Linode Review
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Send to friendMy Experience With Linode
A while back I decided to make the jump from shared hosting to a VPS. Shared hosting has many draw backs. The biggest of which is that most shared hosting places throw you on a box with 100's of other websites. If anyone of those sites has something go wrong many times it causes your site to crash or be inaccessible. Running a Drupal site I had this happen many times. Someone else would hammer the MySQL database and it would make my site not work.
After much frustration I began looking into VPS solutions. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. What it means is that you get a server that is all yours. You can put whatever you want on it. You have root access and can do anything you want. Also you are isolated all by yourself. The resources you have are yours. The only way your site goes down is if you do something to make it go down. This is what appealed to me.
At the time I stumbled across Linode.com in a forum. It was surprising to me that they didn't do more advertising. Everyone I talked to recommended them but I didn't see them plastered all over the place like many other VPS's. This made me hesitate, but since you could try them for free and cancel anytime I gave it a shot.
It has been amazing and I gladly recommend them to anyone that wants a solid VPS solution for a reasonable price. If you want more info go check them out.
Benefits Of Linode
The biggest thing I was worried about was that I didn't have hardly any Linux experience and I knew that administering my own box could be a chore. I read some tutorials and began setting up my box. The biggest thing I used was Linode's built in IRC chat channel. The owners and maintainers of Linode are on there all the time. Also many other experienced users are on there. Any time I ran into a question I asked on there and they were excited to help. Its amazing how devoted Linux users are. They always want to help someone from a Windows background which surprised me. I had my box setup within a couple hours!
Linode has withstood the test of time
Well now its a year later and Linode has been serving me well. After signing up and getting my sites set up they never go down. This is so different from shared hosting. On top of that I'm able to host all of my sites on the one box which makes it perfect for me. As my site gained popularity I simply upgraded my plan to handle more bandwidth. Very useful and I only had about 1 minute of downtime during the upgrade.
My Reward for this Linode review
I wrote this review because I love Linode.com. I do not get paid anything for saying these things but I do want to be upfront that if you click on my referral link and decide to sign up for 90 days Linode gives me a $20 credit to my hosting. See the only way it benefits me is because I actually host through them. This tells you how much I believe in them!
Your Experience
Below I'd love to hear how other people have experienced Linode.com - leave a comment sharing what you liked or disliked about it.