I don’t recommend linode as a number of prominent security people I follow on Twitter have warned that linode has terrible internal security practices.
However, it is great news to get that 1gb memory plan pushed down to $5 per month on all hosts through competition!
I have my biggest XenForo community on Linode. It’s been one of the best hosts I’ve had. It’s unmanaged of course, but as far as performance it’s hard to beat for the money…
I’m new to Discourse, and I’m using the $5 plan for my first Discourse image testing things out. So far so good!
For my example, I created a second swap disk manually using the Linode control panel and then added a second swap device to /etc/fstab. So that part would be manual, but doesn’t seem that hard.
Deploy an image, with the mandatory swap partition
Remove the swap partition
Resize the root partition to maximum disk size
discourse-setup shall create the swap file.
Edit - poor CPU benchmark:
CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz
Number of cores: 1
CPU frequency: 2499.996 MHz
Total amount of RAM: 989 MB
Total amount of swap: MB
System uptime: 10 min,
I/O speed: 408 MB/s
Bzip 25MB: 9.92s
Download 100MB file: 108MB/s
I really like Linode’s admin dashboard. It is fully featured, yet down to earth functional design. And they have been around since 2003, although they have remained as a relatively small player. Also, wasn’t it so that Linode has a long history of upgrading their plan specs with the market trends? Latest was in 2016, when they doubled the resources of all plans, making the 5$ option meet Discourse requirements.