I'm a little new to this VPS thing, and I'm not 100% sure it's going to be what I want. So I'd like to try it out before I commit to a year of service.

If I sign up to pay month-to-month and find out I love the service, can I then pay for a year and get the 10% discount, or am I locked into month-to-month if I start that way?

Also, it's pretty simple to upgrade my linode or add another one to my account if my site takes off and I need more resources, right?

Is there any difference between the different data centers other than location? Like, if I live in New York and my greatest concentration of users will be in the northeast, is there any reason not to use the Newark data center?

Very simple to go both ways. I went originally from month to month to yearly and just downgraded my 540 to a 360 and had no problems.

Also, adding new nodes is simplistic.

Newark would be your best node location wise.

You need to raise a ticket to change the billing cycle - it's not changeable from within the Linode Manager (not anywhere I can find it, anyway). I went from monthly to annual OK.


Trivially simple. The only restriction is that if you change DCs, your IP has to change.


Go with Newark. As a plus, it's the DC nearest to Linode HQ, so they will most likely roll out new stuff there first - they did with the backup beta.

Ha! bezerker beat me to it.

_________________
/ Peter

Just file a support ticket asking to be moved to annual billing.



Yes.

Adding a new node is very easy. (It's just like when you create your first one...)

To upgrade your node, file a support ticket; they'll configure it and give you a button to press.

If you need to upgrade immediately, you can use the Extras page to add extra RAM, disk space or bandwidth onto your node, or you could create a new node and clone your disk images over.



Atlanta blocks some ports, most notably those commonly used by IRC. Other than that, location is the only difference.

When my linode was in atlanta, I noticed a lot more variance in ping times from my home. It's hard to say if that's simply because I was further away or if newark has better connectivity, but my pings to newark are always 18-24 ms and really never go outside that range.

All of the data centers have good connectivity. I guess you just have a better route to Newark than Atlanta; that's not the data center's fault, especially if you're closer to Newark.