Linode’s API and Images data preservation tool help effectively manage infrastructure. Its RAM amount, CPU capacity, and I/O performance at desired price points deliver a favored and scalable benefit/cost ratio for start-ups needing cloud services. And its automatic backups feature preserved customer data independent of human intervention. According to Flitcroft, end users are very demanding and the private server market is highly competitive. After thoroughly researching the market, PlushForums found only a handful of companies able to supply optimum performance at an affordable price. Linode was one of them. “Primarily,” Flitcroft wrote, “Linode met our minimum RAM requirements at all key price points.” His additional research determined that Linode’s CPU and I/O performance exceeded all competing services at those same price points. This cost-performance ratio helped make PlushForum’s choice “that much easier.” “Pricing and performance at Linode – and other top-tier VPS providers – has given start-ups like us a new way to scale our business,” asserted Flitcroft. Linode’s API is a programmatic interface that automates sysadmin tasks like creating users and restricting permissions. Linode’s Images is a newly launched data preservation tool. PlushForums has found additional value in both features. Flitcroft’s staff considers the Images add-on as convenient containers for those apps that facilitate development and deployment. Such disk “snapshots” enable a user to freeze an entire stack at any point and retain the master image for future use. This constitutes an intuitive and agile way of managing infrastructure, according to Flitcroft, who further insisted, “Only a few cloud companies do snapshots/ Images well. The fact Linode Images works so well really smoothed the way for us.” And that’s important. PlushForums can’t afford to lose its customer’s images; to do so might impede new customer deployments. Sure, Flitcroft’s staff could reconstruct an image, but at the expense of time and money. “If (a cloud host) can’t offer redundancy on image storage, I would like to be able to download them for offline storage,” Flitcroft wrote. Fortunately, Linode satisfies PlushForums’ demand for an in-house back-up system -- complemented by Images. “We use Linode’s API and Images to create a new server for every single customer - in a geographically optimal location for each,” wrote Flitcroft. “As a result, each of our customers gets more dedicated resources, lower latency and greater resiliency.” For PlushForums users, this infrastructure model means its price plans are cheaper, while its systems are faster and offer more storage than marketplace competitors. That’s good for PlushForums customers, and good for a start-up, like PlushForums.
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