Greetings,

Linode is considering rolling out a managed services offering and we would like your feedback on the idea. What do you believe would be most important to include in the offering? What are the keys to ensuring its success?

All feedback is welcome.

Thank you for your consideration.

Being managed without forcing users to use control panels as every other managed company do..

My biggest constraint with Linode as-is would be storage followed by memory. I think a lot of people here might agree.

So, something to help alleviate those specific pressure points. The first thing that springs to mind would be managed $DATABASE. Combine this with optional replication between your datacenters and you could have an awesome solution.

I have my postfix tables stored in MySQL, I have databases for friends who use my Linode, I have a database for a Zabbix instance. If you gave me an option to stop hosting that data on my Linode (reducing both storage and RAM and CPU requirements) while making that data available in every datacenter that I have a Linode in, that would be amazing (just don't restrict connectivity to the hosts in question!). It would be oh so nice to simply create a database, insert a row, and have a user be available on all available mail servers... without the underlying database configuration.

The other thing that comes to mind would be caching HTTP proxies in front of the Linodes. One of the common questions that pop up boil down to "PHP and apache eat my RAM/CPU, how do I fix this?" and while there are a lot of things that can be done to help with this, nothing quite compares to simply not spending CPU cycles in the first place. We can't easily do such caching without buying multiple nodes and using the internal networks.

The last thing that comes to mind would simply be a big ISCSI drive that I can mount and expand my storage by some large quantity of gigabytes. TF2 and L4D2 servers are terrible when they come to storage constraints, and moving my mail stores to such a volume would be a welcome help as well.

You can't beat google for email hosting, so don't bother. I don't think that you can beat $2USD/mo "unlimited transfer" web hosting companies either. So, don't offer the generic hosting services that everyone offers. Offer things that would be a huge benefit to your existing customers with their current plans. Your backup and DNS services are great examples of such services that work great with this idea.

edit: add memcached to the list!

side note: we have no real way of telling that you are actually from Linode..

Another idea would be a managed load-balancing service. To start with, just HTTP load balancing where there is a single external IP address, and I give you the list of my internal IP's to balance traffic between, with some sort of auto-detection and removal if one of my nodes stops servicing requests.

Forgive me my paranoia, csmith, by why don't you have a "Linode Staff" badge in the userbox?

Also, IMO, Linode doesn't need managed services. It'd probably require quite a bunch of additional employees, and might be a step on the way to Rackspace. >.>

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rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

A mix of one-time services, per-problem services, and ongoing monthly plans would be useful for many users. Not everyone needs ongoing management services, and not every service can be realistically covered by a monthly fee.

Maybe the following bundle for new users, at a one-time fee:

- Setting up a simple LAMP server with appropriate default settings
- Install some useful tools such as fail2ban and munin
- Migration of up to N websites from another host

Maybe use per-problem pricing for the following services:

- Making specific changes to server configuration (e.g. move the DB to another linode, adjust tuning parameters after an upgrade, identify a specific performance bottleneck, etc.)
- Finding out why a server got compromised, so that the same server doesn't get hacked into again. (Cost could vary widely, depending on man-hours required.)

Other services might be provided as a monthly plan:

- Keeping server packages updated (weekly apt-get update)
- Keeping common web apps (e.g. WordPress) updated
- Generally monitoring the server so that it works smoothly

Many "server management" services operate on a flat monthly-fee model, so they sometimes have to do a lot of work at once (which may lead to poor quality) or very little work for the same fee. Since the "cloud" is all about paying only for what you use, it might make more sense to charge users only for the management services that they require.

Ditto on both.

He is a member of Linode staff, and his forums account will be updated to reflect this.

Linode does one thing very well, it offers stable and affordable virtual servers. If you start offering other services it's only going to be a distraction from your core business. You will end up being in the user support business and user support is hell. There are plenty of other managed services companies in the world. I don't think the current Linode users really care for them or they would be using them instead.

I'd much rather have native IPv6 than any form of managed anything.

as if those are mutually exclusive.

He didn't say that they are mutually exclusive, just that, if manpower is available, he would rather that it was devoted to rolling out native IPv6 than implementing managed services.

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/ Peter

Q.F.T.

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rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

Network storage access. Load up some machines with drives and allow us to either mount them from within the OS or, even better, from within Linode Manager with a limitation that you can't install your on the network storage.

Why? There are lots of miserable, slow, unreliable VPS hosts that use network storage. If users want to inflict that upon themselves, why not let them?

Edit: I imagine it would be a huge pain in the ass -- especially since people would want live migration as well -- but I don't think it should be dismissed out of hand.

Edit: Not that *I'd* use it. ...Actually, I really might use network storage if it was super-cheap, but I wouldn't boot off it.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Because I am picturing this as a supplement to the space that is included in the package, not as a replacement. To me it doesn't make sense to allow an entire OS to be run from shared storage.