Linode Review: Features, Pros & Cons, Alternatives

if you’re looking to host your website and wondering if you can opt for Linode as a potential hosting provider, then this article is for you. Definitely, there are a lot of hosting companies out there in the market providing similar services at great prices and features. As such, choosing the one that can fulfill all your business requirements becomes pretty challenging.

So in this article, we will talk about all the features you get with Linode hosting so that you can decide for yourself whether you can trust it for your projects.

Linode is a cloud-computing provider launched in 2003 by Christopher Acker. Its company is based in New York City, with its primary data center in Atlanta. Linode was given an unusual A+ rating by the Better Business Bureau and was included in Forbes’ lists of America’s Most Promising Companies in 2012 and 2013.

Let us know more about Linode and where it can be used.

What is Linode?

Linode is considered one of the largest cloud service providers in the world. Linode is popular for its high-performance network and easy-to-use control panel.

It is available as a cloud-computing platform that provides you with a secure, reliable platform where you can host your website or application.

In simple words, Linode is a cloud hosting company capable of providing you access to Linux virtual servers. You may be able to gain full control over your server via Linode’s custom web-based terminal or via SSH.

Get $100 Free Linode Credits

Linode offers you $100 credits on a 60-day free trial. You will however need a valid credit card to avail of the trial. As such, you can easily trust the company and deploy your websites, you can scale when you are happy with the performance, uptime, security, and features.

Linode- At a Glance

Free SSL	No
Uptime Guarantee	99.99%
Free Domain Name	No
Managed Hosting Feature	Yes
Free Trial	Yes, for 60-days (2 months)
Number/Location of Data Centers	1 in India, 2 in Europe, 3 in Asia, 5 in North America and Australia

Why do developers trust Linode?

Linode is developers-friendly and offers you access to all the features a developer may need to optimize. The host is performance-ready and is capable of handling pretty much everything.

If you’re stuck on something important, they’re not gonna try to get rid of you instead will help you in the best possible way. Even then, they don’t try to give you template-based answers. They look at your issue profoundly, and then they will provide you with a solution.

Linode Cloud Hosting has long been as capable of developer transparency as reliability. In addition, it does not add complexity to products or pricing.

People or developers prefer to opt for Linode, as it provides better customer service. Furthermore, their support team provides both solutions and resources to resolve customer problems. Linode tries to solve customer problems through various ways like – tickets, email, phone calls or social media, etc. It can empower every individual or team to feel confident and capable of dealing with problems through a robust training or mentorship program.

Features of Linode

Here are the top features of Linode that you must know about:

Security, Flexibility, and developer friendliness

This hosting provides state-of-the-art security measures to keep your data safe. Moreover, you can choose from various plans and increase your flexibility as your need grows.

You shouldn’t anticipate too many features designed exclusively for web hosting from Linode because it targets developers who require a wide range of cloud hosting options. However, all services include complimentary hosting security protocols, such as sophisticated DDoS protection.

There are limitations on how you may use the free Cloud Firewall and VLAN services. This deployment is quite recent and not all server locations have it yet. Fortunately, all of Linode’s other functions are available to everyone.

Server Programming with Powerful API

With Linode’s very versatile API, you can use code that is simple to customize to handle almost every element of your cloud server. You can use community-created tools and libraries or install the programming libraries and clients that Linode officially supports, such as Python, JavaScript, and the GO client.

Linode has a sophisticated Python-written command line interface if you want to operate directly through the command line. It is easy to install and gives you the ability to automate routine tasks, deploy servers, and pretty much anything else you would require.

SSD Storage

Linode has been using fast and reliable Solid State Disks (SSDs) in all its data centers since 2012. This is the reason why their IOPS performance consistently gets pretty decent and fast speeds. Linode offers lightning-fast SSDs, 24×7 support, and 99.9% uptime guarantees.

GPU Instance

Linode is also capable of providing GPU instances for machine learning, video rendering, and other GPU-accelerated workloads.

Managed Services

It is capable of providing managed services for Cabernets clusters and databases, helping you focus on building rather than managing the infrastructure.

API Availability

It gives you a comprehensive API, capable of giving you control over the entire account and infrastructure. This API can be used to deploy instances as well as manage your account.

Reliability

With data centers across the globe, Linode cloud-based hosting can provide you with reliability and peace of mind.

Affordable Cloud Storage Solutions

When compared to AWS and the Google Cloud Platform, Linode’s cloud storage solutions are significantly less expensive per GB, and there are no additional fees for outgoing data transfers.

If you want additional capacity, Linode offers block storage for your cloud VPS in addition to object storage that is S3-compatible and replicated over a group of cloud servers. Both choices are simple to scale as necessary.

High Availability and Scalability

Linode provides a flexible platform to scale your servers. Your resources can easily be scaled up and down, allowing you to pay only for what you need.

