First Impressions

I've had a Linode now a little less than a week and I'd like to share my initial thoughts about it.

I'm using it to run a Facebook app I've developed (http://apps.facebook.com/touch-me-now). I have a strong technical background, but only nominal Linux experience, and no experience in deploying a production web server. Still, I was able to set up a pretty complex server (Apache/PHP, custom application server, MySQL, SSL) in a day, going slowly and manually, and was able to do so without any technical assistance from Linode. In fact, I've only had to contact them once, regarding a minor issue in the control panel – to which they responded quickly and competently within minutes, even though it was in the middle of the night their time.

And the server runs really well. And fast. There is no perceptible difference running my app on Linode as opposed to my local server.

There are only a few small points of criticism.

While I think the documentation in the library is good (better than most I've seen), it could be improved. It seems geared toward beginners, but at times still makes assumptions about the user's knowledge of Linux. For example, the section on setting up a disk image doesn't describe mounting the image in Linux. Also, the sections on setting up a SSH client on Windows and implementing SSL on Apache are missing important details. Finally, certain topics, such as setting up Apache, are broken up into different pages. It would be nice if it was all in once place.

It would also be nice if there was a timeout setting in the Linode Manager or some way of authenticating with keys.

Overall, though, I would give Linode a solid A, and I hope to be a customer for a long time.