Around April, my VPS provider Linode announced that they’ve just finished a major $45M upgrade to their hardware and network, which means free upgrades for their existing users. The new hardware uses SSD RAID drives and faster CPUs. I hadn’t bothered because Wopular and Movies With Butter have been relatively stable.

I finally took the plunge a few weeks ago and the upgrade process was relatively smooth. First, I had to upgrade from the 32-bit kernel used in each site to 64-bit. Afterwards, I just click on an upgrade link. The entire process for both sites only took a few hours. No hiccups at all.

After the upgrades, I noticed an immediate performance boost from each site. Server load went down almost ten times! For Wopular, for instance, the load went from 2-3 to 0.2-0.3. That’s incredible.

CPU usage went down by about 40%. These new CPUs are almost twice as powerful as the previous ones.

Since the upgrades, both sites have been very responsive.

I like that Linode gives their existing customers free upgrades every year or so: new hardware and/or double the RAM/storage . I’ve been a happy customer for five years.