There's already live technical support, Linode offers telephone or VoIP support. Talking to another human being is about as live as you can get short of flying to the Linode offices and sitting down next to the tech

linode has stated numerous times that it is not cost effective for them to go below the $20/month plans.

I am new here, This is the reason why I asked so.. My Bad!!



Will it take any extra cost for that? I am weak in speaking english, probably a support member can't understand me. any option to text based chat.

Last question hare since i am going off topic!
How much I can expect from support? On shared hosting when i get any problem I asked support via Chat to resolve or to get help to resolve the problem.

On linode I am the only person who can make any Good or bad thing to the server. Will chat support help me in configuring out the problem with possible solution. Strengthening the server or server related issues + LAMP customization and optimization.

I have no problem with Wordpress and I am master(May be I am wrong ) in it.

_________________
Anand Kumar,
Blog: http://www.netrival.com

Linode has an irc channel (http://www.linode.com/irc/) where you can chat with linode and other linoders or you can raise a support ticket from your management area.

Linode is currently unmanaged so support don't have to help you optimize your lamp stack etc they just need to ensure the host/network etc is up and running. However they tend to help if not too busy.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

I have no interest in managed service, but I am sure many would. For me, to be honest, it would make Linode somewhat less attractive.

If managed services are implemented, just wait for the aura of these forums to change. Right now, almost everyone here heaps praise on Linode, and for good reason. Upon offering managed services Linode staff will be blamed for all kinds of mischief that are actually user caused.

I'd have to agree with oak. I like Linode just the way it is...

I'm not sure what you mean my 'managed services'. The first thing that comes to mind is that linode would install or configure software within the VM. That seems like a world of hurt, someone can do all sorts of crazy sadistic things to make that be a huge pain in the ass for linode. I don't think it's possible to do other than billing out at the hour.

However, if you me 'managed services' as some additional services linode could offer to make their service more attractive I have some ideas of some services that someone might be interested in, and willing to pay money for. Some are better than others and I'm not sure there's enough users to justify some. But here's a list of possibilities:

1. Mail
This is probably the biggest one to me. I do not want to run mail, and am willing to pay to make that happen. I think linode could offer smtp and a simple web-mail solution that could make things very easy. I would suggest charging per user.


2. Firewall
One of the tasks one most people tackle first node is establishing a firewall. Sure we can use iptables locally on the host, but for those users who don't want to mess with that linode could provide a simple firewalling service.


3. Load Balancer
I'm not at this level yet, but I could see some who might be. They want to load balance between several nodes, and the cool thing is instead of simple DNS round robbin linode could look at things like the node's load average to decide on balancing. Perhaps with this service we could also off load SSL process to the load balancer?


4. Database
I think most people at linode are just running simple web-based application with a database backend such as wordpress or drupal. How cool would it be to use a database maintained my linode on a separate vm. Think how much more oooomph you could get out of each node after off loading the database load


5. Memcache
Not sure if this is really all that awesome, but maybe. linode could run a simple memcache service and hopefully secure it by local IPs. I remember reading someone is trying to provide that service on linode, but it sounded like just some yahoo... not someone you can trust with a client's web-application, but maybe I'm wrong.


6. LDAP
For those who have multiple nodes it would be nice to be able to out-source an LDAP service. Linode could provide a simple web-based interface for managing users, and hopefully it would be able to store ssh-keys in LDAP so I don't have to configure that each time I setup a new instance.

Scott Phillips

One more idea...a managed private network, where basically you can get all of my nodes (on the internal network side) on a private VLAN.

That way I can, say, run my databases without having to worry about anyone else on the internal linode network trying to connect, and without having to worry about hardening my database boxes. Or my memcache box - or whatever.

Assuming you know private VLANs are already offered here, you could take less than a minute out of your day to provide this managed service to yourself.

The private network is data center-wide. Any Linode (with a private IP) can connect to any other Linode (with a private IP) in the same data center over the private network.

Unless a new feature has been offered since, like, last night?

Although this is probably straying off-topic again? Which is kind of its own answer to the question about Linoders wanting "managed services".

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Sorry, I was being flippant; too much bourbon. What I meant was this could be easily implemented with a simple firewall rule. In principle I don't really agree with Linode expanding into the "managed services" field, whatever that means. The backup service is enough for me, and even that is essentially a black box and not to be entirely trusted.

To be more constructive, a 'managed' service I would like to see from Linode might be something like anycast DNS to compete with Amazon's weirdo Route 53 service. Or geo-load-balancing? Yeah now I'm the weirdo.

The two main things I want when setting up a server are measuring and monitoring the services and resources running on it.

If someone were to check regularly that my database is caching all the right queries and queries are fast, the web server has a small footprint and is serving pages fast, the load balancers are routing traffic well and so on. Come back with a report and recommendations for tweaks and amends (based on current and expected future traffic). That would be worth paying for, and not something usually done by managed hosting. Currently one gets the "you're server was unresponsive, we rebooted it" message, but you need to hire a full time sysadmin (or do it yourself) in order to look and plan for these situations.

I know of syadmins who could do all these things for me at the drop of a hat, and would be happy for come in 4-5 days a month to do exactly that. But I can't convince the guy with the purse strings that it is worth doing. However, if (like backups) it is somehow part of the hosting cost, that could be a different story.

There's a difference between a public-ish network with firewall rules and a private VLAN. So I took less than a minute out of my day to point that out to you.

JshWright is a far sight from "some yahoo." If I were offering it, on the other hand, you'd have a point.