About a week ago, I wrote a comment in another Linode-related thread asking how the new usage patterns that hourly billing encourages might affect CPU contention. At the time, I received 11 upvotes but no replies. Apparently, quite a few people were interested in my question but had no useful conjectures to share.
Now it's obvious what Linode's answer to that question is: Lower "burstable" CPU for lower plans.
The $20 plan used to be able to burst to 8 cores for short periods, but now it only has access to 2 vcores. The "guaranteed" processing power is probably higher with the newer CPUs, but at the expense of short-term burst performance.
Another minor detail that I find interesting is that the transfer cap for the $20 plan has been increased to 3TB, whereas the $40 plan still gets 4TB. Apart from the transfer cap plateau-ing at the extreme high end, this is the first time that Linode has broken its 11-year-old policy of "pay X times as much money, get X times as much RAM/disk/transfer".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564764
Now it's obvious what Linode's answer to that question is: Lower "burstable" CPU for lower plans.
The $20 plan used to be able to burst to 8 cores for short periods, but now it only has access to 2 vcores. The "guaranteed" processing power is probably higher with the newer CPUs, but at the expense of short-term burst performance.
Another minor detail that I find interesting is that the transfer cap for the $20 plan has been increased to 3TB, whereas the $40 plan still gets 4TB. Apart from the transfer cap plateau-ing at the extreme high end, this is the first time that Linode has broken its 11-year-old policy of "pay X times as much money, get X times as much RAM/disk/transfer".