Linode Promotional Code: The Scoop

Why I was interested in signing up for Linode

I just signed up for Linode yesterday. I’ve been interested in switching hosts away from Bluehost for quite some time for a number of reasons, the most important of which is speed. Bluehost hosting has just become unbearably slow. For those of you who don’t know what Linode is, it’s a virtual private server (VPS) hosting solution, which means that it simulates a dedicated server. That is, there’s no hand-holding; you get full control of your box, so you need to know how to run a server. The upside compared to a dedicated host is that you’re not completely dependent on a single piece of hardware: there’s an abstraction layer that removes the single point of failure. If the machine your Linode is hosted on goes down, your virtual machine is instantly switched over to another machine. So… the reasons I decided to sign up for Linode were:

1. Speed – it’s waaaaaaay faster than a shared host
2. Reliability – it’s more dependable than a dedicated host
3. Cost – it’s far cheaper than a dedicated server

So, having made up my mind, I went looking for Linode promotional codes.

The hunt for a Linode promo code

I have a number of Google tactics I use to find promotional codes for anything I’m considering buying. The first and most obvious is just to pop open Google and search for “linode promo code.” That failed to yield any results from the normal first sources (retailmenot, couponcabin, etc.), so I switched to different tactics. The tools on the left side panel of Google are incredibly useful for finding information beyond the default search engine. My first resort is generally the ‘Discussions’ option, which I use to find all kinds of information — I’ll likely explore this in more detail in a future post. This limits the returned search results to forum posts. I have found that in general, the information discussed in forums is more useful than general websites, as there is far less SEO that goes on in forums and people tend to cut to the chase and discuss only the topic of interest.

So, did this yield any results for a Linode promotional code? Not really. I found one result that indicated that Linode had distributed promotion codes to a select number of people who attended a Ruby on Rails conference, but they weren’t shared and the result was a couple of years old. In a desperate attempt to find more recent (and thus more likely valid) information, I used the ‘Past year’ filter on the left Google toolbar. No luck.

So, unfortunately, the verdict is: Linode seems to be pretty stingy with promotional codes. That makes sense, as it’s already dirt cheap. The cost breakdown is like this:

1. $19.95/mo month-to-month
2. $17.96/mo one year prepaid
3. $16.96/mo two year prepaid

So, here’s the deal: there aren’t any obvious promotional codes, but if you found this post useful and decide to sign up for Linode, I would shamelessly welcome you entering the following referral code, which would buy me a beer (beer makes me happy). It doesn’t give you any extra discount, but it also doesn’t cost you anything and gives me beer (did I mention beer makes me happy?).

Tres’ Linode referral code:
5a484befc4dc20dc3b3302a1e922d335af6a0d19

Disclaimer: the various links to Linode in this post are referral links, which save you the work of copy-and-pasting the above referral code, and still buy me beer (beer makes me happy!) and cost you nothing.