Looking at transferring...

This is my opinion so take it with however big a pinch of salt you want.

I'm a relatively new user to Linode (signed up about 3 months ago).

Operating System Choice - You can pick whichever distro you want from a list of 8+ current distro's.

Running 30 websites on a 768 is possible depending on the type of sites and how much traffic they have.

Setting up a Linode requires a fairly reasonable level of linux experience but you are always backed up with the excellent linode library (some of the tutorials are so good I've used them when I'm not setting up linode stuff).

Reliability - Again I'm a relatively new user so I can't really speak for that except I've not had any down time in the time I've been using the service.

The administration interface for linode is absolutely spot on, it makes things as simple as possibe but no simpler.

When comparing specs for VPS check the small print, Unlimited often does not mean Unlimited or means Unlimited for a given value of Unlimited.

Finally I've found the linode community to be an exceptionall friendly bunch who can often answer (my sometimes idiotic) questions quickly.

If you have any other questions perhaps it might be worth popping into the linode IRC channel (#linode on OFTC).

Thanks for that, I setup my current web server ubuntu 10.4 - but need to outsource because of speed limitations, and my email server is due for retirement.

I have had a look through the library, and it looks really good - but I just wanted to check before I signed up - the last 2 vps hosters have looked good from reviews and data speeds looked good from their test bin file download, but once signed up, the support went to zero, and ofcourse my fav one of all, data speeds to my vps were around dial up speeds, but yet I could still download the test file at full speed.

Every time I've needed them, Linode's support has responded within minutes. I can't remember the last time I opened a ticket, though.

If you want some test payload, http://drop.hoopycat.com/slides.tar is a 100 MB file on an Actual Real Linode.

Linode support is excellent. In theory, they only support the VPS and networking; in practice, they often help out with the OS / software on your VPS as well. caker - the founder of Linode - has dug me out of a hole more than once; he and his crew really know their stuff. If the Linode library can't help you fix something, ask here or in the IRC channel. The Linode crew all hang out there and there's nearly always someone about - one of the support guys is in Australia for the night shift. Some Linoders are real experts as well, I get better advice from them than from the people we pay to run some of our other servers.

Reliability and performance is top notch. I have three Linodes, and the two that are really used both have uptimes over 150 days (the other one is for screwing about, um, I mean development). The only outages I have had in seven years with Linode have been due to DDoS attacks on Linodes in the same data center (twice – mitigated within the hour, usually much less) and route flapping in an upstream (provider) router, which only degraded performance and was fixed in a couple of hours.

Summary: recommended without hesitation.

Without answering most of your questions, I will simply say that there is a serious lack of hype surrounding Linode. Its better than you'd expect overall. Give it a shot, you won't usually wait more than a couple of minutes for a response, let alone 48 hours! :shock:

Thanks for all your responses, and thanks to hoopycat - I downloaded your 100mb file on 2 browsers on my pc, and 2 browsers on one of my servers to see how multiple connections affected speed - to be honest, its a really good speed, I was getting around 200 - 500kb/s on each browser

Its quite funny how things work out, I submitted a ticket to my current VPS provider stating they had 24 hours to respond - 3 hours later I get an email:
> Hello,

This is a notification to let you know that we are changing the status of your ticket #881719 to Closed as we have not received a response from you in over 48 hours.

Not meaning to sound like a pissed off person and all, but where they hell did their ticket system learn to count?

Again, thank you for all your responses, while it might seem odd asking on Linodes forums how good Linode is, I had already read reviews I found on google, posting here is a really good way to find out how active the forums are, and the general tone of people replying - 15 minutes for the first reply is pretty dam good!

Anyway, I shall be signing up with Linode

Linode is just not a provider… its a community. If you need help your just not going to get help from the staff… but the users as well.

I've only had one downtime with Linode that was not my fault… and it was corrected quickly.

My experience with Linode has been awesome. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them, and I don't think you should hesitate to give them a try :)

I've been through several VPS providers before settling down with Linode over a year ago. Linode beats them all in price per MB/GB/CPU, performance, reliability, usability of control panel, selection (and freshness) of OS and above all support!

Linode support is great.

At one point, there was a hardware failure on the server my linode is on. Not so bad that it was down, but bad enough that they decided to move everyone to a new server (I don't recall what it was offhand). I received an email about it, which told me that I could either migrate at the time of my choice or that it would be automatically migrated if I did nothing. The automatic migration was a couple days out. While it wasn't a huge window, it at least allowed me to pick the best time of day for the downtime to my site (which ended up being all of ~10 minutes for shutdown/datamove/startup). Hardware failures will happen and I think the way they handled it was great.

I know I've seen others say here in the forums that total hardware failures have been taken care of very quickly (swap drives into a spare server, and it's off and running).

I will also echo that when I have had to open tickets, response has been very quick.

I've been with Linode since the early days (June 2003, geez, it's been that long?!), and I've been quite happy with it. When I first subscribed, it was a 128, and now it's a 1024… it's not often that you see a company offer more for your money as time goes on. Just check your cable bill, for instance. ;)

I just noticed something… after checking my billing history and the Linode blog, I realized that Linode had been open for business exactly one day when I made my first payment. Talk about getting in on the ground floor!

I've been with Linode since mid 2007 and I'm a happy camper. That kind of statement doesn't come from me very often. I am VERY critical about the services I pay for and I've never had a provider better than Linode.

If you have a passion for what you do, it shines through in your product/service. To me, it's pretty obvious that the people who run this joint have it.