[wplug-board] Linode has a $10 plan

[Pat Barron]

On 6/16/2014 10:39 AM, Justin Smith wrote:
>
> I just saw this on Hacker News: https://www.linode.com/pricing
>
> It looks like Linode came through with a low-cost plan after all! It's 
> about half as expensive as what we're currently paying. The new plan 
> compared to our current plan:
>
> *1 full core vs 8 virtual cores w/low priority
>
> *1GB RAM vs 1GB RAM
>
> *24GB SSD storage vs 24GB hard disk storage
>
> *2TB transfer bandwidth vs 2TB transfer bandwidth
>

Interesting...  I'll look into this later today.

> We'd have less CPU power, but as Vance has said, the only intensive 
> task we run on the server is Litecoin mining. I'd be willing to stop 
> mining and sell what Litecoin we've accumulated. The real bottleneck 
> in most computers is the hard drive, so moving to an SSD-based VPS 
> would, in my opinion, make much more of a difference than having 8 
> virtual cores with low priority.
>

Really sort of "six of one, half a dozen of the other" as far as our 
scenario is concerned - with the workload on our server, we're really 
not bottlenecked on anything (not even close, actually), so at least as 
far as that goes, there is no problem we need to solve. ;-)

> It's worth mentioning that Digital Ocean 
> <https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/> has one-upped Linode's $10 
> plan: it offers 30GB of disk space instead of 24GB. Everything else is 
> identical.
>

Doesn't seem like enough of a "bonus" to be worth switching providers, 
given that all else is equal.

> I'm excited about moving WPLUG.org to a new server, but I'm not 
> looking forward to migrating our data. That's my only gripe with 
> CentOS. Since our participation rate is still a bit low, we may want 
> to consider something Debian-based so that future upgrades, if 
> necessary, can go a bit smoother. I'm not a Debian aficionado, myself, 
> but it may work out long-term.
>

Not really sure what Debian would buy us over CentOS as far as 
upgradability.  The real issue in our scenario with doing a server 
migration is having to move from a 32-bit environment to a 64-bit 
environment, which necessitates a full reinstall anyway (unless Debian 
would have some way around that?)

In any case, by the time we'd be ready to migrate, we'd potentially be 
jumping over an entire major release, you'd probably want a full 
reinstall in that case anyway (even if it were Debian - I don't think, 
for instance, I'd try to do an in-place upgrade directly from Debian 5.x 
to Debian 7.x...) - aside from that, "preupgrade" actually does a pretty 
good job with upgrading on RHEL/CentOS systems.

I think the migration scenario (if we were to do this) would involve 
running both environments in parallel for a month or two.  This is 
something I think the Technology Committee should be able to to sort out 
with a few people and a few weeks (and could be interesting enough work 
that it could bring some folks back into action who've been quiet for a 
while.  ;-) ).

> Let's talk about this tomorrow evening.
>

I'm hoping the turnout will be enough that we won't have time to discuss 
it.  ;-)

(And, on a tangent, we should decide what to do about a board meeting, 
since there really isn't time to do a board meeting and the social event 
tomorrow night [and I won't be able to get there early enough to do a 
board meeting before the social event].  Push it out a week, maybe?)

--Pat.

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