Linode has been in the virtual private server (VPS) game for longer than most, but in recent years, companies like DigitalOcean and Vultr have taken quite a bit of mindshare from the company. Now it looks like Linode is ready to fight back.
The company today announced the launch of a new $5/month plan that offers twice the memory (1 GB) of DigitalOcean‘s and AWS Lightsail‘s comparable $5 plan. In addition, Linode also launched a number of high-memory instances for application where memory is more important than storage and CPU power.
While today’s announcement is Valentine’s Day-themed, it’s probably no surprise Linode announced this new plan today, given that DigitalOcean launched its load balancer this morning as well. Linode already offered this feature, after all, and likely wanted to steal a bit of thunder from its competitor.
For regular instances, Linode’s service generally offers up to twice as much RAM as DigitalOcean’s — with the rest of the features being more or less equal. As for the new high-memory plans, Linode tends to charge about half of what DigitalOcean charges for RAM, but at the lower end, Linode offers fewer CPU cores.
Linode makes it pretty easy to resize instances up or down, so if you’re paying for a higher-end instance right now but maybe only need 1 GB and a single CPU, you can probably save yourself a few bucks. The new low-end instances are definitely powerful enough for running a few hobby projects or a smaller, more specialized part of a larger application.
One feature Linode doesn’t currently offer is a dedicated block storage service, something DigitalOcean introduced last year. The company says that’s on its roadmap, though, and we’ll likely see a beta release in the coming month. The same goes for the launch of a RESTful API and a new dashboard.
