I've been using Linode for more than a decade. I advise hobbyists not to use the cheapest VPS option and neither do I. Its noticeably less performant and just because you are a hobbyist or whatever doesn't mean you can't spend $10-20 per month.
In the United States, people regularly spend more than $10,000 per year on hobbies.
The $5 machines work fine for a lot of tasks. I have some services in production that people pay for running on $5 machines and they aren't anywhere near capacity, lol.
As some people pointed out, Linode used to increase the value of existing plans as RAM/disk/CPU got cheaper. Here, we are losing value relative to the price we are paying. They are trying to do just enough to not lose hobbyists, but the message is clear that individual developers are not a priority anymore.
I'd like to point out that this comment is an assumption and isn't backed by any hard data.
Anecdotally, I'm a hobbyist and I've had to use higher price tiers throughout my entire time with Linode. The low-end VPS instances are insanely limited if you're looking to accomplish any sort of real work.
Yep, as a 1GB Shared Nanode customer, that was the first thing I checked. Smart move. As a hobbyist I'm pretty price sensitive, and will not hesitate to abandon them if they go too far over their $4 competitors.
Not necessarily. There tends to be a sweet spot for performance and I expect the lowest hosting plans mostly serve to acquire customers in the expectation many will upgrade to more expensive plans
What I HATE about these VPS deals from lowendbox is my past experience of getting burned multiple times on VPS systems that have terrible uptime, become randomly unresponsive and the the provider being unresponsive, shutting down, or disappearing one day. I don't know if things have improved but I tread carefully because at some point my time and sanity become more valuable. Id love a microinstance for the cheapest possible price but I dont have a way to measure average uptime reliability.
In the United States, people regularly spend more than $10,000 per year on hobbies.