Oh yea, forgot to mention. I've been planning on moving to a new virtual machine system for a while to reduce cost and also to upgrade to a newer system version. This week my virtual machine has rebooted like six times due to an issue with its host machine and getting it resolved. This prompted me to go look to see if there were free nodes at linode again, and they did so I have a machine to start poking at (so far have just removed a pile of useless packages from their "small" install - who uses an X server on a remote machine?!?). I've seen good things about them whenever the topic of virtual machines comes up. Before I move everything over though, anyone have any direct or close indirect experience with them? They use uml where the current one I think is vmware gsx, so I'm expecting some differences there. I'm more looking for info on reliability or any issues running specific apps. Anyone?
Oh - and you were looking for information regarding specific apps. I'm running the Gentoo image (surprise surprise) with Chris's latest stable kernel. As an aside, he has written several kernel patches to improve UML performance and to help immunize other UML instances on a certain host machine if one instance starts churning or whatever.
Anyway, I'm running apache2/mod-php, qmail/vpopmail, openldap, mysql, openssh, and (every once in a while) an Unreal Tournament 2004 server. I've had no performance or stability problems with my setup. The only significant change I made was tweaking the default apache configs a bit to limit the number of threads it can fork.
Cool, glad to hear it. Just curious, don't have to answer it if you don't want to, but I'm guessing the reason your site doesn't appear to be on it is for space? Or are there other thing you found?
Good question, and I don't mind answering it at all. One of the perks of working for a small-ish company is that they let me hang a server off of their 10Mbit internet pipe. So yes, the only reasons that I don't host my personal site on my linode are 1) Disk Space and 2) Bandwidth.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
I've been a very happy linode customer for about 2 years now. Up until last week, I had a linode-80, which I outgrew as I gained webhosting customers. I'm now running on a linode-120. The migration between the two hosts was seamless and took about 10 minutes total for the disk images to copy over. Pretty slick.
Aside from a few issues imposed by screw-ups at their datacenter, I've had absolutely no problems with them. I'm in #linode on irc.oftc.net during business hours. If you have any further questions, either drop in there or send me an email. I'd be glad to help out...
Oh - and also, Chris Aker (the owner) is currently working on a beta rollout of Xen (instead of UML). My understanding is that once he gets it stabilized, all of the linodes will be moved to Xen, which would greatly help performance.