I needed a host to handle my OpenArena server (MeTaLNET) that I had been running for a year out of my garage, during a short-term period of couch-hopping in-between housing, because I was really enjoying hosting the game and was starting to accrue a great bunch of regulars playing on my server. After a tiny bit of self-education about virtual hosting, I decided to settle on Linode because they seemed to be one of the premier Xen-based offerings, and Xen sounded like the way to go for my needs. I backed up my server configs and such, e-mailed the stuff to one of my regulars, and started up a base-level Linode account for us. Within a week, we had our old server back up and running, now on the Linode, with better performance for everyone - not just our regulars, but for newcomers from around the world, as well. The transition was really simple, since we were able to run essentially the same O/S version that I had been able to use in my garage. Here we are, just about a year later now, and I'm proud to say our bottom- level Linode server is now hosting about 12 game servers spanning three games, a web file-dump, a web forum and wiki, an e-mail system, full IDS and more. Performance is great, we still haven't gotten even close to tapping out that little slice even though it's only got 512MB RAM! We only get the occasional lag-burp that's apparently caused by disk I/O, probably just our swap file, so we're looking at implementing ZRAM to see if that will help us squeeze even more out of the system. Bottom line? We've created a growing group of gamers who are all getting enjoyment out our little Linode, and have achieved goals we never imagined, all for $20/month - which is far cheaper than the cable access I had been originally paying for at the house where my server was originally located. The folks at Linode were great, both technically and with regard to courtesy, the one or two times I talked to them on the phone with basic questions. Guess I don't need to say much more - Linode has been great for my needs!

Mine's above average - nearly 11 inches!