[UFO Chicago] Linode, was "Comcast Cuts Off Bandwidth Hogs"

[Nate Riffe]

Chris McAvoy said this (probably recently):
> On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 06:23:27PM -0500, sten wrote:
> >linode
> 
> On 4/5/07, Jordan Bettis <jordanb at hafd.org> wrote:
> >linode
> 
> What do you guys thing of Linode?  I currently have a handful of sites
> on dreamhost, and one slightly bigger site on textdrive.  I'd like to
> move the bigger site off of textdrive when my contract is up (not
> really a contract, I just paid for a year in advance, and they won't
> give me a refund if I move, I won't do that again).  I looked at
> Rimuhosting (which most people seem to like).  I hadn't heard of
> Linode before you two mentioned it.
> 
> Any opinions?

I have been a Linode customer for 3.5 years and have been very
satisfied with the service.  The free upgrades just keep falling from
the sky, and I have the same level of hands-on control as I would with
a real box sitting in my living room.  There are boot profile,
reboot/shutdown, disk image, and reverse DNS controls (among others)
on the website, along with a pretty good heads-up display of your
system's status.

The main caveat is the I/O limiter.  Basically, there's a revolving
quota for disk operations.  Normal activity isn't a problem, and the
occassional brief disk activity spike will fit within the quota as
well.  Sustained, high disk I/O rates (measured in operations/second,
not blocks/second) will trigger a time penalty for each operation.  In
practical terms, this basically just means you'll need to tune your
databases and your web servers and your mail servers (etc) to avoid
disk I/O whenever possible.  Also, you'll need to try to keep your
memory usage constrained to physical most of the time.  Swap-in and
swap-out also come out of your I/O quota.  Occassional swapping is
fine, but a thrashing system will eat through the accumulated tokens
in under 10 minutes quite easily.  As long as you know it's there and
how to avoid it, the I/O limiter is pretty easy to live with, but it
does sting a lot of new customers who are used to doing whatever.

Every couple of weeks one of the hosts has a kernel panic and needs to
be rebooted.  Considerably less often, a host needs to be shut down to
replace a lost drive (all hosts use RAID 1).  Considering that they'll
have 100 host machines soon, it's a little surprising that these
things don't happen more often.  One of the datacenters completely
lost power once (ThePlanet Internet Services, about two years ago),
but even then the hosts and the customer systems on them were back up
within minutes of having power restored.  The only time Linode lost
customer data was the one time when a host machine lost *both* RAID
drives.  Of course, Linode customers sometimes lose their own data :)

There's an incentive for pre-paying a year, too.  You'll get 50% extra
disk space.  I haven't ever taken advantage of it, but it's tempting.

-Nate

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