As I’ve mentioned before, my blog is hosted on a VPS at Linode. Just under 3 years ago, I moved to my current VPS in their Newark DC to take advantage of their native IPv6 support. I’ve now moved within Linode again, this time to take advantage of their awesome free upgrades.

$20/month gets you a 2GB Xen VM backed by enterprise-grade SSDs, Ivy Bridge Xeons, and a 40Gbps backbone. Think that 40Gbps is going to waste? Think again. I downloaded a 100MB test file from Cachefly in 1.2 seconds. That’s 85.5 MB/s. Consider my mind blown.

I’ve been a Linode customer since 2009, and have probably had about 3 outages in the 5 years. All have been short, and have had good explanations with great communication from the Linode staff. There may be cheaper options out there, but I care about uptime and infrastructure, and Linode makes the necessary investments there.

Full ApacheBench tests for my old and new hardware are below.

32 bit VM on Old Hardware

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% ab -c 10 -n 200 -q https://epsilon.systemoverlord.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1430300 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking epsilon.systemoverlord.com (be patient).....done


Server Software:        nginx/1.2.1
Server Hostname:        epsilon.systemoverlord.com
Server Port:            443
SSL/TLS Protocol:       TLSv1.1,ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA,2048,128

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        26 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   7.878 seconds
Complete requests:      200
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      200
Total transferred:      121600 bytes
HTML transferred:       5200 bytes
Requests per second:    25.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       393.898 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       39.390 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          15.07 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:      277  298  17.6    292     386
Processing:    89   93   4.3     92     112
Waiting:       87   93   4.1     91     112
Total:        367  391  17.7    387     481

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    387
  66%    393
  75%    398
  80%    401
  90%    414
  95%    426
  98%    448
  99%    458
  100%    481 (longest request)

64-bit VM on New Hardware

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% ab -c 10 -n 200 -q https://lambda.systemoverlord.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1430300 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking lambda.systemoverlord.com (be patient).....done


Server Software:        nginx/1.2.1
Server Hostname:        lambda.systemoverlord.com
Server Port:            443
SSL/TLS Protocol:       TLSv1.1,ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA,2048,128

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        26 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   2.999 seconds
Complete requests:      200
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      200
Total transferred:      121600 bytes
HTML transferred:       5200 bytes
Requests per second:    66.68 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       149.959 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       14.996 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          39.59 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       68   90  21.8     84     199
Processing:    22   57 100.4     31     623
Waiting:       20   57 100.3     30     623
Total:         95  148 105.4    115     707

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    115
  66%    120
  75%    128
  80%    143
  90%    212
  95%    479
  98%    566
  99%    706
  100%    707 (longest request)