Eleventy-two

Just a quick post today, having a quick review of Linode VPS now I have had chance to play with it.  For those of you who havn’t heard of Linode, they specialise in providing Virtual Private Servers (VPSs). Signing up for acount was easy I went for their base package of Linode 360, which gives you 360mb of ram, 12GB storage and 200GB transfers for $19.95.

Once payment is completed Linode let you reserve your VM.  Linode use 4 data centres, and once you paid you get to chose at which data centre you want you VPS hosted.  Only three of the 4 data centres had free slots so I chose a data centre on the east coast.  From then on you can get into the Linode Dashboard to manage your VPS.

Next up is creating your boot drive, Linode has a whole bunch of distros to choose from, including Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS, there is even Gentoo if you have the time to build it on a VPS.  I decided on Ubuntu 8.10 64bit edition and used up 8GB of my storage allowance to make the boot image, and used the remaining 4GB for my /home.  The Distro wizard automatically sets up everything needed to boot them image and starting the VPS is one click away.

Setting up the home drive was a little more complicated but, but all it took was adding the /home drive to the bootimage config and editing the fstab to mount the drive on boot and everything was set up.

Linode also provide a SSH based Console calls Lish, so even if you muck up your iptables or say uninstall your ssh server you can still access your VPS, as well as charts of your recent CPU/newtwork usage, and progrss bars so you keep track on how much bandwidth you have been using.

So for less than a week of use I would give linode a thumbs up!