I am a freelance sysadmin/php-programmer/designer with 17 customers currently hosted on another VPS provider .

Each customer has his own VPS running my custom programmed web stores with CMS (etc.). Maintenance, upgrades, etc... all managed by myself.

But they have root access to their VPS's (80% of my customers are small businesses) and sometimes their ignorant employees like to tinker and break things installing things they should not install because those are easy backdoors for malicious people trying web-based exploits found by scanning IP ranges etc.

I want to migrate all those VPS's to Linode 360's, placing all the linodes under MY Linode account.

Linode staff would think... "wow! this customer has 1+17=18 linodes! quite a bunch of linodes!" but no... I just have 1 linode and the other 17 linodes are paid by my customers but "managed by myself"

QUESTION:

What happens if one of those 17 linodes gets hacked via web-based exploits and is used to send spam, ddos, etc.... do you automatically suspend/cancel my account and delete all linodes UNDER my account? would you contact me by email before deleting all linodes under my account so I can fix the problems quickly?

To lazy to source my claim, but I think the usual policy is to open an abuse ticket with you (creates an email notification), and if its not resolved in an appropriate amount of time they might power down the offending node.

Put on your sysadmin hat and stop giving them root!

How are you going to accomplish this?

Granted I'm new here (just over a week and still getting my feet wet and learning the system). But you can only have 1 configuration booted at a time. There is no way a 360 account is going to be powerful enough to run a virtual server to run additional virtual machines under. The physical boxes Linode and Slicehost both run have 16GB of RAM and dual or quad processors.

You're either going to need 17+1 Linode's or 1 Linode that is running 1 OS, that's running 1 web server that's hosting 17 sites. Thus taking your users from separate servers and putting them on a shared server.

Maybe I'm missing something or I'm clueless, but I just don't see how you are going to accomplish what you describe.

I agree with phvt. Don't give you're users root access. Unless they are paying for it, or doing it themselves, that's just silly and going to lead to problems. You are their administrator, admin them.

You can create multiple linodes under one account. Each has its own resources and configuration. Just click the "Add a Linode to this Account" link when you log in to your account...

Ah, re-reading the OP, I see better now. Long day, too much coffee...

Thanks for the clarification.