This is terrific. That's one more thing off my plate in getting my auditors to sign off on my SAS 70.
Regarding that: has anyone out there done a SAS 70 with Linode-based services? I haven't moved my entire operation yet, but I doubt I'm the first to consider doing it. I know the Dallas colo is audited.
The biggest problem I can see with this solution is simply that it's not an off-site backup. I haven't had any serious issues with Linode so far, but I don't want to risk losing source repositories (for example) to an event that took down their entire site.
As such, I configured duplicity to sync against S3 (http://duplicity.nongnu.org/) and I only back up my "important" bits. I pay roughly 75¢ month over month; definitely worth it.
As a sidenote, though, access to on-demand snapshotting might push me to front the $5 anyway.
Being a long time SliceHost user, when I finally decided to signup Linode two days ago despite its lacking of (official) backup capability, I wasn't expecting such a nice gift, which almost feels exclusive.
BTW, a quick hard disk benchmark test shows that my Linode is almost twice as fast as my SliceHost.
I've moved from Slicehost to prgmr to Linode and I'm happiest with Linode out of the three.
the I/O on Linode is faster, but it's still very slow compared to a "real" machine, but that's the case with any VPS at this pricepoint as far as I know.
That is good that they offer the service, but I prefer cron jobs that make daily backups to S3 that roll over (e.g., today's daily backup clobbers last Tuesday's backup). Doing a monthly backup that never gets rolled over is also a good idea.
I am in the process of moving my rails app to Rackspace Cloud Servers. It offers three backup images for free, but it only exists as long as the associated server is around.
A 256 meg slice only costs $10. So it is actually a pretty good deal.
I was looking into Cloud servers recently. I think I will be going going with 1and1 Dynamic Cloud Server. 1and1 seem to have a better price than Rackspace, and you can change the Ram, CPU, and storage all independently. At Rackspace you had to scale both the Ram and your Disk space. How is your experience with Rackspace? Has any one else tried 1and1's Dynamic Cloud server?
I'm not suggesting linode goes commie and gives it away for free, but it would be extremely nice to have a more flexible pricing policy. For that price, I'd prefer backing up crucial data every night to a separate partition and downloading it with a script weekly (actually, that's what I do). In general, what I'm saying is: for the projects that use VPS backups may not be as important to pay the offered price. I wonder what linode had in mind for that - maybe I'm wrong.
I'm not sure I can justify a 25% (an additional $5/mo on top of the standard $19.99) premium on my linode 360 when I can do manual weekly backups. Granted, this node is all personal projects.. should something detrimental happen to the node, it wouldn't be a problem if my backup was a few days old.
I can totally justify it. I run a bunch of side projects on a $20 Linode server and have always felt bad for not having any backups at all, but not bad enough to spend any of my incredibly limited free time doing something about it. Now I get to just throw $5/month at the problem.
But if you're using the linode for business, the longer you're down the more money you could be losing. If these backups mean your server can be up again faster then it's totally worth the money.
Backups are very useful for sysadmin experimentation. Assuming you already do your own backups anyway, you can backup a node, upgrade/install certain packages, do quick tests to make sure everything's working. If there are issues just restore your backup without having to provision and restore your data.
I have accounts on both Slicehost and Linode and until now I could be more cavalier with the former because of the undo button backups provide.
I just do a nightly rsync. It doesn't protect against a certain class of problems (like being hacked, which I'm not worried about since I'm a small fish and I actually update my systems).
And, yeah, $5 per month seems kind of steep for a linode 360. I'd probably sign up if it was $1-2.
I could have used this last week when I hosed my box running the Lucid Lynx upgrade from 8.04 (I lost networking). I can easily justify $5/month to not have to waste my time rebuilding a server like I just had to…
Regarding that: has anyone out there done a SAS 70 with Linode-based services? I haven't moved my entire operation yet, but I doubt I'm the first to consider doing it. I know the Dallas colo is audited.