It is much more than a webhost, but this post is about my hosting provider, Linode. Your typical webhost provides terabytes of transfer and hundreds of gigabytes of storage for a fraction of what it actually would cost them to provide all of that. They do it because they know you can’t use all of it, and if you do try they can just cancel your account for any reason or no reason.

I have tried many different hosts in the past but have never been satisfied with the speed or true capacity of the serivce. For example, many providers will provide your database on a separate host. Now in an ideal world this practice is very smart because the hosting provider can tune the database server for just servicing database activity. Overall capacity increases. Most hosting providers do not live in an ideal world and what this ends up introducing to your website is latency. The more ideal solution for most small sites is to run a database server on the same host as the webserver. Linode allows that, but I haven’t gotten to the best part about Linode yet.

The best part is that you get to run the popular Linux flavor of your choice and become root completely and utterly. I’m not talking about some kind of limited shell that you share with other people, and I’m not talking about a filesystem that your share with others either. This will look and perform just as if you had your own Linux server standing out on the Internet.

From the Linode website, here are some features:

• Full root access
• Deploy multiple Linux distributions
• Reimage at any time
• Dedicated IP address, premium providers
• Dedicated Resources
• Guaranteed CPU, burstable
• Xen instances with 4 cores for SMP
• Out of band Ajax and ssh based console shell
• Choose from four geographically diverse datacenters
• Bandwidth pooling between Linodes under an account
• Support for IP Failover, Private back-end networks, Linode cloning.
• Managed DNS
• Linode API

Some practical uses for Linode include:

• Host your web sites and blogs or other custom applications (Apache/Wordpress)
• Host mail for your domain and filter spam
• Host Ruby on Rails applications (Mongrel, Lighttpd)
• Remotely back up your important data (rsync, rdiff-backup)
• Function as a primary or secondary domain name server (DNS)
• Host dedicated multi-player game servers
• Dedicated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server
• Use two Linodes for a complete Development / Production environment
• Use multiple Linodes to create virtual computer clusters

Potential downsides:

• You are root, so you have to know what you are doing or be willing to learn. This isn’t a host for everyone. You’ll need to concern yourself with security, web server configuration, database configuration and tuning, email and spam setup if desired, etc.
• Shared resources – this hasn’t bothered me too frequently, but occasionally something happens to another host running on the same piece of physical hardware as mine and it will affect my performance. I need to point out that this is much less likely to hurt you at Linode than it is at a normal hosting provider.

I encourage you to check them out. There is some competition in the field from others who have tried to emulate the business model, and Amazon’s cloud computing initiatives are similar in some ways to this, but I find Linode to be the most well rounded and versatile service of its type out there.