Hi,

I'm amazed at the features offered here compared to all the other VPS/VDS companies.

A few questions:

1. If we sign up today, will we get prorated for this month or will our billing period be the 10th day of each month? I'd hate getting billed for the whole month when signing up in the middle.

2. We'd like to run a secure website that conducts ecommerce using paypal (IPN) and a merchant account gateway. Some customer info (probably encrypted but briefly clear) would be stored until we download it each day. Is a Linode appropriate for doing this?

3. Which Linux distro do you recommend if security out-of-the-box is important? We like Gentoo but not sure if its appropriate for a Linode 64.

4. What is the average time to upgrade a customer from Linode 64 to Linode 128 (assuming one was available)?

5. Do we have to pay you extra if we want to use an SSL cert we already have (comodo/instantssl)?

The reason we're looking at VPS is because some shared hosts don't update often (still using OpenSSL 0.9.6b!). And since we have no clue what are traffic will be, we're looking for a provider that'll let us upgrade bandwidth or reinstall things without waiting 1/2 day for billing/tech support.

Thanks.

Hello,


Glad you found Linode.com

1) Signups are prorated from the day/minute/second you signup until the end of the month. Orders on or after the 21st are also pro-rated, but also include the next month's payment in full at time of signup. Pro-rating signups get's everyone on a "1st of the month" billing schedual (after the initial pro-rate).

2) Sounds good -- plenty of other users doing ecommerce on their Linodes.

3) I recommend Debian -- it's light weight, easy to maintain, and no long compile times (especially on systems with not a lot of memory).

4) Upgrades are usually configured the same business day, and you can perform the migration/upgrade when you're ready.

5) There's no reason why Linode.com would charge more for you setting up a secure SSL cert, other than the fact that you need an IP address per https cert.

Hope that answers your questions,

Thanks,
-Chris

The first month is pro-ratated till the next billing data, 1st of the month.



You should have no problem doing this.



Gentoo works fine on an L64, in the end the choice is what you prefer, all of the distros can be locked down. For a very stable system debian is usually recommended due to the stable distro only having security updates.



As long as it takes caker to click a few buttons



All you may have to do is pick up IP, but that is it.



Adam