Name three things Linode should improve upon - improvements, new services, whatever - anything goes. Would love to know.

Thanks,
-Chris

Disk space, either locally or networked storage in the same datacenter that's faster and more reliable than solutions like Amazon's S3...

Android app

Moving Fremont to a different DC or getting your own set of UPS racks and generator(s) to power your own servers to show the Fremont network monkeys how things should be done. Maybe at least just let us know what the hell is happening on the Fremont front.

I have only one issue with Linode: Fremont...
It's a problematic DC. Its location is very important (to me at least), but the DC itself isn't stable (I know it's HE's fault). Were there any improvements on that topic since the last downtime?

Other than that, amazing service, amazing support. Great price.

being more open about outages with followups to major ones. Like what's happening with fremonts ups?

Less wait time when a host reboots between the boot being added to the queue and the linode actually booting. decentralise the boot process.

DC in australia.

We've already deployed changes which make response times to power failures much reduced. I'm quite proud of them. Previously, an admin needed to log into each host, perform checks, and then start up the linode services. This happens now automatically. We've also increased the concurrency during host-initiated-reboots from a single thread to three. The end result is that recovering from power outages or host failures is incredibly improved.

We (at Linode) know the Fremont issue is a big one, and I'll address that in more detail in a later post.

So, besides Fremont, what else?

Thanks,
-Chris

Hmm...

1. Storage: I'd really love to see some form of storage plan, without changing at all how local storage is currently engineered/packaged for primary Linode use. But external storage packages (say, perhaps, SAN storage in each DC) as an add-on for economical larger storage needs without having to give up too much in convenience/performance would be great.
2. Disk management: Permit cloning an operating Linode by snapshot-ing the disk images just as backups do. Generate alerts for failed backups.
3. Accounts: Support multiple billing methods per account, so a different account isn't needed just to handle multiple payment methods. Since some aspects of the service are bounded by account (such as for example, bandwidth pooling/cloning/restorations), having to artificially split Linodes just for billing purposes can interfere with some features. Alternatively, provide some way for multiple accounts to be grouped under some sort of parent account to lump all the Linodes together for system features.

Ok, I suppose that's 4 with the backup alerts, but that's a tiny item.

-- David

1) Disk space. Disk space disk space disk space. Does that count for three? :) A networked volume that I could work with would absolutely suffice. Having this space around so that my TF2 server wouldn't eat ~50% of my total disk and so that I could add some quota to my mail stores would be great.

2) I recently did an IP swap. This page notated that it would execute shutdown jobs, which is cool. What I didn't expect was that they would simply not come back up, even despite lassie. Changing this to be either reboot events tied to each other, or at least give me an option to have them come back up automatically after this would be neat.

3) This may not be wanted/used by a huge audience, but having SELinux in the stock kernels might be nice. I'm running the stock CentOS kernel now (which I will probably continue using), but if I had a SELinux enabled kernel when I first worked on changing my linode to CentOS 6 I probably would have just kept with the linode kernels.

Service is great, though. Nice hold music. :)

1) Datacenter in Hawaii
- i know i know, but I'd like to have a cloud here, even if it was small.
- i'd fund the rack... we can get 1Gig IP here, but why? start with 100MB. I'll even fund the IP.
- Wavecom (telco here put up a cloud in Kona, HI and Honolulu, HI) - http://wavecomsolutions.com/waveflex/

2) Management of multiple linode
- ability to compress / expand display group of linodes
- cumulative graph of all node traffic
- support ticket node selection alphabetical (not by order purchased)

3) IPs move between data centers
- we understand the bgp issues
- without NAT
- Linode would have to have a private network on the backend

My list:

1) Local bulk object storage, along the lines of S3. Must have a robust way to mount as a filesystem (like s3fs), and must support optional direct retrieval by HTTP GET. I think you know what I mean.

2) Better short-term billing options. I'd like to spin up a 4 or 8 GB instance for an afternoon to run a terribly-written script, but I really don't want to have $300 sitting on my Linode account for the next few months after I nuke it. Gotta eat, bro. (I could rewrite the script, but it'd be annoying. I could also ask for a credit card refund, but that sucks for you.)

3) Easier support for distro-provided kernels. I know pv_grub sucks balls through a bull's bojangles six ways from Sunday, but over the past few years, distro kernels have started to become quite decent. A way to automagically do the right things and set up grub in a pointy-clicky fashion would be nice.

I probably have something else even more important than those, but it's late, my mind is toast, and I need to sleep. -rt

p.s.: Alohatone: Linode doesn't start small. One rack would pulverize a 1 Gb/sec link, and at this point, I'd be surprised if a single rack of Linode servers elsewhere in the Pacific quadrant weren't noavail'd within a couple weeks. That said, some sort of Linode-in-ur-house-provisioning-ur-nodes VIP personal on-site cloud delivery service... hmmm.

