19:35:52 up 363 days, 59 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.00

Until a week ago, I'd more or less forgotten that I was a Linode customer. My email and web hosting chugged happily along by themselves; my Linux environment was there when I needed it; every few weeks I logged into patch; and I never quite got around to rebooting. The only evidence of Linode's involvement was a $19.95 charge on my credit card every month.

That's the way I like it.

I had to reboot my linode today, and the uptime line above was taken from it right before that reboot. (Yes, I'd originally planned to wait until Tuesday to make this post, but alas, I wasn't able to.)

So... in almost a year, no power outages, no reboots, no host failures. I'm impressed.

Why did I reboot now, instead of waiting for the one-year mark? My linode had to be moved to a new (faster, bigger) host, and today was the deadline for doing so. Migration took about 15 minutes, and my linode was upgraded from 80MB RAM to 256; storage from 4GB to 8. And I'm still paying $19.95.

I'd love to talk about how good Linode's support is, or how friendly and helpful the folks in the IRC channel are - but I've not had to use either of those resources for the best part of a year. (Of course, I've now jinxed myself completely, so perhaps I will have something to say on this topic before long...)

I've been a Linode customer since December 26th, 2004. No complaints, no problems - and every time I think about upgrading to a larger plan, a free upgrade comes along and satiates me. I'll see how life is like on my new host (it's certainly faster!), but right now, I'm a very happy customer.