This is terrific. That's one more thing off my plate in getting my auditors to sign off on my SAS 70.<p>Regarding that: has anyone out there done a SAS 70 with Linode-based services? I haven't moved my entire operation yet, but I doubt I'm the first to consider doing it. I know the Dallas colo is audited.
The biggest problem I can see with this solution is simply that it's not an off-site backup. I haven't had any serious issues with Linode so far, but I don't want to risk losing source repositories (for example) to an event that took down their entire site.<p>As such, I configured duplicity to sync against S3 (<a href="http://duplicity.nongnu.org/" rel="nofollow">http://duplicity.nongnu.org/</a>) and I only back up my "important" bits. I pay roughly 75¢ month over month; definitely worth it.<p>As a sidenote, though, access to on-demand snapshotting might push me to front the $5 anyway.
Being a long time SliceHost user, when I finally decided to signup Linode two days ago despite its lacking of (official) backup capability, I wasn't expecting such a nice gift, which almost feels exclusive.<p>BTW, a quick hard disk benchmark test shows that my Linode is almost twice as fast as my SliceHost.
That is good that they offer the service, but I prefer cron jobs that make daily backups to S3 that roll over (e.g., today's daily backup clobbers last Tuesday's backup). Doing a monthly backup that never gets rolled over is also a good idea.
I am in the process of moving my rails app to Rackspace Cloud Servers. It offers three backup images for free, but it only exists as long as the associated server is around.<p>A 256 meg slice only costs $10. So it is actually a pretty good deal.
I'm not suggesting linode goes commie and gives it away for free, but it would be extremely nice to have a more flexible pricing policy. For that price, I'd prefer backing up crucial data every night to a separate partition and downloading it with a script weekly (actually, that's what I do). In general, what I'm saying is: for the projects that use VPS backups may not be as important to pay the offered price. I wonder what linode had in mind for that - maybe I'm wrong.
I'm not sure I can justify a 25% (an additional $5/mo on top of the standard $19.99) premium on my linode 360 when I can do manual weekly backups. Granted, this node is all personal projects.. should something detrimental happen to the node, it wouldn't be a problem if my backup was a few days old.<p>Also, the pricing is here on the right <a href="http://www.linode.com/backups/" rel="nofollow">http://www.linode.com/backups/</a>
I could have used this last week when I hosed my box running the Lucid Lynx upgrade from 8.04 (I lost networking). I can easily justify $5/month to not have to waste my time rebuilding a server like I just had to…