Linode vs AWS pricing

Recently, i moved my linode to new plans and compare it with latest EC2 pricing. I have myself 2 “1024” and 1 “2048” server in linode which just cost USD45 per month. Personally which is a very good deal. I served my clients on AWS as AWS can do much more things and actually cheaper if you buy bigger servers.

It is actually not easy to find a better price between them if you have no data on your application. In my application, bottleneck is on Memory instead of CPU. I believe most application are same with me, that is why Linode pricing plan base on Memory as well.


If your server shows CPU always 10-20% and you are running websites / PHP things. This price comparison may be useful to you.


Screen Shot 2014-12-17 at 2.11.21 PM Screen Shot 2014-12-17 at 2.10.38 PM

Comparing Linode 8192 plan and EC2 m3.large, the monthly price is AWS more expensive. But, dont forget Linode require USD20 extra for the backup plan, so it will be same price as AWS. Someone may say AWS lot fewer computation power, i agree with it. My application is memory driven, so i don’t care.

In my case, AWS is cheaper when the machine is more powerful. Like if we just need 1024 / 2048 memory, USD 10/20, you can buy nothing in AWS, but you can have really good servers at linode.

Extra features

While price don’t change, AWS also offer VPC, cross region AMI copying, IAM user control, load balancer pay by traffic, nearly free S3 storage which you will be expensive to have all these in Linode.


One of the problem of Linode is their servers will sold out. So, for enterprise usage, like ElasticMapReduce / Auto-scaling, you cannot do it on Linode. Remember, High availability is cost. AWS reserved many instance in each data center, so that you can pay for it when you need it. Linode cannot offer like if I need 10 more servers anytime I want.


In Summary, i would suggest people to use Linode if you are just considering to have < 4096 memory per server. You dont need architecture like separate servers into NAT zones.

If you are serving big server architecture, you are better to go for AWS due to rich features and availability. And for the big servers, AWS actually 50%+ cheaper when you go for the pre-paid reserved instances.