Today is my first day with linode. I installed a debian system, did a dist-upgrade to testing, and setup sendmail to forward email for my vanity domain.

The virtual server is running great. Although I haven't pounded on it, so far I can't really tell it's not a decent stand alone server, and I'm getting very fast downloads from my debian mirror.

I'm particularly impressed with the web interface -- it's easy to create your system and boot it up. I'm sure that if I wanted to add more resources to my setup, that would be easy as well.

I used to have a physical server, nothing fancy, just something that someone let me plug into their lan, and I think that the web control panel probably makes the virtual server better for me. The control panel gives me the ability to do everything I need to do on my own. If I totally munged the machine so it wouldn't boot, I think I could use the control panel to recover without assistance.

This is really important, so I want to stress it: I've never used a virtual server, I didn't know how the drill would work, but I was able to sign on and figure it all out without any help. The web app that controls the accounts here is very well designed and easy to use.

Beyond that, I love the idea of virtual servers in general. Having a server is such a useful thing, and linode puts it in reach of people who don't want to spend a lot of money.

I haven't tested it, but ifconfig even shows that I've got an IPv6 address -- how cool is that?