_________________

/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */

My three things wish list:

1) Cheap, large archival disk space, I'd like to back up my home systems in case a fire took out the house. 300 Gigs of slow but usable archival disk space that doesn't count against my bandwidth. 500 Gigs would be nice. I'd be willing to pay let's see, I can get a 1 TB slow USB drive at Fry's for $79.99 so divide that by 24 months (I'd go from monthly to 24 monthly) is $3.33. I'd pay that and you can keep the discount so 24 months @ 480 plus the $3.33 for the extra archival disk space == 560.

I'd pay $560 every two years from now on for the lowest sized Linode with a 1 TB slow archival drive. Do I need that much? No, 16 Gigs would work but I'd have to be very careful what I backed up and I don't want to search through over a decade of data to figure that out.

The above offer depends on item 2).

2) Don't sell Linode. You guys rock a rama.

3) Have lots of fun (learned that from the SuSE camp years ago).

If it's mountable and works reasonably well, that's not entirely necessary, since you could put a Linode with a web server in front of it. Granted it's a waste of LAN bandwidth, but it wouldn't kill anyone.

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

This is all I would ask for. Linode outperforms in all areas. Best run business on the Internet.

I've been with Linode for almost a year and I don't think I could think of three things to improve upon.

Like the others have said a mass storage option that we could backup to and mount. Flat rate for a chunk or pay as you go similar to Amazon S3 but with Linodes great service. Perhaps with some guaranteed redundancy. As I understand it the current backup space could be in the same rack so a big failure could result in a total loss of data, including the backups. Excuse my ignorance of the logistics of this option.

I'm in the Newark data center and as far as I know my only downtime has been me hitting the reboot button. Reliability is excellent and support did a great job helping me recover from a crash that was entirely my fault.

Edit: Also, don't sell Linode...

As for *my* three things, I certainly gripe all the time, but it took me a while to think of anything...

1.) Storage, like everyone else. My requirements are: a.) Cheap. , b.) Mountable, POSIX FS, not just some stupid HTTP API, c.) Reasonably fast. (In other words, just like current storage, only magically cheap!) I don't think I require anything else. In particular, I don't care if it's network or local, though obviously it will be network, but there's no reason for me to specify. I also don't need public HTTP access, though that would probably be neat.

It would also be neat if it was accessible from the other data centers or maybe even the entire Internet (with transfer fees, obviously). Obviously that also makes mounting less practical -- though not impossible? -- but something like SFTP or rsync could work. Or, god forbid, an HTTP API. (Though this is getting into the territory of a separate, different product.) Edit: Wait. If it's *mountable*, then it's easy to rsync or SFTP to a node that has it mounted. Duh. That doesn't solve it if you want to put it in a data center you don't have a node in, though.

2.) More flexible billing. I'm cheating by listing two things, but oh well: a.) Pro-rating to less than a day. Knowing it costs a wallet-shattering $0.66 to spend three minutes testing iptables rules gives me some sticker shock. b.) Not having to pre-pay so much. I've only needed this once, but it would be nice to be able to run a reasonably large node for a few days without having to move hundreds of dollars around. Edit: I understand if you don't want to make repeatedly deploying nodes for minutes at a time *too* easy -- 15 minutes of a 512 is less than a cent, after all -- but there are ways around that. For example, having a minimum 3-6 hour commitment charged up front, then billing hourly after that.

3.) I wish the JavaScript prompts when deleting config profiles or disk images specified *which one* you are about to delete, just to double-check.

Finally, I'm going to cheat again by adding 4.) Greater transparency. You're certainly transparent *enough*, but not much more than that. You're tight-lipped as can be about future plans, and don't release the reasons for maintenance.

I feel guilty about mentioning this, since my desire for that information is pretty much entirely to satisfy my own curiosity, and as I said, you're 100% transparent *enough*. But 150% is even cooler, no? (I also feel guilty since there's a decent chance I'll unintentionally spark an argument, or that I'll be shot down for spoutin' unproven, vague nonsense.)

I understand that you don't want to make unnecessary promises about the future that you may later want to back out of, but *I* wouldn't hold it against you if you changed your mind. (And this doesn't apply to the maintenance thing at all, though for that case I do accept that *some* things need to be secret.)

Plus, the two times I've been affected by maintenance (both times for beta products, which is entirely acceptable, I hasten to add), the reasons *were* explained to me. Though the second time there was one 'sorry, that's classified' before someone more senior did discuss it. (And if you read this, Less Senior Person, I hold no ill will towards you!)

*cringe, Submit* (Yikes, this got long.)

Edit edit edit edit edit: Tweaks, nothing major.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

1. More flexible storage and more of it, as noted above.

2. Optional management and/or something like cPanel - it's much less hassle if I'm hosting several different sites.

3. Probably not going to happen, but I'd love to hear more information about your setup. I know there are things that are secret, but I'd love to have some info on things like new server hardware (CPU types) and how your network is laid out. (Example: http://www.softlayer.com/advantages/datacenters/dallas/)