Multiple Account Management

You can now have multiple Linodes under one account, either by adding a Linode to your existing account or, if you already have multiple Linodes you can merge them together.

Multiple Accounts Features
Can switch from one Linode to another inside the LPM without logging out/in.
All-in-one billing. All your Linode accounts will be on the same statement
Linodes you add yourself are activated instantly
Paves the way for some cool features in the future

Comments welcome.

Enjoy!
-Chris

I currently have two Linodes. Both are billed annually, but on different dates.

If I merge them into a single account, will one billing date be adjusted so that they renew at the same time, or will annual payments stay on the current schedule?

They'd stay on the same schedule they were on. The only effect this has on billing is that they'll be under the same Customer record on our end -- and therefore, the same credit card will be used when your subscription renewals come around.

-Chris

Would the cool features in the future involve being able to move resources from one to another?

It would be nice if you could take ram from one, and put it in another, that sort of thing. Those sorts of features would be good for people who want to run development and production versions of web apps.

I could see some outfits buying a "bunch" of linode services, and then letting some administrator in the company dole them out to various people inside the company, so the billing isn't mixed up with reprovisioning.

Cool! I was wondering when this would happen.
My accounts have now been merged, and no sign of any problems yet.

A few questions, though:


Does that also mean that if both/all of my Linodes have the same due date, they will be on one single invoice? (Ie. a single charge instead of one invoice per Linode)


Care to give us a small preview of what to expect?

A lot of thought (and even some development) has gone into doing something like this, but it creates the potential to be very wasteful of server resources when we allocate chunks ad-hoc. As you may know, we group similar plans onto the same servers, so we know how they'll be utilized.


I have something on the drawing board to do stuff like this. Stay tuned

-Chris

Yes. Same invoice, one charge to your card.


The potential to do cool stuff with networking...

Private back-end networks (or at least private IP space) to connect Linodes within the same datacenter together.

You could use the private network space to do DB replication, device synchronization (drbd), etc, all outside of the network transfer accounting.

Another possibility: a floating IP address, whereby an IP can be brought up on any of the Linodes it's assigned to, without rebooting, for failover and High Availability (HA) setups.

Or how about generating complex configurations of Linodes. Front end Linodes with public IPs, and back end Linodes on a private networking doing, well, back end sutff.

-Chris

This is great Chris. Something I've been wanting to see happen for a long time now. Thanks!

Rick

This is good, thanks Chris. I can now remove it from the post I was thinking of "customer suggestions for new Linode priorities"

I have duly merged my accounts. Now I still have two user names listed - how do I rationalise this, or is this for "future development"?

(Sorry - correction - my "this is good" should read "this is ...ing good". And hello to all Pratchett fans.)