I had been hosting this blog in the past for an extremely competitive (read cheap) price here at Arvixe . I was using ASP.net based blogging software called BlogEngine. over and all I will describe my experience as pleasant. Arvixe is a great Hosting Provider, has good up time and has plans which are easy on the pocket, and does almost all the common stuff like emails and cpanel ,blah blah that other hosting provider do, but kinda does it on a low price. I was a happy blogger for an year although I could only manage close to 8 post and and few demos in that time.

Enter Linode.

Linode is a different beast than Arvixe, this baby gives you way more control than any conventional hosting provider(shared) or a VPS provider generally gives you , and this is done by a custom made dash board panel which has a plethora of features, now Arvixe also has other plans which will end up giving you a dedicated hosting (VPS) and I bet they would be better than most others in the similar category, but Linode (a different league) is like Amazon Elastic,but only for Linux operating system like Ubuntu (debian), Fedora(centos) etc or rather dedicated for them, Linode means Linux Node anyways ;)

If I quote them verbatim:

We’re a VPS hosting company built upon one simple premise: provide the best possible tools and services to those that know what they need — better hosting.

and this is pretty true , they have many features which can be found here. They also do a Getting Started video here, if you still have questions look here and here, they also have an Irc channel and other discussions and bulletin boards which can be reached through this page.

Linode has six data centers around the world , so one can switch between them either while setting up an account or even migrate like a hot swap later on, depending on what speed they would like to get for dedicated regional customers, they do a blog as well.

Linode does a lotta stuff and does is good, but the bang on the buck is that they have a kinda “do it yourself library”, which is pretty vast, quality and covers every thing you need to know, or at least the important bits. I have lately spend hours just browsing through it, this library will have “getting started” information and stuff which you need to do to get cracking!!.

By the way did I mention that since I had purchased a good(slightly expensive than earlier )plan from them I also decided to write my own blog,I have used python and SQLite so that it stays light weight and have used WSGI . I will soon be open sourcing it at git hub. I used Bottle.py, micro web-framework to build it so I will be calling the software Message, “Message in the bottle…..”, rings any silly bell anywhere ??

I wish my very best to Linode team and hope some of you linux ninjas would like to give it a try someday.