Server Location advice

Choosing the "right" datacenter for you more or less depends on where your target audience is. If you're creating a website and/or service intended for European clients, I'd go for the one in London. Closest to West Coast USA: Fremont. Closest to North East Coast USA: Newark. And so on. If your target client base would be located anywhere in the US, go with whichever one has the Linode size you're after.

NOTE: If you're going to set up an IRC server, the Atlanta datacenter filters the common IRC ports, although you're free to use alternate ports. Other than that, none of the datacenters filters out IRC.

You might want to try the speed tests from the different data centers- http://www.linode.com/speedtest/

In the US and Canada, the largest concentration of population is in the northeast. Newark is the closest datacenter to the most major cities. It's the closest datacenter for five out of the ten largest cities in the US and Canada. In order of population, New York City (1), Chicago (3), Toronto (4), Montreal (6), Philadelphia (8 ), although I think Atlanta might be closer to Chicago.

So, if you're trying to go for maximum population coverage, that'd be the one to go for. However, there are also significant population centres around the Dallas datacenter (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas), and Fremont (Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, San Jose).

Ok, thanks for the replies..