I had been a slicehost.com customer for over 1-year. I was paying the $40 plan for 20GB of disk space, 200GB transfer, and 512MB of RAM. I recently switched to linode.com after investigating other Virtual Private Servers. For the same amount ($40), I am getting 32GB of disk space, 400GB transfer, and 720MB of RAM. Also, I get to choose an x86 or x64 of my OS choice!
Slicehost uses an AMD Opteron (4 processors) on their servers. Linode uses Intel Xeon 5520′s @ 2.27GHz (4 processors). I don’t have any objective benchmarks, but I am finding that my performance is much better on the Linode server. I host a Left4Dead game server on it and it runs well with up to 8-players. Perhaps it’s because I get more memory, or that the CPU is better, or that I am running a 32-bit OS instead of 64-bit. Maybe it’s all three! Whatever the primary reasons, I am getting more bang for my buck!
Slicehost’s data center is out in Missouri. Linode has 4 data centers up across the US (California, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey). Since I’m in California, my latency and response time has been very low! When I play on my Left4Dead server, I get around 13ms latency. When I was with Slicehost, I was getting about ~100ms.
Slicehost had really good uptime. It’s too early to tell with Linode, but so far the past month has had no problems.
Slicehost did have nice tutorials and a good community forum, however, if you are a competent Linux systems administrator then you should have no problems setting up your virtual private server. Linode does have a help section and a community forum area, but I did not explore it thoroughly as I was able to get myself up and running without the helps and FAQ’s.
If I had to do it all over again, I would have chosen Linode. I hope that Slicehost will be able to competitively compete with Linode in the near future.
Just to be absolutely clear, I am in no way represented by Slicehost or Linode. This is all from my own personal experience and opinions.
