On Dec 2, 2007 8:46 AM, Todd Walton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Oct 21, 2007 2:03 PM, John H. Robinson, IV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Todd Walton wrote:
> > > http://www.vr.org/
> > http://serverpronto.com/detail-starter.php

I just recently leased a VPS from linode.com. They're great.
http://linode.com/products/linodes.cfm

> 1) Who cares about server ratio?

I know that they do not oversell; they have a certain number of each
of their plans available at each of their three datacenters, and I
actually had to wait (just a week or so) before they had the plan I
want available in their west coast datacenter (which is in Fremont,
CA).

> 2) Bandwidth overage: 30c/GB/m vr.org, 85c/GB/m serverpronto.com.

Linode is 25c/GiB/mo.

> 3) Setup fee: $5 vr.org, $69 serverpronto.com.

Linode: none!

> 4) Support.  vr.org says "yes we have an email help desk".
> serverpronto.com says "yeah we have one and you get two tickets a
> month, extra cost $15 a piece".

Linode has free support, which is excellent. It also provides a Web
forum and an IRC channel for community support.

> I have a general question about virtual servers.  Why couldn't
> somebody install a very very basic Linux (Damn Bare Linux?) and then
> let the customer pick a distro and install it?  These places list what
> distros they offer.  I'm just wondering what the technical
> considerations are that they have to offer the distro themselves.

Linode does have a wide range of distros available:
**Current Distros
Arch Linux 2007.08      436 MiB
Centos 5.0      594 MiB
Debian 4.0      168 MiB
Fedora Core 8   740 MiB
Gentoo 2007.0   1800 MiB
OpenSUSE 10.3   605 MiB
Slackware 12.0  315 MiB
Ubuntu 7.10     237 MiB
**Older Distros
CentOS 4.0 (RHEL)       800 MiB
Fedora Core 6   875 MiB
Gentoo 2006.1   1600 MiB
Mandrake 9.1 (Small)    775 MiB
Slackware 10 (small)    230 MiB
Ubuntu 6.06     250 MiB
Ubuntu 7.04     252 MiB

They have their own host OS, and these are the distributions for which
they have created and tested a kernel that is optimized to run as VM
on their hosts.

The great thing about Linode is that they provide X amount of storage
space, but then they have their own Web administration interface (very
robust) that lets you create and resize your own disk images,
including choosing which /dev/ points at which to place the images
before you boot your machine. You might even be able to "burn" an .iso
to one of these images and then use it to install whatever distro you
want, but  I haven't tried it because my preferred OS was on their
list. Unfortunately they've got their "standard" image and you don't
get to go through the installation process, but it's easy enough to
add the packages you want through standard means.

You're even granted an account on the host itself to which you can SSH
and then get an actual TTY at your box (if you've accidentally
firewalled yourself out or something).

Also, their bandwidth capacity is great. Just yesterday I torrented
the Fedora 8 LiveCD (700MB) in about 6 minutes, topping out at about
2500KB/s throughput. Of course I then had to wait an hour and a half
at my home's max downlink speed to get the .iso on my local machine,
but I was able to seed the torrent during that transfer.

It was also very simple to put my domain name on my Linode, and even
to change the reverse DNS for my IP to reflect my doman instead of
Linode's.

Sorry if I sound like a gushy fanboy, but I've *really* enjoyed their
service so far. Definitely take a look!

-- 
Brad Beyenhof
http://augmentedfourth.com
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also
deprive me of the possibility of being right.
                                                    ~ Igor Stravinsky


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