One of the major performance metrics I looked at when evaluating Linode vs. Slicehost was disk performance. Here are the stats for my two servers as of a few moments ago:
[ Performance taken with htparm -tT on both systems at the same time. ]
Slicehost
Cached Reads: 413.15 MB/sec
Buffered Reads: 7.27 MB/sec
Linode
Cached Reads: 5576.59 MB/sec
Buffered Reads: 120.59 MB/sec
That’s a 17X performance gain on non-cached read speed with Linode, and I really feel the difference when I’m doing things like adding large numbers of files to a git repository.
Edit: Once Linode added snapshot backups (which Slicehost had on them for a while) the reasons to go with Slicehost seem to have disappeared completely. I switched to Linode a while back and have never been happier with a host.
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