So, it’s finally happened. I’ve decided to move my blog onto linode to check what all the fuss was about with their $5/month offering. I’ve been quite curious as to how much performance I can get for $5, my current shared hosting solution with tsohost is OK, but it’s not great…

For $5/month, you get 1GB RAM and 1 Core CPU (whatever that means). What does that really mean for us, coming from shared hosting?

Well, first thing is performance you’d get – 1GB for $5 is a lot of bang for your buck. The fact that you also have full root access means you can pretty much setup anything you want.

Migration Guides

Most of the steps to get you going is pretty well documented for you by linode:

I’d also recommend going through setting up HTTPS via letsencrypt using their certbot tool which does pretty much all the work for you.

Memory usage

I’m surprised by how much memory MySQL consumes at 25%, but I’m still happy with the result. Perhaps it’s something to keep in mind for my future setup.

andyw@localhost:~$ ps aux --sort '%mem' | grep 'mysql'
andyw    11309  0.0  0.2  16788  2128 pts/0    S+   17:00   0:00 grep --color=auto mysql
mysql     5778  0.0 24.6 1271524 248800 ?      Sl   Apr28   0:39 /usr/sbin/mysqld --daemonize --pid-file=/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

andyw@localhost:~$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            985         397         357          26         230         415
Swap:           255          21         234

Result

WordPress admin load time has dropped from roughly 2.5s to less than 500ms mark. Site load times without cache reduced from 4s to 500ms. It was worth all the effort.

Next Steps – Containerised Apps

Next step for me is to start setting up something more interesting to see how much I can really push these things a bit more.