Like transfer, or monthly bank billing to Hang Seng Account, Hong Kong?

I dont have a credit card.

We cannot accept payment via bank transfer. You can use a debit or pre-paid card as well, as long as it is branded with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover. I'm not sure how readily available these are outside the US, but every corner market seems to carry them here.

-Tom

My god I have been living in caves. I had no idea they had prepaid credit cards. Perfect.

Ok,

I am using drupal 6.x dev, have 700 registeredd users, plan on 700 in the next week, will have 135 logged in users on average with 70 at a time running the quiz module, and basic organic groups and feeds aggregating stuff, with .....

Later on I will have 700 more users. and very soon after probably nearly 4000 users with 300-500 simultaneous users (not doing quiz at the same time)..I hope to get a better package later, but I am so poor I can only afford the 1536 package. for perhaps the next 3 months.

1) Will it be possible to upgrade without redoing everything to the 2048 package??

2) Cause it is so difficult to go to Hong Kong just to get a prepaid card to pay the bill, are there any other charges than the 60 dollars a month
I need to get the exact amount prepaid for 3 months. Do I need to pay any extra bandwith charges unlisted, or to ftp my stuff from my current server?

3) Is the package enough you think ? I am doing something like olpc, and have not asked for any money (deperately need it though) and am a poor teacher / father of 3 (some pics @ thelifephotography.com) (also down soon) and funding this all myself on my teachers salary. I have been doing this for 10 years nearly in China... but in the next months important school officials, students and government officials will see the site as it goes into the next development stages. If it is terribley slow with nothing but 503;s it would be so bad for my face

Thanks for your help-

Robert Eaton
Thecenterofthenet.com (down)

First, upgrading is very simple and your existing system is migrated to the new host, so you won't lose any configuration. Upgrades within the same data center even maintain your IP address(es). There will be a modest down time (mostly dictated by transferring the disk images) needed for the migration. Probably no more than 10-15 minutes for upgrading a Linode 512 to something larger. As long as you aren't upgrading for disk space (e.g,. you just want more CPU/memory), which is the most likely case, you can then immediately reboot, otherwise you'd want to resize your disk images first.

I'd certainly consider starting small and growing if you find it necessary. You won't waste any money - everything is prorated if you upgrade. Of course, you could also take the opposite approach - start larger, and downgrade if you find you can, at which point any savings is credited back to your account (or just used to offset the new rate, not sure - either way you don't waste any of the money spent on future time for the larger plan).

In terms of users supported, it's less a question of total users registered, and even to a lesser extent simultaneous users, as it is the instantaneous number of requests you have to service.

For example, I'm not sure how the quiz you refer to works, but even if you have 70 people taking the quiz, let's say they all take 15-20s per "question" - that's only about 4-5 requests/s your server has to support. Let's say your configuration can do 5/s max. Even if all 70 click simultaneously - your worst case response would be about 15s which is pretty bad in absolute terms, but probably not that bad as a worst case scenario for such an unlikely event.

With that said, Drupal is reasonably heavy weight, so your best choice is to set up the Linode then run some tests and see what load you can support. You can then decide if you need a larger configuration.

Oh, and in terms of billing, you shouldn't have any other charges unless you exceed your monthly bandwidth (which covers anything you transfer to or from the server), or decide to add extra services (backups, additional public IP address, etc..). But the costs for that are all published, so nothing unexpected should happen.

If it's tough to try to maintain a card prepared to accept a new charge from Linode, I believe you can also manually initiate a charge to essentially transfer funds into your Linode account. So you could get the prepaid card(s) when convenient, and manually let Linode charge the full card at once, thus building a balance in your Linode account which will get used over time, leaving you in control of exactly when the charging activities take place. Not sure this is all that more helpful, but at least it keeps you in control of the money transactions.

-- David