience) had a pretty good customer service story. These latest round of upgrades don’t push Linode down into the “budget” category (nor should they), but they do make a good chunk of their competitors in the same category/price range look inadequate. For example, I’m not sure how I could justify using Rackspace after these adjustments for my own purposes.

We all win

Regardless of whether you use Linode or even like them, let’s be clear about one thing: When upgrades and bigger jumps like this happen, we all win. Other providers are going to look at this and will have to decide whether their current offerings need a shot in the arm. Linode is no industry juggernaut, but they are well known enough for this to cause a few ripples.

Let’s sit back and see who makes the next big jump.

Amazon Route 53 DNS failover

Tuesday, April 02 2013

A quick review of my experience with Route 53's DNS failover service.

namecheap.com EssentialSSL and Amazon ELB

Friday, March 29 2013

How to generate the Certificate Chain for namecheap.com EssentialSSL and Amazon ELB.

Ansible first impressions

Friday, February 08 2013

After brief visits with Puppet and Chef for config management, I’ve set my sights on Ansible. It’s late and I’ve been staring at this stuff for way too long today, but here are some early observations:

I really like that it is written in Python. Puppet and ...

Amazon Elastic Transcoder Review

Wednesday, January 30 2013

Amazon Elastic Transcoder was released just a few short days ago. Given that we do a lot of encoding at Pathwright, this was of high interest to us. A year or two ago, we wrote media-nommer which is similar to Amazon’s Transcoder, and it has worked well for us ...

python-route53 released!

Wednesday, November 14 2012

After some more time in the cooker, python-route53 1.0 has landed on PyPi. This is a stand-alone Route 53 package, independent from the one in boto. The major hilights are:

Python 2.7 and 3.x compatibility.
Extremely simple API
Powered by requests

Read the documentation, see the source ...

seacucumber 1.5 released

Monday, July 16 2012

seacucumber 1.5 was released, and is a pretty important (albeit minor) update to correct our unicode handling. The minimum boto version was raised to 2.3, so we can make use of the more specific SES exceptions seen in later releases.

Grab it from PyPi or pip/easy_install away.

django-dynamodb-sessions 0.5 released

Tuesday, May 01 2012

I have released django-dynamodb-sessions 0.5 today, addressing an issue with session keys. All users of previous versions are encouraged to upgrade. Thanks goes to Adam Nelson for pointing this out.

Pathwright launches, powered by Snakes and Jazz

Tuesday, April 03 2012

After over two years of development, Pathwright has emerged from beta, and is open to the masses. For those with knowledge to share, we hope this web application will give you an easy-to-use, easy-on-the-eyes way to teach others. We provide a structured, social way for your students to learn.

See ...

More efficient market web APIs for EVE Online

Sunday, March 11 2012

There are a handful of market data sites (EVE-Central, Eve Marketeers, Eve Marketdata) out there now, each with their own developer APIs. All but EVE-Central are relatively new sites, and most seem to suffer from the occasional, or permanent, sluggishness. It doesn’t appear to be for lack ...