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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

@Linode -- you guys seeing this ? Don't make me migrate away after 2 years.

If you enjoy having hypervisors disappear for 12 hours without notice, go ahead.

Until then, I'd say Linode is your better bet :).

EDIT: A little more information, I had two VMs go offline abruptly around 1am one night. It took 3 hours for Digital Ocean to even acknowledge a problem existed (I had opened a ticket), and that was only after I started poking their twitter account. It was at least 12 hours before they brought it back online, it was never acknowledged in any mass ticket. If you are unlucky enough, you can have the same thing unfortunately happen to you. This is my second experience of having such an outage at Digital Ocean and is, as a result, the reason I still only use DO as a testbed and nothing more.

EDIT2: Another pretty bad example of Digital Ocean: https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/8sk3mbgp6jgl.

I'm actually looking at migrating away from Digital Ocean. I had a recent incident that took over a week to solve with 48+ hours between tickets where support wasn't even reading the previous ticket. They claimed that someone looked at the hypervisor the system was on and found nothing, but as soon as that occurred my issue was resolved. One of the worst support experiences I've ever had where I was asked for the same information multiple times after waiting days to hear back, and was even asked if my issue started during an outage that was days after my initial report. Completely unacceptable.

Hey gravyboat - I'm Zach, Director of Support here at DigitalOcean. I'm very sorry that we didn't provide helpful or timely support. This certainly isn't the type of experience that's typical, and definitely not what we design for.

Can you do me a favor and shoot me an email so that I can investigate further? zach@digitalocean.com

Please see this as my personal commitment to our entire userbase that I'm happy to hear from you as well if your experience was not perfect.

Sure I've sent you a follow up email. Thanks for the response.

And the new support system is utterly useless Javascript SPA that breaks if you refresh, or use back buttons, and is just a terrible experience to use. I get mostly NOOP responses to my tickets these days. Given how complicated Kubernetes can be, I'm terrified to see how they'll handle support for when they hit some of the more difficult problems.

Hi Operyl - I appreciate your candid feedback on this.

As with anyone else, please feel free to email me directly if you want to follow up: zach@digitalocean.com

Regarding the actual system, its functionality, etc, we are planning an update. If there's anything that you want us to include in the system, or support systems that you enjoy using, please let me know.

Honestly, I miss the simple support system Digital Ocean had when it first launched, built straight into the panel, instead of another buggy service with tons of javascript. Less is more. The tier1 support needs much more training and information to effectively handle support as well.

I was also a big fan of the old support system that was accessible straight from the interface and not a third party tool. Granted the few times I had to contact support at that point I received very fast and thorough responses so this experience may have made me biased.

I hear you on the simplicity. There are a few things that we want to hit upon with an update, including: single login, better navigation/search, integrated look/feel, etc.

architect your app around failure and loss of compute nodes - if you aren't you aren't doing cloud right.

It's not that I didn't architect around the problem, that's besides the point. It's the fact they continuously have poor communication. My projects are relatively small, and were interrupted as a result of the downtime. With some effort (about 15 minutes) I brought them back up. Like I mentioned before, I use this is a testbed (the "beta" for my application) so it wasn't _terrible_. But it was still annoying.

I had been a Linode customer since 2008 and recently migrated to DigitalOcean about 6 months ago. So far my DO experience has been flawless. I needed basic, reliable block storage and at the time, Linode had promised "it's coming" for years. I beta-tested the Linode block storage and it was not stable for me. At the end of the day, Linode has rock solid stability, but they are unfortunately too slow to develop new features, thus I simply had to move on.

Linode user since 2009 here. Their support and network are rock solid [1].

I really hope they step up their game, but I won't be moving away anytime soon.

[1] The only major issue I had was a massive DDOS that took down their Atlanta data center around Christmas, couple of years ago.

Linode user for the last 10+ years here, I'm migrating some sites to DO after checking it out recently(again), the UI is better and it seems DO innovates faster these days, and the stability might have improved too(need more time to verify this).

Linode has been solid for me, only one bad hardware crash in the last 10+ years, but DO has more functions, good UI, larger disk,etc. I am trying it again.

DO support has gone majorly downhill (I have a comment about this that goes into it) in the last year or two with more issues cropping up here and there on hypervisors that go unattended for absolutely no reason. I still haven't found a good alternative but I'm looking.

Linode's support has been excellent though I rarely needed that. for me it's all resolved on their irc channel really quickly.

DO support is of concern but I never used that yet. I hope Linode can match up DO's offering(pricing and features) then I will likely stay.

Second that. I was emailing back and forth all last week due to some tricky bind-related rDNS issues on an ipv6 issued 64 block.

While I do wish they built out features faster (their new beta console which seems to have actually dropped features, and things like CertBot plugins for LetsEncrypt wildcard DNS updates), the support is fantastic.

They are always are polite and ready to help, even if the issue turned out to be a misconfiguration problem on my end.

Long live Linode.

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