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Comment by empressplay | Hacker News Reader

Although I'm not sure how important it is to announce outages on social media, I'm a customer and I haven't seen an e-mail either warning of an outage or explaining the situation. Generally I think linode is great but taking the tack of "Oh, if they don't notice, we shouldn't point it out to them" is just a bit cowardly.

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They have a status page[0] that you can subscribe to for email/rss/atom notifications. You could use an IFTTT recipe to send the RSS feed to twitter[1] or even a Slack channel[2], if you wanted.

Personally, I use Uptimerobot[3] to monitor my nodes and post any issues into a Slack channel. This lets me know if it's a problem with my VPS or Linode (or any of the other providers I use).

[0]http://status.linode.com/

[1]https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter

[2]https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/slack

[3]https://uptimerobot.com

Yes, or a company that isn't providing the service you're paying for could be honest about it and let you know. Especially when it happens to fall on a major holiday. I am moving my account ASAP and probably wouldn't if I had heard from them before I found out myself.

I love Linode and I agree with you here. It does depend on the situation and I don't think it's necessary to start sending emails for each bit of down time, I mean, if you're savvy enough to run a VPS you should be able to monitor what your running, but since the severity of what's happening at the moment I would have at least expected an email by now explaining what's going on. Did receive my invoice though.. :)

It's basically the same with the status updates, I have to "poll" for status updates rather than to be notified. They have this mobile app (which is pretty useless as it currently sits) which would be a great platform to receive push notifications on, even if it was to let you know that there is a change on the status page.

There's certainly some missed opportunities here, but then again, I assume they're pretty busy at the moment...

I agree with this. They're service clearly doesn't include monitoring as a mention commodity, and the monitoring that they provide pro-bono isn't network monitoring. If you want to know that kind of thing, you should have the monitoring in place to do so, or simply subscribe to their RSS.

No VPS provider ever has sent out emails. The only hosting company I ever left was DigitalOcean, because they kept having really silly problems and at the time NY1 was the only datacenter with private networking, which is ridiculously silly to think that your infrastructure communicates over the internet. And the private networking was "experimental" for the longest time, and very limited.

I don't think Linode did anything wrong. And moving to another host, I garuntee you that they will not do this either. Chances are if you move hosts you may feed the shitty business who performed this DDoS.

Close.

By making customers aware of the downtime they will have more customers ask for credit. If you suffer 1-2days of downtime and your customer doesn't notice to ask for credit; you win.

It's terrible; but unfortunately cost savings is drilled in from every darned angle.

Pretty much. I've already been billed my full monthly amount, and when asked about it they said its because its automatic and that the credits have not been processed yet...

yes my Atlanta linode just runs a few old non essential services and has been failing on its own randomly over the last through months mainly due to neglect. I assumed it was failing when I got the first few pingdom alerts over Christmas and rebooted it several times.

They should have done a mail out.

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