How to Choose a Linode Plan

Linode offers four instance types: Shared, High Memory, Dedicated CPU, and GPU Instances. For all Linode Instance types, there are several hardware resource tiers, or plans, that you can choose from.

When selecting a plan, it is important to understand the hardware resources allocated to your instance, like CPU, transfer, storage, and RAM. An understanding of your project’s own needs and requirements is also useful. This guide provides an overview of all Linode instance types and plans, their corresponding use cases, and how to choose which one is right for you.

Note

You can easily change between instance types and plans on an existing Linode at any time. Review the Resizing a Linode for instructions.

Hardware Resource Definitions

Start by reviewing what each resource means for your application. If you’re confident in your understanding of these concepts, please feel free to skip ahead.

General Principles when Choosing a Plan

The different Linode instance types represent different balances of the above resources. Shared instances offer a general-purpose array of resources, High Memory instances favor higher memory allocations, Dedicated CPU instances reserve physical CPU cores for you, and GPU instances give you access to both dedicated CPU cores and are the only plan type that gives you access to a GPU.

At the same time, different kinds of applications have different resource requirements. Some applications may need to store a lot of data but require less processing power, some may need more memory than CPU, and some may be especially CPU-intensive. As a result, certain instance types can better serve certain applications. When creating your instances, consider what resources your application needs and then compare it with the resources specified by each of the instance types. The following sections include common use cases for each type, and one of these may resemble your needs.

Finally, a common strategy when setting up a new server is to start with a smaller instance and then resize your Linode if needed. At a minimum, you will need to choose a plan that offers enough disk space to store your data. For more information, see Resizing a Linode. You can then monitor the CPU, GPU, memory, and network usage of your application to determine if you need more of those resources.

1. Shared

Shared instances start with 1GB of RAM and 1 vCPU and can go all the way up to 192GB of RAM with 32 vCPUs. These instances offer a balanced array of resources and can support a wide range of modern cloud applications, from personal projects to production deployments of an enterprise application.

Use Cases

• Websites and web applications
• Code repositories
• Game servers
• Database servers
• Code repositories
• Virtual private networks (VPNs)
• Container clusters
• Application and database clusters
• Content delivery network (CDN) nodes

Base Plan

To view a full list of the Shared instance plans, visit the Linode Pricing page.

2. High Memory

High Memory instances feature higher RAM allocations and relatively fewer vCPUs and less storage. This keeps your costs down and provides power to memory-intensive applications. As of June 16, 2020, all High Memory plans utilize dedicated CPU cores.

Use Cases

Two primary applications for High Memory instances are in-memory caches and in-memory databases, like Memcached and Redis. These applications offer very fast retrieval of data, but they store data in a non-persistent manner (with some caveats). So, they are usually used in conjunction with another persistent database server running on a separate instance.

The kinds of data you might store in one of these applications includes: information about your users' sessions; frequently-requested pages on your website; and data that needs to be computed (for example, the average rating of a product on a retail store’s site).

Base Plan

To view a full list of the High Memory instance plans, visit the Linode Pricing page.

3. Dedicated CPU

Dedicated CPU instances offer entire dedicated CPU cores for your own Linode’s use. No other instances can run processes on the same cores that you’re using, which means that your software can run at peak speed and efficiency.

Under the Shared instances, your processes are scheduled on the same CPU cores as the processes from other servers. This shared scheduling is done in a secure and performant manner, and Linode works to minimize competition for CPU resources between your server and other servers, but the Dedicated CPU instances provide an environment with zero competition. With Dedicated CPU instances, you can run your software for prolonged periods of maximum CPU usage, and you can ensure the lowest latency possible for latency-sensitive operations.

Dedicated CPUs and the Linode API

Some data analysis and processing tasks are well-suited for Dedicated CPU instances. For these workloads, you may only need your Dedicated CPU instance until the task is finished, at which point you can remove the instance.

Furthermore, some CPU-intensive tasks may be triggered from other events in your workflow. For example, if you’re a software developer that uses continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools, those tools are generally run whenever you push code to your repository. By leveraging the Linode API, you can programmatically create a Dedicated CPU instance, run these tools, and destroy the instance on every code push.

Use Cases

• CI/CD toolchains and build servers
• CPU-intensive game servers, like Minecraft or Team Fortress
• Audio and video transcoding and streaming
• Big data and data analysis
• Scientific computing
• Machine learning

Base Plan

To view a full list of the Dedicated CPU instance plans, visit the Linode Pricing page.

4. GPU Instances

GPU instances are the only plan that give you access to NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPU cards with Tensor, ray tracing (RT), and CUDA cores. GPUs are designed to process large blocks of data in parallel, meaning that they are an excellent choice for any workload requiring thousands of simultaneous threads. With significantly more logical cores than a standard CPU, GPUs can perform computations that process large amounts of data in parallel more efficiently.

Use Cases

• Machine Learning and AI
• Big Data
• Video Encoding
• General Purpose Computing Using NVIDIA’s CUDA Toolkit
• Graphics Processing

Base Plan

To view a full list of the Dedicated CPU instance plans, visit the Linode Pricing page.

Pricing

Think about pricing when considering which Linode plan is right for you. You can view all the pricing at Linode Pricing.

You can also compare cost per month and save with Linode’s predictable and transparent pricing with our Cloud Estimator. Explore bundled compute, storage, and transfer packages against AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Migrating from on-premise or between cloud providers for hosting, cloud storage, or cloud computing? Use our Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) cloud pricing calculator to receive a full cost breakdown and technical recommendations.