[zhovner]

To prevent such incidents Linode have alerts of traffic/cpu/disk thresholds. For example you can configure notification if your bandwidth utilization more than N Mbit/s in duration more than N minutes. Very useful for DDoS prevention.

[bluedino]

And look at your dashboards once in a while. I'd find it unusual if I saw my toy VPS cranking out 100mbs for a week straight!

[emeraldd]

Make sure you tune those alerts appropriately and know when your systems should be doing things that will trip them. We've had a couple of boxes that regularly trip cpu warnings during normal operation, but only inside specific time windows. Knowing what's not normal is vitally important with this stuff.