Hi,

I am looking for a VPS hosting which offers some 500GB+ bandwidth per month to host a wordpress powered news blog which receives around 100,000 pageviews daily.

I was being hosted earlier in a shared hosting environment but due to bandwidth constraints, I now have to moved to a VPS.

But before I jump into this, I would like to clarify some points.

(1) Which Linode VPS plan will suit for my website (wordpress site with 100,000 pageviews a day)
(2) Is upgrading from one VPS plan to another in linode done on a fly or do I have to change the DNS every time?
(3) What is the date backup process in linode? Is it done everyday automatically?
(4) I am totally new to VPS hosting (managed and un-managed), so will it a problem for me to start my site in an un-managed hosting environment?
(5)Once I have signed up for an account, will someone from the linode support assist me in transferring my site to the new host? (I am asking this because I am little new to all this web mastering thing, specially server side and I am transferring such an active site for the first time from one host to another). How much downtime is expected when I transfer my site from the current host to the new linode host?

Waiting for linode support to reply.

Best best regards.
Umi

I don't work for Linode, but I can answer some of these:

(1) I have no idea, sorry.
(2) It is done on the fly. You do need to reboot to see the new hard drive space/memory, but DNS doesn't have to be updated.
(3) Backup is currently in beta, but you can sign up by opening a ticket. It is automatically done on a daily basis (snapshots) and weekly basis (full). You can restore from any of the snapshots at any time.
(4) and (5) Linode is completely un-managed. You have to provide your own expertise and handle the move/maintenance of the server on your own. Honestly, if you're completely unfamiliar with Linux management I would recommend you either hire someone to handle the switchover for you. IMO, there's just no way you can learn all you will need to know in order to successfully administer the server in the time frame you're looking at.

edit: I should mention, Linode support is excellent, and they will help you if you have specific questions. They also provide excellent documentation and tools to help you get the work done, but with a site that big, the little experience you say you have, and your time constraints, I think it's just not something you can tackle on your own.

If limiting downtime is key, probably best to hired a experienced sysadmin to handle the initial setup and move.

Un-managed means exactly that - it's ALL up to you.

Linode support is there to make sure their network and your VPS is up and running - anything past that is up to you.

It's not rocket science, but it's not something a few Kindle books on LAMP for Dummies will teach you in a few days either.

But you're off to a good start - Linode is easily one of the best VPS hosts out there.

(1) Well, any plan from the 360 + additional bandwidth to a 1080 or larger... you may want at least a 540, tho, as Wordpress is quite a hog. You can tune it to work efficiently, but it's not super-easy... and some people consider buying a larger plan the easier way.
(2) Yeah, only switching datacenters or an explicit request from you changes your IP. Everything else keeps it, but you need a reboot of the VM for the kernel to notice that "more stuff" is available. Also, resizing disk image to accomodate larger space available, while optional, takes a few minutes of downtime.
(3) Backups are out of bete - for details and pricing see http://www.linode.com/backups/
(4,5) See above. There's a lot of admins-for-hire, tho, and if you're wililng to learn, you can stay on your own soon afterwards.

Another customer here.

(1) Choose a plan that gives you 500GB+ of bandwidth. You could buy a smaller plan and add bandwidth, but the price difference would not be much. Besides, a large Wordpress site would probably benefit from the extra RAM, as MySQL may be able to keep the whole DB in RAM.

(2) Upgrades take a few minutes of downtime, but the IP address remains the same unless you move to a different datacenter. So, no need to change the DNS.

(3) See the official announcement for how backups are done. However, you should always keep your own daily backups. Learn to use rsync and either rdiff-backup or rsnapshot for easy incremental backups. Keep your backups in a different geographical location if possible.

(4) You can start with Ubuntu and learn it (it's not that hard), or you can pay somebody to manage the server for you. There are professionals out there who do server management for a fee. It depends on whether time/effort or money is more important for you.

(5) Same as (4). If you want to do it yourself, practice with a different site (or a backup of your site) before doing the real thing. Here's how you can do it with less than 10 minutes of downtime. Move the nameservers first. Keep the A records pointed at the old host. Wait a couple of days for the nameserver change to propagate. Reduce the TTL value. Move the files and the database. Test. Finally, update the IP address to point to your new server.