I have an application that is only used when a customer purchases it. After they purchase it they specify how many days they are going to use it. This is usually 30-60 days. If I have no customers I have no application running. Not a little traffic, absolute zero traffic.

My top priority is to not be in this situation, I want as many customers buying as many months as possible. However, during dry spells I'm wondering if it is possible to set the linode to an "on hold" status where it has maybe 64mb memory. I can reduce it down to 512, but then I'm paying $20 a month for nothing, not a huge expense for sure, but a year of no customers means I spent $240 to have an idle site. I know I could cancel and then reapply, but that's a hassle when I'd rather just bump the linode up from 64mb to 2g.

Again, just curious to know if there is something like this.

So you don't want to lose money on a idle VPS, but find it completely acceptable for LINODE to lose money on a idle VPS reserved for you?

With wonky logic like that, I'm guessing you come from the banking industry, where their business model is "everyone but the banker gets screwed".

Caker, the one calling the shots here, has previously said that Linode won't go below the $20/month price point.

Jesus. Take some valerian root. It was just a question, I wasn't expecting them to do it for free.

That's all I needed, thanks funkytastic

Just ignore vonskippy; everyone else does.

If you just want to keep a disk image "on ice" for awhile but have other Linode(s) on your account, you can shrink it as far as it will go and stash it in unallocated space on another Linode, cloning/expanding it when the time comes.

Or, instead of storing images, store sets of instructions defining how to recreate the images using puppet, chef, fabric, or even a private StackScript... something like DevStructure can help you do this. Then, you can spawn a new instance "from scratch" on a moment's notice, even if your account has zero active Linodes(*). -rt

(*) I don't know if private StackScripts stick around when your account has no Linodes; I think they will, but you'll have a local backup anyway, right?

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They do.

-Chris

So, all you have to do is copy and paste the contents of your disk images into a Stack Script! Ehh?

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

To do: grab the Altera Quartus II installation shell script and port it to a StackScript.

(You're storing the byte count of a StackScript in an unsigned long, right..?)

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It sounds like this might be an ideal situation for an Amazon EC2 instance. You could store your configuration on S3 for pennies a year, and then boot up an EC2 instance when needed. A microinstance is a little cheaper than a Linode, but you don't get quite the resources.

Or, you could store your configuration on S3 and figure out a way to boot up a Linode on demand. They will pro-rate you. If you need a small website to be a placeholder while you are looking for customers, you could always set up a temporary site using shared hosting for a few dollars a year.

Sounds like a lot of hugely over engineered solutions to me!

As with any product you sell, factor in all the costs. Price whatever you are selling to include $240/year costs. If your business can't sustain that then it is probably time to do something else?

Hey all, update

Yeah I agree $240 a year isn't much, this was more of a "is this possible" question.

Here's my final solution

1: SVN for storing code, tags for releases
2: Amazon S3 for storing nightly database backups
3: StackScripts for storing build configs

At that point everything is detached from the node, which is more along the lines of what I wanted (I want to be able to build/destroy with a single click). This gives me the leverage to set up various types of deployments (dev,qa,pre,prod) as well as the ability to automate the creation/destruction of servers. An added side benefit is if I really wanted to turn things off for 6 months (or however long) I would still have everything needed to recreate the instance.

Thanks for all of your input, overall this will give me a cleaner build process, which is better than what I thought I needed in the first place.

It's only $215.46 if you sign up for a year at a time and $406.98 if you sign up for two years.