How does a "Live" Migration differ from a "Cold" Migration?

There are some key differences in Live and Cold Migrations. Based on your needs, one is going to be more beneficial than the other. Below, I have provided a bulleted list of the key differences.

Live Migration

• Linode stays powered on and needs to remain on for the duration of the migration.
• Only available if migrating within the same data center.
• No interruption in services, all of your applications will continue to run.
• Live Migrations are about 5x faster than Cold Migrations.
• Live Migrations can only be configured by opening a support ticket.

Cold Migration

• Linode needs to be powered down and remain powered down during the migration.
• You have the ability to transfer to another data center. (IP Address will change)
• Due the Linode needing to be powered down, services will be interrupted.
• Cold Migrations within the same data center complete at the rate of 3-5 minutes per GB. When migrating to another data center it's at the rate of 10-15 minutes per GB.

*Initiating a Cross Data Center (Cold) Migration can be configured in the Cloud Manager without needing to open a support ticket.

Updating to note that all live migrations initiated for Linodes will now result in an email alert if you have Notifications turned on in your Cloud Manager My Profile Settings.

We did this to provide notice of live migrations initiated by us, such as for emergency response or performance optimization purposes. Note that live migrations will not appear in Linodes' activity feeds at the moment, so these notifications are the only way to track live migration activity apart from direct communications from our Support team for now.

Yes, please go ahead, since 2 incidents during a week do not look promising.

@thedotedge - If you'd like to set up a migration for your Linode, we can definitely take care of that for you. We'd just need you to open a Support ticket.