My blog has been hosted with Heroku for sometime. My requirements for my blog were not complicated. It's a simple static site that is generated locally on my computer and then pushed to the server. My performance needs aren't complicated as well but one thing that irked me on Heroku was the extra cost in going from one dyno to two dynos. A dyno is a computing unit they use to allow applications to scale from their free single dyno to hundreds should you require them. At just over $35US per month for two dynos, I felt that I just wasn't getting value for money. Heroku does do a lot of the lifting for you when it comes to deploying and hosting but how much of it is necessary for what is a simple static site? After hearing good things about Linode I decided to make plans to move my blog away from Heroku.

At first I was slightly daunted by the fact that I would be setting up the server myself. I've never been a fan of system administration. If there's easier ways of setting things up I'll always opt for them but if i was going to move my blog I had to give the sysadmin part of it a chance. I spent a day setting up the server with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and getting all the necessary dependencies installed. Thanks to some similar steps for a previous version of Ubuntu I was able to get the site up and running by the end of the day.

My blog runs on the Linode 2048 plan which is $20US per month. This isn't the cheapest plan available but it does give me a fair size of memory for my site. I am able to downgrade the server to the new Linode 1024 plan, but I'm happy with my plan for the moment. The server is probably capable of hosting a few more other sites if needed but I don't see that being necessary anytime soon although it is good to have the option there.

To this day I haven't had to do much to the server. I've setup notifications when certain thresholds are reached in terms of size and there's backups of the server taken on a daily basis. You know, just in case. It just runs. And that's the beauty of services like Linode. Yes you could argue that Heroku just runs as well but the setup I have with Linode is just as simple as it was with Heroku. I still keep my blog in a Git repository on BitBucket just as a backup but all that's needs to be done to update my site is run a Rake task. It probably could be simpler if I installed Dropbox on the server and let it continually update each hour through synchronisation, but I prefer to have a little bit of control when it comes to publishing, so the Rake task suits me fine.

After three months I couldn't be happier with Linode's service. Having a hosting solution that just works, requires little maintenance and is relatively cheap are all good benefits. I might even start hosting some Rails applications on them soon!