If you want to run large-scale websites or applications but do not want to invest in expensive hardware, Linode is the perfect solution. Linode’s High Availability Clusters provide automated failover resolution across multiple data centers so that you can work with ease.

Flat-Fee Backup Service

Although there is no free automated backup service, you may pay extra money for it. Your VPS will be automatically backed up daily, weekly, and biweekly using the Linode Backup Service.

You won’t be charged extra for the amount of storage your backups utilize, unlike other Cloud backup services. Instead, based on your VPS setup, you pay a single monthly charge. However, as backups may only be downloaded locally, I advise downloading them for an additional layer of redundancy.

Other Features

Hundreds of thousands of businesses and developers around the world deploy their modern applications on Linode to make it faster and easier to scale up.

With Linode, your team can be able to build web, mobile, database, and machine learning applications more efficiently with a simple cloud manager or API and CLI.

It is able to talk to you 24/7 for customer support or whenever required. It gives you the support experience you love and is able to provide all the tools you need for total control over your infrastructure.

Linode Pricing & Plans

There are four types of plans accessible –

• Dedicated CPU plans,
• Shared CPU plans,
• High memory plans,
• GPU plans.

Dedicated CPU Plans

There are nine different plans available in this, which we have told in the following picture –

Shared CPU Plans

There are 10 different plans available in this, which we have shown by the picture in the following –

High Memory Plans

There are five different plans available in this, which we have presented through the picture in the following –

GPU Plans

There are four different types of plans available, which are shown in the picture below –

Linode- Ease of Use

Simple to understand user-interface

You will be sent to the Cloud Manager once you have completed the quick and easy account creation process. All of your Cloud servers and services, as well as invoicing and account information, will be managed here.

It was incredibly user-friendly, responsive, and simple to discover anything, which I appreciated. It only required a few clicks to construct a few VPSs and install a load balancer.

A Very Simple App Store

Additionally, Linode has an app store that makes it simple to deploy a selection of CMSs, control panels, stacks, and development tools. The fact that you can quickly customize these apps during the construction process, adjusting the maximum number of authorized resources, metadata, and other settings, is very nice.

However, Linode’s app store is very underpopulated. It doesn’t even come close to other well-known program installers like Softaculous with only 66 total applications accessible.

Managed Services, but Not as You Might Think

Linode is just 24-hour dedicated website monitoring with a few more features; it is not genuine administration of your VPS.

It offers free cPanel and WHM, site migrations, and the Linode Backup Service in addition to carefully monitoring the uptime and performance of your VPS for a very high charge.

Linode will try its best to get you back up as quickly as possible if issues are found.

A Fantastic Control Panel, but disappointing almost everywhere else

When it comes to the majority of features, Linode prioritizes utility and appears to take usability seriously. The last thing a developer needs are obstacles to the services and capabilities they require. Unfortunately, Linode occasionally falls short in terms of usability.

Linode- Performance

Amazing Speeds When It Functions

Start with the positive news. AMD EPYC processors, among the finest currently available in the market, are used in Linode’s servers. The same technology is used by AWS and Google Cloud, but at a far lower cost.

Some speed-improving apps are also available in the App Marketplace for no cost. It is possible to use OpenLiteSpeed WordPress, which provides you with everything you need to run a very fast WordPress-based website with LSCache. If you would rather use Nginx, you could also set up a LEMP stack.

All of this provides Linode with a lot of opportunities to execute at the level of business performance you’d anticipate from AWS and Google Cloud. Indeed, the servers are sufficiently quick. Sadly, Linode’s Achilles’ heel is its lack of dependability. Although it promises 99.99% uptime, keeping that claim appears to be a different story

Linode- Support

Before joining Linode, you may contact their customer support team by phone (both domestic and international numbers are provided), ticket, email, and IRC chat. Although their customer care representatives should be available by phone and email around the clock, you may anticipate a quicker response if you are already a client.

The “Community Q & A (opens in new tab)” area of the forum, which contains contributions from users from all over the world, may also be quite beneficial. Here, people discuss solutions for a wide range of problems and worries.

The forum is well-staffed even if it isn’t very popular because most inquiries are responded to within a day or less by members of Linode’s staff or other users. Another option is to go through the “Search Docs & Resources” area for quick solutions and in-depth instructions, some of which are surprisingly user-friendly for beginners.

Since developers are the primary audience for cloud computing services like Linode, they often don’t provide any technical help. If they do, getting access to it typically involves paying exorbitant amounts of money. However, Linode doesn’t provide several support tiers; regardless of how much you pay, you always get the same level of assistance.

A ticketing system is used by Linode to supply all of its technical support services. Technically, there is a chat option, but it is handled by a bot.

Although a more expensive option for managed services or extended technical assistance would have been good, most experienced developers would find this hands-off approach to be sufficient.

Alternatives of Linode

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider that offers the same great features as Linode, including robust APIs, high-performance SSDs, and hourly pricing. It’s also priced the same as Linode, starting at $30/month for 4GB of RAM and 80GB of SSD storage. They also provide managed services for your servers.

Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 is a highly-scalable infrastructure-as-a-service solution that comes with an almost limitless choice of server types, giving it a slight advantage over other providers like Linode because they’ve been doing this since 2003. . It’s a bit more complicated to manage than Linode or DigitalOcean, but if you’re looking for flexibility and scalability in a provider, it’s a great option.

Vultr

The primary reason why Vultr is a solid alternative is that it offers 16 data centers located worldwide. With such a vast network of servers, it ensures that users can choose the best location based on their target audience and enjoy maximum performance and minimal latency.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is another cloud-hosting service that offers many benefits besides cloud hosting. It is an excellent option if you are looking for something simple or plan on using other AWS services as well.

UpCloud

UpCloud is a cloud-hosting provider that provides public and private cloud solutions, as well as high-availability servers for users who need enterprise-grade reliability.

Founded in 2011, UpCloud cloud hosting provides virtual server and storage solutions to businesses of all sizes. It can create server clusters for high availability or automate processes with APIs.

Linode: Competition

Check out HostGator if you’re searching for a more user-friendly host that provides a wide selection of hosting services at competitive costs. With a generous 45-day money-back guarantee, its entry-level subscription will provide you access to a tonne of endless features and beginner-friendly tools, allowing you to test things out without having to rush or worry about a thing.

Bluehost, situated in the US, is another excellent replacement for Linode for all the novices out there. It offers shared, managed WordPress, WooCommerce, VPS, and dedicated server options in addition to being less expensive than Linode. So, you should probably choose Bluehost as your provider if you’re searching for a more complete host with affordable rates.

Like the other companies, Hostwinds provides a quick, easy, and intelligent solution to start a top-notch cloud server. In addition to this, Hostwinds offers a wide range of hosting-related services, including shared, VPS (both Linux and Windows-based), dedicated servers, reseller solutions, and more. However, whereas Linode has a 7-day money-back guarantee that seems a little skimpy, Hostwinds does not provide any, which is unfortunate.

Since both Cloudways and Linode provide free trials, new users may check them out without worrying about their finances. Both services are highly developer-friendly. Though the entry-level plan with Linode starts at $5.00 per month, it costs $10.00 with Cloudways.

Frequently Asked Questions –

Is Linode Better than Digital Ocean?

Linode and Digital Ocean are both cloud hosting providers, meaning they offer servers that you can use to build and host websites. They are both popular with small-business owners and individual developers, but they each have their own strengths.

If you need to scale your business quickly and want a lot of flexibility in the size of your server, Linode is a good choice. It is also a great option for speedy customer support, including live chat.

Digital Ocean offers a much simpler user interface, making it easier for new users or non-technical users to manage their servers. Digital Ocean also has more features on its basic plan than Linode does. Ultimately, though, the best provider for you will depend on what kind of applications you are using and what kind of budget you have available.

Can you Host Multiple Websites on Linode

Yes, you can host multiple websites on a Linode server. You can do this directly through the Linode Manager, which allows you to create any number of website configurations and link them to your domains.

What pricing scheme does Linode have? In what form does it accept payment?

Linode is an excellent choice for hosting your website. It is one of the most popular options on the market. A hybrid pay-as-you-go mechanism is used by Linode. You will only ever pay for the precise number of resources and add-ons you use on all servers, which are paid by the hour (up to a monthly maximum). Overall, Linode provides excellent value for your money, with robust VPS options priced far lower than those of its rivals.

Visa, American Express, Discover, and Mastercard have accepted forms of payment. PayPal can be used to make payments, but you would first need to join up with a working credit card.

Is the cloud hosting from Linode safe?

All of Linode’s services come with cutting-edge DDoS defense. Additionally, you may utilize their Secure Your Server program for Linux, which aids in protecting your server from illegal access.

The fully customized Cloud Firewall solution is another free offering. Custom rule sets based on IP addresses and ports are possible. Linode offers secure hosting, but you might have to put in some extra work.

What distinguishes shared hosting from cloud hosting?

You share a physical server (and its space) with other users when you utilize shared hosting. On the other hand, a website hosted in the cloud will have its resources distributed among several servers.

The best option for novices is shared hosting, which is slower and less dependable but far less expensive.

Is Linode a worthwhile investment?

Linode will enable you to save a significant amount of money compared to other premium cloud computing providers. A strong VPS setup is available for a lot less money than what many rivals may charge. Additionally, the bulk of Linode’s add-ons has affordable prices.

Over to you: Linode Review

Linode is a fantastic choice for Linux-savvy developers who are looking for high-performance services at an affordable price.

You may utilize the $100 promotional credit provided by Linode to try out their services. During this time, you will have around two months to decide if Linode is the right host for you.

But new users might think that Linode’s learning curve is a touch too steep. We suggest newbies check out HostGator and Bluehost before making a significant decision because they are two of the most beginner-friendly hosts accessible.