Hi all,

I'm looking into signing up, and I was wondering whether Linode sells any sort of add-on bandwidth packages? I saw on the FAQ that the standard overage is $0.10/GB, which isn't that bad, but I was curious whether you could prepay for larger amounts at a discount (e.g. buy extra chunks of 100GB/mo for $5/each or something, then pay any additional overage at the usual rate)?

I run a web service which serves as an intermediary for uploading photos to Facebook from a popular desktop photo organizer. The workflow is something like:

1. The user uploads photos from their computer, which arrive in a specific POST format from this desktop software
2. The photos are stored on the server for 2 minutes or so while the user selects an FB album or makes a new one
3. The photos are transferred to Facebook using their API and are deleted from my server

The end result is that I need a lot of bandwidth (~400GB last month for ~3mil photos), but not particularly much CPU, RAM, or disk space (as there's no heavy data processing or database work, the photos themselves are transferred as-is). So it would be awesome if I could get a 360 or 540 Linode with some extra bandwidth for less than upgrading to a 720 or 1080 Linode. It's been running on Dreamhost so far, so I know I'm not using anywhere near a GB of RAM, or they would have kicked me out long ago

I've also heard of other providers selling unmetered bandwidth at a certain rate (e.g. $X/Mbps/month), which might work, though buying per GB might work better since certain times/days have higher usage than others.

Has anyone heard of something like this being available from Linode? Any information or suggestions would be appreciated!

Cheers!

FWIW, you can buy additional transfer (starting in blocks of 100 GB)...at $0.10/GB, just like all of your other bandwidth.

I dunno if Linode would be willing to work out some sort of deal with you. You'll have to wait for them to respond!

Edit: Whoops, emoticon abuse.

Here's a thread with a reply from caker:
http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4182

But the way Linode pricing is structured ($20/month for an extra 200GB of transfer). You could get 2 360s, have 2 servers and get 400GB as bandwidth is pooled for all Linodes under your account.

They price the ram and storage upgrades the same way

Good idea, thanks! I hadn't thought of doing it that way.

It would let you implement a failover solution and have the linodes in different datacentres (although keep in mind the private network only works in-datacenter).

Although, consider that 2x360 costs the same as 1x720. A single VPS is easier to manage, and even if you don't strictly speaking need extra RAM/disk/CPU, it never hurts to throw more RAM at things.

The downside to a 1x720 is, of course, lack of redundancy.