Linode is a very focused and simple
Virtual Private Hosting (VPS) company that delivers some very affordable cloud hosting solutions.
I just stumbled across this company, yet they are a 7 year old "cloud" platform with an pretty impressive set of features out of the box:
- Multiple Linux distributions
- Create Configuration Profiles which associate disk images and device nodes
- Boot between configuration profiles
- Share disk images between configuration profiles
- Resize disk images
- Network and CPU usage graphs
- Multiple IP address support
- Managed/hosted DNS service with slave support
- Custom reverse DNS (rdns)
- Access Out of band console access using Lish
- Lish menu system to issue jobs to your Linode
- Lish access via SSH keys
- Support for booting into single user mode, init=/bin/bash
- Support for booting with a custom "root=" kernel parameter
- Support for booting with an initrd
- Bootable recovery distribution (Finnix)
- Add and remove extra resources to and from your Linode
- Shutdown Watchdog will automatically reboot your Linode in case of a crash
- Clone a Linode to another
- Move IPs from one Linode to another
- IP address fail over support for high availability setups
To make them even more competitive they provide data centers in:
- London, GB, UK
- Newark, NJ, USA
- Atlanta, GA, USA
- Dallas, TX, USA
- Fremont, CA, USA
They look like a pretty scrappy cloud service provider offering computing and storage services. In the
Jack of all Clouds,
State of the Cloud report they show them as being one of the fastest growing
cloud service providers.
With their pricing model, simple dashboard, and straightforward approach, they look like a sensible small business solution for migrating to the cloud.
