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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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

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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