This morning, LowEndTalk member @david (a veteran since 2011!) posted a lengthy piece on his experiences with both Linode (now Akamai) and Vultr.
His scenario:
In 2019 I switched to Linode and cancelled all my low end boxes and simplified things with a single vps. I’ve been happy with it, but lately I’ve had routing issues in the evening from my home (Asia) using wireguard.
For a long time I used Fremont or Dallas, which was mostly ok, but no more. That leaves Singapore or Osaka. Tokyo has no availability, though I used it a year or so ago and had some issues. Osaka gets routed through Singapore, unfortunately. And Singapore has issues. By issues, I mean high latency, packet loss, and low speeds in the evening.
So I switched to Vultr, Tokyo, which seems to be mostly ok so far. Sometimes it has some issues in the evening, but restarting the wireguard tunnel a few times will get a good route.
Personally I’ve used both, though I bailed on Linode once Akamai acquired them. Vultr has a more extensive image library (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) than many providers and I’ve always had a good experience with them (heck, they even give folks a free VPS). Linode’s panel seems to be a bit behind the state of the art, though quite serviceable, at least back when they were independent.
@david explains some reasons why he prefers Linode over Vultr:
- They don’t block port 25, but Vultr does. This is getting to be so common I think customers need to go in assuming they’re going to have use Amazon SES or some other mail service to send outgoing mail.
- Linode providers a slave DNS service.
- Linode provides an extra /64 ipv6 block (or /56) on request. This is helpful when using the VPS for VPN services.
- Vultr’s 25GB disk is reported as 23G, while Linode’s is reported as 25GB
That last one intrigued me, so I spun up a VM on both and compared:
Vultr
/dev/vda2 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
and df -h says:
/dev/vda2 23G 5.4G 17G 25% /
dmesg:
[ 1.712341] virtio_blk virtio1: [vda] 52428800 512-byte logical blocks (26.8 GB/25.0 GiB)
Linode
/dev/sda on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sda 25G 1.1G 22G 5% /
# dmesg | grep sda [ 1.415900] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 51380224 512-byte logical blocks: (26.3 GB/24.5 GiB)
Huh. I’m not sure why they appear that way. Both VMs I spun up are Debian 12. Vultr’s image sure seems a lot fatter.
As always, your individual needs determine the best provider. What are your thoughts? Which do you prefer? Let us know in the comments below!
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I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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I did some more digging on the disk space difference, and I think it’s due to a much higher number of inodes on Vultr’s file system (about 4x as many).