Hi,

I'm currently a customer of the Lycos VDS program, running a vserver with Debian Sarge. Features are as follows:

256MB memory (no swap)
30GB transfer p/m (don't even use a third of it in a month!!)
2GB Disk space (getting close to the limit on that)

The cost of this is the equivalent of ~$20 per month

I run the following applications:
Bind9
Postfix/Courier-IMAP/Spamassassin/Clamav/Amavis
LAMP

The server is currently being utilised for 4 domains with fairly low load (1 blog, 1 project homepage, and 2 bulletin boards) and about 10 IMAP email addresses. The server seems to run smoothly as is with about 80-120MB of free memory at any one time (after a bit of fiddling with configs). At busy times, the websites run a little sluggishly but that is to be expected and is not necessarily a problem, since this is all non-commercial.

My reason for investigating alternatives is the complete lack of service on Lycos, with lots of downtime from broken hardware/software that they use. It has proved to be too much for me to bear now with pretty much 50% availability of my server. Additional flaws are the inability to offer more than 1 ip address (which I expect I may need in the future for ssl etc) and there is no support for iptables! Argh!

I stumbled across Linode.com through google and the testimonials etc look impressive. I was just wondering if anyone out there is able to positively recommend Linode to me, based on the requirements I have. Initially i'm looking at the Linode 80 plan with a possible upgrade to 120 in the future. Will these be adequate?? The community you have here looks to be thriving and it seems that, apart from with the likes of refunds (!!), the general feeling is of satisfaction with the service being given. Is this truly the case?! I'd be grateful for your comments

Kind Regards,

Chris

Yes!

I run pretty much what you want on a Linode 80 with the exception of bind (my DNS is on ZoneEdit) - you have to set everything up to minimise memory use because the penalty for excessive swapping is I/O limiting resulting in incredibly slow performance BUT Spamassassin on an 80 is a step too far (I have turned it off until I can afford an upgrade - my Linode is only a hobby) - you need to go for a 120.

I have always found the service and reliability at Linode to be excellent. There have been a few network outages which were down to the connectivity provider, not Linode, and a power failure, also down to the provider. Recently, one of the other Linodes on my host was subject to a DoS attack, which clagged the whole thing up. Linode and their provider had it sorted in half an hour. I regularly get 100 day uptimes - then I usually reboot to check that my Linode will auto restart correctly after config changes. The host has been up for well over a year.

_________________
/ Peter

Awesome, thanks for your reply.

Reliability is the key to my decision....100 day uptimes is much better than the 16 days MAXIMUM that I've had using lycos.

Bind uses about 3MB of memory so I don't envisage it to be much of a problem and I also use http://freedns.afraid.org/ as the secondary DNS.

Spamassassin is not an essential....it's just useful. I can live without it and just have my mail program filter out the spam as it receives it. To be quite honest, it is probably a little to much for my current server to handle anyway.

Regards,
Chris

Right, waiting for my mastercard to be renewed so it might be a few weeks before I can start to think about making a transition.

I have a couple more questions....

What defines "excessive swapping" and how much does "I/O Limiting" degrade performance?

Is there a backup facility for the servers? If so, how quickly can a server be restored?

Kind regards,
Chris

Linode works on the concept of "I/O Tokens". Basically, the Linode gets a steady stream of these tokens from the host server, and they accumulate up to a maximum value of 400,000. Every time your Linode needs I/O to the disk (and perhaps other things too - I'm not altogether sure), it uses up a number of these tokens.

If the Linode uses up more tokens than it receives, then when it runs out I/O is halted until more tokens are received, effectively limiting your I/O rate to a slower rate until your Linode stops using I/O and your token value starts to increase again.

I don't know how fast the server gives out I/O tokens (although it seems to be pretty fast), nor do I know how many tokens are used up typically. I can say though that for my Linode, it seems to not be much of a problem.

As for backup facilities, Linode don't keep backups other than a RAID array, as far as I know. It's your responsibility to back up your own data.

If my interpretation of the /proc/io_status output is correct, the tokens are refilled at a rate of 512 per second.

_________________
Bus error (passengers dumped)

Someone (sorry I forget whom) setup http://www.ratemylinode.com which graphs your IO token usage. The graphs on the rankings page are pretty small, but they do show that people rarely hit their IO token limit.
On my Linode 160 I run Apache with my blog and a quite busy PHP site (15,000 hits/day), my e-mail server w/ spam assassin, and a few other small things. The only time I hit the IO limit is when doing an 'emerge --sync' on Gentoo.

On ratemylinode you can also get an idea of uptimes - my host is on 80 days and counting.
For me the best feature of Linode (aside from the server itself) is the community, both on these forums and on IRC. The people here are consistently helpful, friendly, and very knowledgeable.

We can thank Richard Harman, aka. "warewolf" around here, for this one.

I agree, I am setting up a Linode 120 to do some web hosting and email hosting, and any snags I have run into have always been sorted out with help from the excellent community here at Linode. If there is something you don;t know or need to learn, there will always be someone to point you in the right direction.

Linode, big thumbs up.

Cheers.