Linode sends out notices for every single maintenance event, which includes both emergency and scheduled events. The maintenance you experienced last month is explained here: http://blog.linode.com/2012/06/13/xen-security-advisories-an...
164 karma · joined January 12, 2009
On a side note, all facilities (and not just Linode's) will experience issues from time to time. You want to evaluate the manner in which it was resolved and the frequency. Don't move because of one outage in the last several years and degrade the experience for your customers. If an outage is going to damage your business then you should investigate high availability and/or quick deployment strategies.
All of that being said, if your users are mostly US based you probably won't notice the latency between any of the US based locations.
As an example, a medium sized website database might be 100 GB in size and expect to average 100 I/Os per second over the course of a month. This would translate to $10 per month in storage costs (100 GB x $0.10/month), and approximately $26 per month in request costs (~2.6 million seconds/month x 100 I/O per second $0.10 per million I/O).
The LAMP and LEMP (nginx instead of apache) stacks are two of the most popular.
Bandwidth is pooled between all of your nodes (and it doesn't matter which data center you place them in).
We offer prepayment discounts: 10% for 12 months and 15% for 24 months. We also prorate all billing to the day (you only pay for what you use).
There is an API for the DNS Manager, with more to come.