Five stars

The short form of this testimonial is that Linode provides the best hosting service I have ever used. Read on for the detail of why I think it is the best service.

I work for iChemLabs (http://www.ichemlabs.com). On May 31st, our previous provider, The Planet, as you may have heard suffered an explosion in one of their data centers in Texas. Our server was in the affected building. All service was out for 2 days. During that time google crawled our temporary site, changed their indexing accordingly, and pretty much dropped us from their listings.

Needless to say, we needed to put up a disaster site to avoid this happening again in the future. I evaluated many Xen hosting services, but none compared to Linode. The BIG advantage to Linode is that they have geographically diverse data centers. I could find no other company that provided that.

So we signed up for 3 Linode 720s, each in a different data center, and then went to work. We had the servers setup in the initial state in no time. We built all the software we needed for our service in just a few hours. Imagine our surprise when we found that compile time on our Linode was 1/3rd FASTER than on our dedicated server. We used all the latest versions of Apache, Mysql, Php, and Tomcat, and had no configuration problems at all. Having the ability to clone servers was a huge benefit, and extraordinarily easy. Network performance on all servers is great, and transferring data between nodes is fast. It was so easy that we moved to our new service in just two weeks. All this, and the cost of the 3 Linode servers is actually slightly less than we were paying before.

I have extensive experience deploying all type of hosted services, including shared hosting, dedicated hosting, colocation, and Amazon EC2. I even hosted services in my basement at one point. I can honestly say that no service has been as easy or as efficient as the Linode service. And I no longer have to worry about failed power supplies or failed disks. And with geographically separated data centers I don't even have to worry about server failure.

Linode is a five-star service provided by some very talented people. I would recommend this service to anyone and everyone looking for a hosting service.