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Comment by antoineMoPa | Hacker News Reader

That's a really anti-hobbyist move. With CAD losing value compared to USD, it means I have been paying more in the last year already. As a tiny hobby developper who has almost no traffic, lower egress fees mean nothing to me and the higher pricing means I'll just kill my projects. I guess they don't care about losing loyal customers and are shifting towards entreprise. It's a bit sad to sell your business to people who have no care for your original set of values.

We need a new independent VPS provider.

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After more than a decade of never increasing prices and improving the hardware for free, charging $12/mo instead of $10/mo means all hobby projects will die and Linode hates their customers.

I think you're being a bit dramatic.

It should have been something that happens before acquisition or years after. What I dislike is the message that this increase sends. My bank account can absorb this increase, my heart can't accept that Linode changed.

$10 is already a lot though. I pay about $2.50 on scaleway with unlimited traffic

Most hobbyists will use the $5 machines which are not changing, though.

Yep, as a 1GB Shared Nanode customer, that was the first thing I checked. Smart move. As a hobbyist I'm pretty price sensitive, and will not hesitate to abandon them if they go too far over their $4 competitors.

I mean that's nice, but it's not so nice for my 10$ instance.

Do you mean your $12 instance? :)

I've been using Linode for more than a decade. I advise hobbyists not to use the cheapest VPS option and neither do I. Its noticeably less performant and just because you are a hobbyist or whatever doesn't mean you can't spend $10-20 per month.

In the United States, people regularly spend more than $10,000 per year on hobbies.

As some people pointed out, Linode used to increase the value of existing plans as RAM/disk/CPU got cheaper. Here, we are losing value relative to the price we are paying. They are trying to do just enough to not lose hobbyists, but the message is clear that individual developers are not a priority anymore.

> In the United States, people regularly spend more than $10,000 per year on hobbies.

There are some people who spend that much, but its way in the high tail of the distribution.

The $5 machines work fine for a lot of tasks. I have some services in production that people pay for running on $5 machines and they aren't anywhere near capacity, lol.

I'd like to point out that this comment is an assumption and isn't backed by any hard data.

Anecdotally, I'm a hobbyist and I've had to use higher price tiers throughout my entire time with Linode. The low-end VPS instances are insanely limited if you're looking to accomplish any sort of real work.

$5? That's tad expensive in most of world. It's often better to use free tiers (https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev) or $1 / $2 VPS (https://lowendbox.com/)

What I HATE about these VPS deals from lowendbox is my past experience of getting burned multiple times on VPS systems that have terrible uptime, become randomly unresponsive and the the provider being unresponsive, shutting down, or disappearing one day. I don't know if things have improved but I tread carefully because at some point my time and sanity become more valuable. Id love a microinstance for the cheapest possible price but I dont have a way to measure average uptime reliability.

Not necessarily. There tends to be a sweet spot for performance and I expect the lowest hosting plans mostly serve to acquire customers in the expectation many will upgrade to more expensive plans

Yeah, it's really sad. I am going to be switching off of Linode after using it for many years happily.

I am considering trying to exclusively use Oracle Cloud's "always free" tier. They literally give away small VMs for hobbyists and I've had one around for a few years now. Reliability isn't as good as Linode (what do you expect for free?) but as a small timer/hobbyist I don't really care.

(as an aside, driving hobbyists away from your product to Oracle of all things is quite funny to me)

> I guess they don't care about losing loyal customers and are shifting towards entreprise.

I called it in the name-rebranding thread here.

I've been noodling around on how I'm going to move, but it looks like I should really work harder on getting that done.

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