Dear Linode.com Members,

Today, June 16th, 2005, is Linode.com's two year anniversary. This past year has been very successful - Linode subscriptions and the number of hosts online have doubled since this time last year. I hired Linode's first employee. We've continued to improve the service that we offer.

Here's some insight into what we have planned for the next year or so:

The Move to Xen

Xen is a technology which allows a single system to be partitioned into multiple domains, or guest operating systems. Guest OSs under Xen aren't restricted to Linux, although for our purpose we'll initially be focusing on providing Linux. The main benefit over UML from an end-user's perspective is performance. Xen runs at almost-native speed, whereas UML can incur practical overhead of 50-100%.

We've already implemented support for Xen in the LPM, it's now a waiting game while some required features, at least for us, are coded into Xen (PAE support).

Shared-Storage Infrastructure

Currently, each host has hard drives which contain the Linode filesystems for that host. As is apparent, hard drives can fail, causing problems for that specific host. This also limits the amount of disk space we can offer to all the plans because the amount of space on each host is fixed.

The goals of moving towards a networked storage infrastructure are to free us from the limited space constraint, and to provide a redundant and failsafe setup to eliminate problems that arise when disks fail.

Xen + Shared Storage = Live Migrations

Using Xen and shared storage together means we can "Live Migrate", or move Xen-based Linodes across different hosts while they are still running, completely invisible to the end user. This could be useful for real-time load balancing of Linodes across different hosts, or to move Linodes to another set of hosts while a specific host in the cluster has maintenance performed. Cool stuff.

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I hope that gives you a good idea of what's to come. Linode.com is committed to providing the best virtual server platform available. So, on behalf of Linode.com, I wanted to express my gratitude for your business, suggestions and contributions to the Linode community.

Sincerely,
Christopher S. Aker

I've been here almost the whole time, since July 2003. It's been amazing watching Linode grow from just a handful of hosts to the dozens and dozens there are now. It was a fantastic service then, and somewhat unbelievably, it's gotten better and better ever since.

My favorite was 1GB HDD -> 2GB HDD -> 3GB HDD. As soon as I'd get close to running out of space, there'd be more! Free!

Caker, the plans you've outlined for the upcoming year are very exciting. Thanks for making Linode the perfect tool for so many uses.

This is the best hosting company I have ever partnered with, hands down.

Well done Caker.

Ron

First and foremost, Happy birthdaaay!!! Where's the party?

I've been with Linode since april 2004 and I don't remember being sorry throughout my time here. Excelent job!

I am too eagerly awaiting the new changes!

Bravo! Congratulations caker (and mikegrb).

/me passes champagne around

Xen is an exciting thing, even now while it's still maturing. I'm very much looking forward to Linode migrating to it.

Ive only been here for about 3 months. But man I tell you what this is by far the best service ever. Since I have been with you guys I have signed up with other companies just to see how they compare with linode so I can post reviews on my blogg and make people aware about how crappy they are. And let me tell you Linode is the best and hopefully always will be, Dont stray away from here guys, you will be missing out on something spectacular.

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James Lenhart.

Congrats Linode.com! Two years strong and many more to come.

I cant wait for the Migration, Xen has already proved itself to be a powerful OS Virtulization kernel, and I think the transition will be welcomed here.

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-- Surferdude

Congratulations!

I've been here since August 2003. I'm especially happy that Linode was able to, after much work on their part, eliminate the load spike problem which had been plagueing early linodes. My Linode has been humming along so smoothly for months and months now that I hardly even bother to check my munin graphs for problems anymore. Great Linode performance and support is making my system administration skills rusty, and that's a good thing!

My only request for the future is to add more disk space, and more memory if possible, to the plans. I'm approaching 90% full on my filesystem and so far Linode has saved the day by adding more disk space to the plans right when I needed it, but it's getting close to that time again!

It's been an amazing and wonderful two years.

/me raises his glass

Here's to another two!

Yeah, I fully love everything about Linode, and the UML system has been perfect for what I needed. If Xen is gonna be even better, you'll have a fully satisfied customer for a long time.

-tiz

P.S.: The best part is the honesty of caker and mike, and I've learned a bunch and been able to teach in the IRC channel which has been a great resource. I also feel that I can help mike and caker out at times with answering questions when their time could be better suited at keeping this great service working well.

I love this service. I've been here 18 months and it keeps getting better. Happy birthday and thank you.

And since I'm an alcoholic, and I'm always looking for a reason to celebrate...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LINODE! *CHEERS*

-tiz

Wow, how the time flies! I've been here since almost the beginning (my billing history starts exactly two years ago today), and I've been quite happy with the service. I'm looking forward to Xen - it looks very promising. At home I now have a FC4 system that includes Xen, and it's looking like it can do quite a lot.

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Bus error (passengers dumped)

Congratulations! You deserve it Caker.

Been here since August 2003 and only had a couple of problems in all that time which is amazingly good.

Cheers to caker!