I recently had a bit of downtime on my linode. If you are wondering what a ‘linode’ is, check out my review or the website. And a big thank you to the folks that used my [referral code][3] when they got setup with linode themselves, you guys rock!

So, about my recent ¹⁄₂ day downtime. It was self-inflicted because I wanted to move to a different datacenter. I moved my linode from Newark, NJ to Dallas, TX. It is quite a long story, but it boils down to a problem with my ISP (Comcast). I was only able to pull 100K/s from the Newark datacenter and 2-3M/s from the others. This was unacceptable. I tried to get it escalated past Comcast’s frontline support but they kept asking me questions like “Do you use a router? If so, each computer only gets ¹⁄₂ the speed” & “Every computer is different. I’m glad that you can get 3M/s from another host, that is really good” Sigh.

At least Linode’s customer server was helpful and allowed me to work around the ISP. The steps to move a linode are as follows:

1. File a support request. (My initial request was answered in 11 minutes)
2. Shutdown your linode
3. Hit the ‘migrate’ button, after support sets up your migration
4. Wait for the transfer. My total transfer time was ~43 minutes (~6G to transfer). This was pretty fast throughput, in my opinion
5. Meanwhile, update your DNS for your new IP.
6. Since you can queue up a boot job, I just let it go and checked in on it a couple hours later. Magic, it was online.

So, to finish the story off. Linode++, Comcast–. I wish I didn’t need to do something like this, I wish my ISP was…I don’t know…smart?

[3]: http://www.linode.com/?r=b4fa70eb87c890e08baf7b0c7852fb7cecd8963b