Linode vs Vultr

Published on October 29, 2022 by Kevin Graham

Linode and Vultr are cloud platforms that offer various services, among which are their virtual private servers (or VPSs). These virtual servers have proven to be very efficient and more budget-friendly solutions than regular servers – not to mention they can be deployed and decommissioned almost immediately. They show how reliable they are time and time again through their superb performance, security, storage, backups, user interface, and much more. And, of course, we cannot forget the tech support available for them, as well.

So without further ado, let’s move over to the comparison of two very prominent cloud hosts, and put them head to head: Linode vs Vultr. I’ll go into the features they offer, their usability, their tech support, and more.

What is Linode?

Linode is an American cloud-hosting company that has almost 20 years of history in the hosting market. Formed in 2003, it was one of the first companies to use the powers of cloud computing and virtual machines. And their predictions have proven just right. They’ve managed to stay on top of their game in 2022, being voted as a top IaaS provider, and reaching a one million customer threshold around the world.

And even though there’s much more competition nowadays, than there was 20 years ago, from the likes of UpCloud, DigitalOcean, and Vultr, as well as giant companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, Linode has managed to hold its ground.

How do they do this? Well, for starters, they’ve made sure to improve the user-friendliness of the services they offer; they’ve also invested in building a robust API, integrated superb control panel support, and designed super vast VPSs. Linode has also expanded the price tier options so that now you can choose between numerous tiers with dedicated CPUs, shared CPUs, and high memory cloud computing plans.

What is Vultr?

Vultr is a cloud platform founded in 2014. Even though it’s been less time on the market than Linode, it has done a tremendous job in spreading its cloud services around the world through no less than 27 data centers.

Among their services they include cloud computing, cloud GPUs, bare metal plans, load balancers, managed databases, block storage, and object storage.

Vultr is a company that both businesses and developers can use, since it offers a customizable control panel, as well as flexible and highly functional infrastructure.

Linode’s Features

Linode is a developer and small to medium-sized business-oriented company, and they put a lot of effort into delivering a superb Linux server performance of their virtual servers.

Supported ISOs for Linode are Arch, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Slackware, and Ubuntu. If you want something else, you can also install custom distros by connecting an ISO of your chosen operating system to the Linode.

As was mentioned earlier, Linode offers several cloud computing plans – shared CPU affordable plans for less demanding apps, dedicated CPU, and high memory plans for more complex apps that also require lots of memory. They also offer the option for bare metal plans which gives you more powerful servers if your application needs it.

Data Centers

Linode has 11 data centers across the globe. Five are in North America (Toronto, Dallas, Newark, Atlanta, Fremont, three are in Asia (Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore), one is in Australia (Sydney), and two are in Europe (Frankfurt and London). This is significantly less than Vultr, which has 27 of them. Nevertheless, Linode does a pretty good job with the 11 that it has, with providing a relatively large geographic footprint.

Vultr’s Features

Vultr boasts with high-performance SSD cloud servers using Intel CPUs latest generation technology, while cloud instance spin ip is 60 seconds.

The choice of OS systems that Vultr offers is not small: AlmaLinux, Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, VzLinux, and Windows. They also give you the possibility to upload a custom ISO.

Data Centers

Vultr’s data centers span 27 locations. Seven of them are in Europe (Frankfurt, Paris, Warsaw, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London), nine of them in the US (New Jersey, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Silicon Valley, Miami, Honolulu), one in Canada (Toronto), and one in Mexico (Mexico City). There’s also one data center in Brazil (São Paulo), two in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne), and six in Asia (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore).

Which One is Easier to Use – Linode or Vultr?

When it comes to usability, both Linode and Vultr do a good job to simplify their customer’s journey with their products by having a clear interface and good tech support.

Vultr offers a variety of readily available one-click installers for popular apps, like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Magenta, cPanel, MediaWiki, and PrestaShop.  Of course, you also have the option to install new apps and use scripts, but if you’re not a developer and need the good old basics, Vultr has you covered from the very beginning.

Linode also offers one-click installs for popular apps like WordPress, Drupal, GitLab, Lamp, MERN, and Minecraft.

Scalability is easy with Linode and Vultr, and they offer plenty of options to satisfy any growing power or memory appetites you may have.

Also, both companies offer plenty of options for the development of simpler projects, as well as more complex and memory-intensive ones.

Now, the key takeaway here is that in terms of apps that don’t require as many capacities or require a moderate amount, users find find both Linode and Vultr are doing a good job. But when it comes to more memory, and GPU plans, things are more complicated.

It’s safe to say that developers, individuals, and businesses alike can use Vultr and Linode. People who are more tech-savvy usually find these kinds of platforms much easier to use than giants like AWS and Azure. That’s also in part of the support options they offer, with Linode being the superior one here, even though Vultr’s is not so bad either.

Linode offers 24/7 available support either through support tickets, phone, or the IRC channel. You can also use their community Q&A database, and take a look at their comprehensive “Getting Started Guide”.

Vultr gives you the option to open a support ticket, or to go through their Vultr Docs, which is also a kind of database for common issues that customers are often facing.

Conclusion

Linode and Vultr are competitors and they fight for similar clientele, which means that, in the end, they will try to offer similar products and features, with the occasional differentiator to grab your attention and help you make the final call.

Linode seems to offer more memory than Vultr in some of their similar plans, but on the other hand, Vultr has a lot more choice when it comes to their dedicated plans, and more CPU power on their most powerful plan (more than Linode’s – 96 vCPU vs 64 vCPU). Of course, it all depends on what you need to use them for and how much you’re willing to spend. There are enough options for anybody’s project, that’s for sure.

Be that as it may, both are still doing a great job within their customer target pool by offering user-friendly services, good tech support, and lots of tier options.

If you really can’t make up your mind, you can opt for a multi-cloud strategy with servers from both Linode and Vultr.

Both Linode and Vultr are available through WP Bolt. Getting them through WP Bolt also gives you managed WordPress VPS hosting and 24/7 available and reliable tech support.

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