Hi,

My Linode is being brought down on Friday morning (AU time) and I will probably lose some email.

I would like to put a temporary box in place to:

1. catch and store email until the main box is back up; and
2. redirect http requests (not nearly as urgent)

I would like to do this with the least amount of cost. I can use Linode or will try get feet wet with Amazon.

Either way - cost is important and the box should only be up for, at most, 4 hours.

- Allen

Hello,

Two suggestions: 1) You can upgrade to KVM to avoid the Xen-only downtime. 2) Mail will queue at sending servers - so, I wouldn't worry about this so much?

-Chris

I administer half a dozen Linodes. For the first couple of servers that were scheduled for maintenance (including an SMTP server), I dealt with this by provisioning a new server that's identical to the exiting one, then doing an IP swap to the new server. I assumed the "short delay before both addresses become available" mentioned in the Linode manager was on the order of seconds, but one of the IPs being swapped took at least 5 minutes to become routable. That resulted in some non-trivial downtime, so for the rest of servers I used DNS to direct traffic to the new servers. Not as easy as an IP swap, but much more predictable.