Linux server slinger Linode has doubled its RAM allocations per-server, and swapped out all its hard drives with SSDs allowing it to match upstart Digital Ocean on prices.

The new gear was announced by the company in a blog post on Thursday. It contains new Ivy Bridge E5-2680 v2 processors, greater networking bandwidth, and larger memory allocations, as well as SSDs for storage.

These significant upgrades are the result of a $45m investment by Linode as it tries to compete with young venture-backed rival Digital Ocean.

"This is the largest single investment we've made in the company in our almost eleven year history. We think these improvements represent the highest quality cloud hosting available, and we're excited to offer them to you," the company wrote in a blog post announcing the changes.

With the price changes, Linode is now competitive with Digital Ocean on a RAM–per hour basis, with a low-end server with 2GB of RAM, 48GB of SSD, 3TB of data transfer, and 2 cores costing $0.03 per hour, versus the same price for an equivalent Digital Ocean instance.

Existing Linode customers with equipment in the Fremont, Dallas, Atlanta, and Newark data centers can upgrade existing 64-bit servers to the new kit immediately, but must wait two months to upgrade 32-bit servers. Customers in London and Tokyo will be able to upgrade in one to three weeks for 64-bit.

This upgrade follows Linode introducing hourly billing earlier in the month – another move that saw it take on Digital Ocean, giving users access to reasonable servers for a few cents per hour.

One potential benefit of using Linode is that it has its own load balancing, backup, and analytics services, features that Digital Ocean lacks. ®