e.g. a linode version of S3, not EBS which went to pot on amazon's USA-East region last week.

It apparently makes sense to some people, since they do it. One advantage is live migration of VMs between hosts. I imagine it also makes storage provisioning more flexible.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Correct, but I'd even be happy with a simple samba or NFS mount.

It does make it considerably more difficult to build high-availability systems, since you need to ensure "both halves" rely on different, independent SANs.

Live migration is a reboot-avoidance technique, not a high-availability technique.

It does indeed make storage provisioning more flexible, and often works out to be less expensive per GB (since you can get reasonable performance with slower disks, and can afford a higher failure rate).

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Yes, it makes sense in an enterprise but I don't think it makes sense in a situation like this. You are provided local storage for your OS install. In an enterprise it is common to have diskless servers when booting off the SAN. That is not the case here. We also don't have live migration. I'm only asking for storage as a managed service, not live migration and all kinds of other features.

While we love hearing feature requests of all kinds, I'd appreciate it if you could keep them in the feature request category and keep this thread on the topic of the proposed managed service.

I know many of the forum regulars here are experienced Linux admins and are independent and may not see the need, but I believe there is demand for managed services. People probably do not want to be on call 24h/day to monitor their servers, services and apps, or learn the intricacies configuring and tuning services, or just worry about things in general. We want to worry for you. So I guess the question is: what types of things could some smart admins help you with?

-Chris

Besides my earlier idea of managed load balancing, I think a managed mySQL service would be interesting. Priced based on total storage and queries per second, or some measure of query complexity, or something. Or punt and price based on size, CPU, and IOPS.

But in any case, for larger or busier databases, would be great to know someone else is dealing with backups, snapshots, hardware scaling, etc.

I'd love to see a monitoring service that would alert Linode of any downtime of the main services: httpd, mysql, ftp, mail, dns, etc.

If a service is to fail, Linode support would receive a ticket submission and look into the situation.

Non of us can be awake 24 hours to keep things online. I believe that this would be a worthy option instead of a support service that would just clog the ticket system with useless "how do I" questions.

Currently Linode provides a service of keeping the machines online. That is where Linode stops. To offer a service to keep the services online would complete the cycle, IMO.

This ^^

I feel that this would be an effective way for Linode to expand it's offerings without completely revamping the current business model.

Basically, you could offer a selection of one-off admin tasks, ranging from "install and tune LAMP" to "configure 2 nodes for HA".

Then, you could charge a small recurring fee, similar to the backup service, for service monitoring. So if a customer's mysql server explodes at 3am local, a Linode employee gets the red flag, sends a "We're doing our thing" email to the customer, and pops in to do some basic troubleshooting.

Obviously, you'd have to come up with a rough definition of what constitutes "basic troubleshooting." For instance, while I might not mind a Linode employee fixing my MySQL config by adjusting some variables in the config file, when my apache daemon eats itself, I don't want the person monitoring it to pop on, decide that nginx is much nicer, and swap me over.

So to remain on topic I think it would be a great idea. I see a lot of off topic posts.

I believe one thing to remember is that when you are a managed host everything becomes your problem. If customers application from a to b doesn't work or customer applications just fails in general you tend to get support requests asking you to help or blaming you. If you can stomach that thought I think a managed linode offering would be a great idea for people who need a bit more hand holding and specialized services (firewall/ips/lb/realtime backups/performance tuning/etc.). Certainly there is a lot of money and a lot of growth in this sector but you may want to pass on these requests to separate staff that are more tuned to deal with managed customers.

I hope this helps, pm me if you want more thoughts.

I'd also love to see a Linode monitoring service, although just that is more a pure feature request than a managed service.

As far as managed services go, how about managed mail servers? Setting up, maintaining, and properly securing a mail server isn't trivial so a lot of people opt to outsource mail to another provide like Google. But then you lose a lot of the advantage of running your own. I could see even experienced users willing to pay someone else to handle all that.

I like very much to sysadmin, but for me it's a hobby not my job, so since our business began to grow, we sadly had to leave linode in favour of a managed service.
I really love linode, and still have one for testing purposes, but for me is really cheaper and safer to pay someone for administering my servers than making it by myself.

So for me the most important things are:
- security updates;
- hardening;
- monitoring;
- backup;
- possibility to access backups with ftp for downloading / restoring also a single file;
- control panel (cpanel or plesk);
- 24x7 support availability ;

I'd also like to have different plans, for example:
- managed cpanel/plesk (standard and cheap);
- managed support without control panel;
- per-accident or per-hour support;
- optimization support;
- migration support;
- prebuilt managed servers (drupal, wordpress, prestashop, etc)

The cost of managed support should be indipendent from the node size (with the exeption of the backup service, obviously).

perhaps these are very basic things, but I think that there is great request for good managed cpanel / plesk hosting.

Well, Nothing matters to me as I think anything will come will be best.

1. Prices will be remain competitive.
2. Servers will remain awesome.
3. Downtime will be still away from Linode's Dictionary!

But, I am newbie and never hosted on any VPS and want to switch but, I have some serious problems.

1. I am not so aware about Linux and Linux Commands,
2. Don't know how to harden Servers,
3. Servers' security is first priority,
4. Server optimization is second one.

I need linode to host my wordpress blog. So 384mb of ram will be enough to start on Managed server (Since it will be well secured and optimized).

You should bring Shared host customers by introducing some cheap managed VPS obviously with small ram and resources. I run a WP blog on shared hosting and my traffic is still growing.

I run a tech blog which need less ram since I do not deliver Videos or other RAM killer app. For me 256MB ram will be sufficient. If i would come in $10 or $15 per month. If my traffic grow and I need more ram and resources than I will easily upgrade my account. I would switch immediately if you have something like in your portfolio. I think you will need some more Data center to handle.

Why one will sign up for a $5 or $7 or $10 shared hosting if a $10 or $15 VPS will be available.

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Anand Kumar,
Blog: http://www.netrival.com

Breaking news: Linode Community goes off on a tangent, observers shocked (shocked!)

As someone who provides a few managed services for folks with Linodes, here's where I think the biggest needs are:

- Package updates. Doing the apt-get update / apt-get upgrade tango when required (preferably during off-peak times) is pretty easy to do en masse, but difficult to remember to do.

- The next steps beyond the LAMP stackscript. There's no small number of folks who recognize the power of a VPS versus shared hosting, but don't really go beyond hosting a few Drupal or WordPress sites. Adding sites to DNS and /etc/apache2/sites-*/* and perhaps untarring/setupping Drupal or WordPress are, again, pretty easy for people who do this all the time, but my clients prefer to e-mail me to do it rather than fighting with it themselves. This is smart, IMHO, because they can do what they are good at and make the benjammies instead of losing a few billable hours trying to save my billable 15 minutes.

There MUST be limits to scope, of course. But there's a huge number of customers who would fit within this scope. Who needs cPanel when you can e-mail someone to do what cPanel does?

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One more thing If their is a live technical support, That will be awesome. Just launch paid live support and forget the term "Managed VPS".

It will be very useful for those who wants to learn!!

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Anand Kumar,

Blog: http://www.netrival.com