Linode Review – Is Unmanaged VPS Right For You?

Linode, launched in June of 2003 by Christopher S. Aker, is an US web hosting provider who focus on VPS service based on XEN. Locating its office in New Jersey, this web host has taken about six months to get on the right track. More importantly, all of this company’s hosting services are based on Linux instead of Windows.

Linode has not bad reputation in this industry because it provides many original and important systems. However, whether it is a reliable web host is still in confusion for many readers who haven’t purchased before. Therefore, we make this Linode review to help you figure out whether this hosting solution is suitable for you from several vital aspects, such as price, feature, performance and technical support.

Price

Linode launches nine VPS packages and each of them can be charged hourly or monthly. Of course, these packages are equipped with different features and have different performance. We select three of them to show you more detailed information.

To be frank, these packages can satisfy webmasters with various demands. A point you need to notice is that the backup fee of your hosting service is a quarter of your package fee.

In terms of payment method, Linode supports Visa, MasterCard, check and American Express. However, this company doesn’t accept PayPal, which is not very convenient for many webmasters.

Feature

As we mentioned before, different packages share different features.

From this table, you can notice that the more you pay, the richer features you enjoy. For the first package, the company offers 1 GB RAM, 1 CPU core, 24 GB SSD storage and 2 TB data transfer. But actually, 1 GB RAM is very limited for some users as a VPS solution.

Because this company provides unmanaged VPS hosting service, customers need to install many software and tools by themselves, which might be difficult for some webmasters. Of course, Linode also provides managed VPS service, but the price of such service ($100/mo) is much too high that many consumers cannot afford it.

The backup service of Linode enables customers to backup their data and statistics on a monthly, weekly and daily basis. Besides, there are some additional features provided by this company, including two-factor authentication to improve the security of customers’ Linode Manager account, and rescue mode to recover from critical errors.

Performance

As is known, powerful performance of hosting solutions enables websites to be available and have fast loading speed all the time. Therefore, webmasters should pay more attention to the high-speed and stability of servers.

Linode owns six data centers in three different regions to ensure the page loading speed and server response time, including Asia Pacific, North America and Europe.
This company announces to provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee on its network connectivity and all hardware.

However, according to the feedbacks from this company’ customers, the servers take a long period to load a page, especially the first VPS package. In other words, Linode doesn’t achieve what they said before.

Technical Support

Linode provides barely satisfactory customer service. They claims to provide 24×7 professional technical support to their users through email, ticket system, phone call and live chat on the Linode IRC channel.

You should pay attention to some special terms about this company’ technical support. For example, they doesn’t provide any customer service for application specific issues like web or mail server configuration, CGI programming and any other such issues.

Summary

From above, perhaps readers have known that Linode is not a wise choice because of its inevitable imperfections. For those companies engaged in business, we still recommend you to choose managed VPS hosting. Therefore, we suggest you to take the following web hosts in to consideration because all of them provide stable and fast Joomla VPS solutions.

Rank	Web Host	Highlights	Price
1	BlueHost	Free domain name & 1 dedicated IP address 2GB RAM, 30GB disk storage & 1TB/mo bandwidth CentOS 6.4, Enhanced cPanel & WMH For more, visit http://www.bluehost.com/	$23.74/mo
2	InMotion Hosting	512MB/1GB Burstable RAM & 40GB disk storage 750GB/mo bandwidth & 2 IP addresses Automated backup for every 24-36 hours For more, visit http://www.inmotionhosting.com/	$29.99/mo
3	A2Hosting	2 GB RAM, 1 TB data transfer & 75 GB storage 2 free dedicated IP addresses & fully customizable Using this promotional link for 51% discount For more, visit http://www.a2hosting.com/	$35.63/mo