The Joy of Linode

Every single time I deal with Linode, I’m impressed.  For years I lived in the States, so my Linode virtual servers were naturally in the States too – somewhere in Dallas, Texas apparently.  Now that I’m back in the UK, it made sense to move at least the ones where the websites live to the UK too.  Any guesses how long that took?

45 minutes per server.  With no downtime, since I purchased new servers in the UK and used the Linode automated ‘clone’ facility to copy everything from the US to the UK.  There was a big warning about potential inconsistencies if I did that while the server was running, but I thought I’d give it a go since they’re just web servers with very few updates going on.  Absolutely flawless.  I shut down the US copies yesterday evening, and will be getting rid of them today.

I sent quite a few support questions to Linode before I took this step, and every single one was responded to within an hour and a quarter.  Most of them within 2-5 minutes.  Phenomenal, particularly for a company that is now 24 years old and big enough to have recently spent $45 million on hardware upgrades.  They still provide the same great support that they did when they were new and their owner was the guy manually setting up new virtuals for customers.  I can’t praise them enough, really.