Linode celebrates 12th birthday by adopting KVM and boosting [...]

📅 Juni 17, 2015 - Linode, a leading cloud-hosting provider, celebrated its 12th birthday today by announcing the availability of KVM-powered Linodes. The free upgrade significantly accelerates server performance, accommodates alternate operating system, and improves boot times.

KVM (in tandem with QEMU) is an alternative to the popular Xen virtualization software that Linode has been using since 2008. KVM has far less overhead, thereby improving virtual machine performance. For example, a 2GB Xen Linode yielded UnixBench scores of 800 compared to a 2GB KVM Linode that yielded scores exceeding 2400, a three-fold performance improvement.

“We invest huge amounts of money in quality hardware, including high end processors,” said Linode's founder/CEO Christopher S. Aker. “KVM's low overhead allows us to optimize our investment and give our customers the benefit of its fantastic performance.”

Adrian Flitcroft, founder of PlushForums, an award-winning forum solution, has been participating in the KVM beta since April and commends the speed gain. “We're always looking to increase performance.” Flitcroft said. “We were impressed to see a 28% performance gain with KVM Linodes in our testing over Xen Linodes. Our results also showed KVM Linodes to be 84% faster than Digital Ocean on a core-for-core basis.”

Aker added, “Not only are we doubling down on our commitment to the industry's highest performing virtual servers, we are also taking advantage of KVM's flexibility, allowing users to run fully virtualized guests and alternate operating systems like BSD, Plan 9, even DOS and Windows 3.11.”

Starting today, customers can upgrade their Linodes to KVM with the click of a button located on their Linode's dashboard. For more information, visit blog.linode.com.

After twelve years, Linode has helped more than 350,000 developers and designers, individuals and businesses worldwide. These and new customers will find the KVM upgrade complements Linode's reputation for affordability, high performance and support that cares.

The company celebrated its birthday in 2014 by introducing its Linode 1GB plan, complete with SSDs, for only $10 per month. Since then, the company debuted its Professional Services, designed to assist subscribers with site migrations, server installations and other sysadmin tasks; upgraded its Managed service to include cPanel; and opened a new datacenter in Singapore.

Linode has also opened a new office in the Philadelphia area to accommodate its expansion plans and will open its eighth datacenter this summer in Frankfurt, Germany.

About PlushForums:

Adrian Flitcroft founded London-based Plush Content in 2014. Tapping its extensive experience managing consumer Internet products for leading international brands, the Plushforums team has brought to market the best in design, user experience, service and value of any commercial forum solution. And it's ready to use in two minutes.

PlushForums is Flitcroft's team's vision of what the modern forum can be: the quintessential place to find genuine expertise, community spirit and diversity of thought and the best possible resource by which to engage your customers or share knowledge within your organization.

About Linode:

Linode (http://www.linode.com| @linode) is a leading cloud-hosting provider founded in 2003. The company boasts more than 350,000 worldwide customers with seven datacenters: four in the US, three in Europe and Asia, and an eighth, in Frankfurt, Germany, coming online later this summer.

Subscribers can create a cloud server with Linode in under a minute for as low as $10 per month. Users can scale their environments to meet demands – paying for only what they use, with no long-term commitments.

In February 2015, BuiltWith.com ranked Linode – home to more than 580,000 websites – in the Top-10 of all web-hosting providers. Moreover, CloudHarmony indicates a greater than 99.99 percent average for service availability throughout Linode's datacenters.