mikeb wrote:
Do I need to shut down the current running linode to receive the clone? Will the I/O kill my website's performance?
No, assuming you have enough free disk space on the target Linode. If you don't, you'll have to shut down long enough to free up the disk space, but don't have to stay down during the clone.
In terms of I/O, the clone operation will use some of the overall host I/O bandwidth, so at a theoretical level it could impact your Linode's I/O performance, but no more so than if any of the other Linodes on the same host were doing I/O. In short, don't worry about it.
-- David