Well my Linode is now officially live. I had it up and running pretty quickly a couple of weeks ago and rsync'd over most of my content from my site. I let it run for a couple of weeks to test stability and performance. I didn't really do that much aside from load some web pages off of it every once in a while and check its uptime occasionally to make sure it hadn't rebooted.

Today I shut down services on my old site, rsync'd over all of the content (all of the important content, I should say - the remainder will have to wait until my friend can physically reboot the system, since somehow I managed to completely hang ssh on that system by interrupting an rsync in progress), switched over the DNS, and now my Linode is hosting my site.

So far I have been happy with the bandwidth and performance. Uptime has been great too, no problems aside from my own reboots to upgrade to the newest kernel and grow my filesystem. I guess I'm lucky to be on host5 which seems to be pretty solid.

I had been running my own hand-rolled Linux server from my friend's house for a couple of years now. I feel a real sense of relief now that my site is on a server the hardware and network for which is someone else's worry.

I think that UML hosting is an incredibly cool concept, and I think it's going to catch on fast. I think that Chris has done a great job with Linode.com and I expect that he's going to have alot of success with it. Which can only mean good things for those of us early Linode adopters!

I'm actually geeky enough to check into the Linode Availability page every once in a while to see how fast the uptake is. Looks like the new server has more than half of its Linodes spoken for already. I think the growth rate is only going to accelerate!

Thanks and all the best wishes to everyone ...