Linode vs. Media Temple

Lately I’ve noticed we’ve been get­ting a lot of hits on my art­icle Good­bye Media Temple, Hello Linode, with search terms such as ‘medi­atemple vs linode’. So I thought it would be best to tran­scribe my thoughts in a little more detail below. I would also like to pre­face this art­icle with the state­ment that I was a cus­tomer of Media Temple’s for almost 3 years, and have been with Linode for 2 months now.

For the table below I have com­pared Media Temple’s ‘base’ ded­ic­ated vir­tual server to it’s nearest Linode com­pet­itor the ‘Linode 720′.

 
Linode comes out way in front in everything other than ‘Net­work Trans­fer’, how­ever I have found that for the few small sites that we host we rarely use more than even 50GB a month. Obvi­ously, depend­ing on what you host you may need more than the 400GB per month that this level of Linode offers, but I would be wary of host­ing any­thing push­ing that much traffic on a server with only 512MB of RAM (in Media Temple’s case). It’s also worth not­ing that Linode offers addi­tional trans­fer at the rate of $0.10 per 1GB if need be. Media Temple does not offer such a ser­vice, and will charge you $0.50 for each 1GB you are over your limit.

In the table below we have the vari­ous levels of sup­port offered by both companies.

Most of my com­mu­nic­a­tion with Media Temple was through their email sup­port, responses usu­ally took any­where from 2 to 24 hours and were vary­ingly help­ful. With Linode I have found their IRC chan­nel to be a ter­rific help in set­ting up, fine-tuning and secur­ing my server, not to men­tion any ran­dom Unix, Win­dows, Mac (or even BeOS) ques­tions you may have that have noth­ing to do with your server. Pop­u­lated by ded­ic­ated staff mem­bers and other help­ful indi­vidu­als, I have found it invaluable.

I should also note that the Linode Lib­rary is still being pop­u­lated with art­icles and that details may occa­sion­ally seem sparse, but it is some­thing that is improv­ing almost daily.

Finally, we have some addi­tional details that I thought were import­ant to compare.

Note that the Beta under ‘Backups’ for Linode is to sig­nify that their backup ser­vice is cur­rently in Beta, there is no word yet on when it will be out of Beta or what the price would be when this hap­pens. Also shown above is my favour­ite fea­ture of Linode: Pro rata billing. I have men­tioned pre­vi­ously what a big help this was to me. I have also found that many people find Linode’s pro rata billing (ie. only pay for what you use) to be extremely help­ful in test­ing vari­ous set-ups before they move them onto their live server.

Not men­tioned above is Linode’s LISH con­sole, which I have found pretty use­ful when I’ve done some­thing stu­pid, such as locked myself out or messed up my net­work settings.

Over­all it comes down quite favour­ably in Linode’s corner, which is pretty much why when I star­ted to exper­i­ence issues with the ser­vice provided by Media Temple they were my first choice. If you are still not sure about choos­ing Linode, then maybe give this a read: where they beat the best that the other VPS pro­viders have to offer.

If you’re think­ing of using Linode after read­ing this art­icle then please sign up using this link and Linode will give me a small dis­count on my hosting.