Top all-time · #2443
Joshtronic
Personal blog · joshtronic.com · on HN as joshtronicprogrammingsystemsgames
Joshtronic is a personal blog at joshtronic.com about programming, systems and games. Since 2011, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 51 times, most often “$5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Josh Tronic's blog mainly for its VPS showdown series, which benchmarks $5-10 cloud servers from DigitalOcean, Linode, Lightsail and Vultr. Some posts cover macOS keychain and other tooling.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- $5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-19
- $10 Showdown: Linode vs. Digital Ocean vs. Amazon Lightsail3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-12-02
- VPS Showdown, June 2019: Do vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-06-06
- VPS Showdown (May, 2020), DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-10
What Hacker News says?
Perhaps, perhaps not. You could argue that choosing not to enable data scrubbing was a deliberate decision by DO to place cost savings (simpler / less costly not to scrub SSDs and saves cell wearing) over security, wheras linode was just the victim of a targeted attack and were unlucky but are overall more competent. Or perhaps not. In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to det…
Comment linking /2014/06/22/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-versus-digitalocean/
on “$500k of Azure credit for YC startups”Submitted $5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr as a story · 482 points
HN discussionAre they? They come out fairly comparably here. I think Lightsail is a T3 instance "under the hood". https://joshtronic.com/2019/06/03/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...
Comment linking /2019/06/03/vps-showdown-digitalocean-lightsail-linode-upcloud-vultr/
on “Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me”Submitted I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid as a story · 67 points
HN discussionSome feedback: I've been using DO droplets since mid 2013, reliability is excellent, no unexpected reboots at all. With the help of Ksplice the Ubuntu Server droplet has achieved 555 and 401 days uptime without downtime (could hang on a bit longer but later decided to reboot once every 3 months to address security concerns). DO support has been responsive and friendly, DO keeps (slowly) delivering new features such…
Comment linking /2016/12/01/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-vs-digitalocean-vs-lightsail/
on “High-Memory Instances and $5 Linodes”Submitted $5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr as a story · 55 points
HN discussionI installed Kubuntu 18.10 on my MacBook Pro 2015 13" (12,1) and sleep doesn't work properly because of the USB3 controller. The MacBook will suspend correctly from a cold boot, but every suspend after that the MacBook immediately wakes up as soon as it successfully suspended. This a is a common issue[1]. As long as I still can't trust Linux to successfully deal with suspending without hacks, I'm not gonna move over.…
Comment linking /2017/03/13/getting-suspend-in-linux-working-on-a-macbook-pro/
on “Notarizing Your App Before Distribution”Submitted $10 Showdown: Linode vs. Digital Ocean vs. Amazon Lightsail as a story · 22 points
HN discussionAre you aware of the command line utility, security? https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin... Some examples of using it: http://joshtronic.com/2014/02/17/using-keyring-access-on-the...
Comment linking /2014/02/17/using-keyring-access-on-the-osx-commandline/
on “Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG”Submitted Switching to Linux, you're doing it wrong as a story · 15 points
HN discussionThere are at least 5 providers that will rent you a $5/month server: DigitalOcean, Lightsail, Linode, UpCloud and Vultr. There's a guy that publishes benchmarks of their $5 instance regularly https://joshtronic.com/2019/09/02/vps-showdown-digitalocean-... DigitalOcean is by far the most popular. Personally, I like Vultr because they also have $2.50 IPv6 only instances and you can upload your own ISO file if you want…
Comment linking /2019/09/02/vps-showdown-digitalocean-lightsail-linode-upcloud-vultr/
on “Ask HN: Where do you get your cheap servers?”Submitted $10 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean as a story · 13 points
HN discussionRelevant read ~> https://joshtronic.com/2017/02/14/five-dollar-showdown-linod...
Comment linking /2017/02/14/five-dollar-showdown-linode-vs-digitalocean-vs-lightsaild-vs-vultr/
on “Ask HN: Which cloud is good in support and value for money for small websites?”Submitted WordPress Login Security with Fail2ban as a story · 11 points
HN discussionHmm, I had a closer look, and most of my instances are old 3.4GHz ones rather than the currently deployable 2.4GHz ones. See https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/567/no-more-3-4-ghz-cpu... Though looking at https://joshtronic.com/2017/02/14/five-dollar-showdown-linod... the current ones still aren't that bad.
Comment linking /2017/02/14/five-dollar-showdown-linode-vs-digitalocean-vs-lightsaild-vs-vultr/
on “Ask HN: Which cloud is good in support and value for money for small websites?”Submitted DirectNIC may have been compromised as a story · 10 points
HN discussion@samdoidge, I found the article with performance benchmarks I was referring to https://joshtronic.com/2016/07/03/ten-dollar-showdown-linode... . A link to it could be found in the medium post as well now. I hope this helps. Cheers!
Comment linking /2016/07/03/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-versus-digital-ocean-july-2016/
on “Why you should consider moving your VPS from DigitalOcean to Linode”Submitted A month after switching to Debian, I know I made the right call as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm surprised nobody mentioned joshtronic's VPS showdown: https://joshtronic.com/2019/07/01/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...
Comment linking /2019/07/01/vps-showdown-digitalocean-lightsail-linode-upcloud-vultr/
on “Ask HN: What are good hosting providers?”Submitted Screenshots Are Not Documentation as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI used Laravel PHP framework to build App from scratch quickly. Also used Linode VPS service to host my App. You can choose that fit to you by reading this link. https://joshtronic.com/2018/08/19/vps-showdown-august-2018-d...
Comment linking /2018/08/19/vps-showdown-august-2018-digitalocean-linode-vultr/
on “Ask HN: How should I build a simple marketplace website today?”Submitted $10 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://joshtronic.com -- 13+ years of weekly diatribes and other noise
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted A Week with Cursor Agent CLI as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Generating lowercase UUIDs with uuidgen on macOS as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted VPS Showdown DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted VPS Showdown Germany Ubuntu 20.04 LTS May 2020 DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted VPS Showdown (May, 2020), DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted VPS Showdown – February 2020 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted $5 VPS Showdown Apr 2018 – DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr West Coast Edition as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
