Hi all,

I am about to switch from Slicehost to Linode. I've been happy for almost everything with Slicehost, but I wasn't that happy about the 64bit only distros available. I was googling for alternatives, and have been amazed by the feedbacks here and there by Linode's customers. Once had a look at the pricing, the features, the screenshots of the control panel etc, I was sold

I am likely to open an account tonight or in the morning, but before proceeding, a few questions:

- which data centre would you recommend for users in Europe (mainly UK & Scandinavia)? I mean, for best response times and download speeds.

- if I understood rightly, once purchased a plan, I can dynamically "resize" an existing node by just adding resources (storage, memory, bandwidth), and this does not mean I will have to rebuild / reinstall everything. Correct?

- I see that Linode currently lacks the snapshot/backup system Slicehost has. Is there any ETA for when this essential feature will be available? How do you - existing users - cope with this?
I am used to that snapshot system which is great, so am wondering if there are as easy, and as reliable alternatives while Linode do not offer this.

Many thanks in advance!
Vito

Hey Vito -

The Newark, NJ facility seems to offer the best connectivity to Europe. You can do you own testing here:

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2636

Upgrading and downgrading is a one click process once you have requested it via support ticket.

A backup/snapshot service is coming soon -- it's actually in testing right now.

Regards,
-Tom

A quick response from staff together with good news. Cool
Many thanks. Am looking forward to the backup feature, in the meantime I'll start setting up a node.

Great, I ran a number of quick tests and it looks like Newark would do very well for me.
~90ms ping and dowload of ~1.3 MB/sec, not bad considering the distance

Hi Vito

I'm in the UK and have two 360s in the Newark DC and don't have any complaints at all.

HTH

I really must say I am impressed so far by Linode.
I set up yesterday a node in no time and the speed and the richness of the control panel are amazing.
Glad I've found it!
The only thing which is not quite there yet is the backups, but for the time being I can backup to S3 etc, so not really a problem (though it will be great to be able to quickly restore the whole vm with a click).

If you're not using all of your disk right not, you can resize your disk down (while host is shutdown) which gives you free pool space. If you can reduce it below 50% of that, you can "duplicate image" to make a copy of it. Then if needed you can change your boot profile to boot from the copy instead.

I made two partitions, one for OS and one for my data so I can backup my host partition like that before doing anything radical (for data, I back that off-site)

I used the remount feature in linux to keep my data on one partition while allowing it live where it wants. e.g.

/mnt/data/home      /home         none   rw,bind      0 0
/mnt/data/www      /var/www      none   rw,bind      0 0
/mnt/data/mysql      /var/lib/mysql      none   rw,bind      0 0