A friend gave me a tip to check out linode.com which is a nifty VPS hosting company that runs on Xen.
Cost: $19.95 month + (optional) $5 month for backups = $24.95 / month. No contract, cancel anytime, etc.
This plan gives you:
Four cores of a Xeon L5520 which geekbench out to ~4401.
Pick your distro
You can pick from a plethora of linux distros and deploy your ‘linode’ as desired. With one plan you can deploy multiple linodes if you would like, or create different partition schemes and such. Your 16GB of space can be used however you wish!
Distro choices are 32bit or 64bit versions of:
Arch
Centos
Debian
Fedora
Gentoo
OpenSUSE
Slackware
Ubuntu
Pick your data center
Linode currently has five data center choices which you can pick from. Also you can have your linode migrated to another data center. How cool is that?
Data center choices:
London, GB, UK
Newark, NJ, USA
Atlanta, GA, USA
Dallas, TX, USA
Fremont, CA, USA
I’m in California and am using the Fremont data center. I see 6Mb/s down 3Mb/up to my linode. Pretty darn fast!
Community
Linode has a strong community of users with forums, how-to guides, and more.
Check out: http://www.linode.com/community
Sweet web based management tools
Here are some screens of the management tools.
Dashboard:
Console access via the web in case you hose your network or other settings:
Network config (you can optionally add additional ip addresses):
Backups! Backups occur daily at 5, once weekly, and you can make a manual snapshot at anytime:
Pretty graphs:
Change root password, clone your linode, and other stuff:
Add on more stuff for additional monthly costs:
Upgrade your plan without having to reinstall anything:
Web interface for the linode DNS servers (or you can just use external DNS):
Add additional users to access web tools:
Integrated ticket system for support:
iPhone app
Ok those are nice and pretty, how does it perform?!
Performance is quite good! I currently have five wordpress blogs, a few other random sites, and other stuff running on mine and pages are incredibly snappy. This very blog is running on linode.com using my 512 plan.
Linode recently bumped the $20 plan to have 512MB of ram, which is pretty sweet!
I can never seem to come close to tax the CPU – four core Xeon is pretty beefy.
What can you do with linode?
Well, that is pretty much up to you! Openvpn, offsite DNS server, web hosting, dev box, hobby server, a fast US or UK ip and shell, mail server… whatever you want!
If you found this review helpful, please use my referral code when you sign up!
Referral code: a655776a052a5ff0d09d9193a3e392656d601386
Update: Updated review posted!
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