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Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

"With Linode, I know that I am getting excellent support."

To be honest, the poor support was one of the reasons we moved away from Linode. We were in the Newark datacenter for about 8 months with 12 linode boxes. Had frequent issues with their load balancer and most of the time when we told them there was a problem, they asked us to prove it.

A few times we had extended outages due to "unscheduled maintenance"

Prior to running my business on Linode I had a single VPS with them for 2 years for personal stuff. I had zero problems... so YMMV. Overall, I'd still use them again, but not for mission critical stuff after that experience.

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> Had frequent issues with their load balancer and most of the time when we told them there was a problem, they asked us to prove it.

Probably was just a request for logs or other such evidence showing what went wrong so that they could diagnose and fix the problem? Might have been a misunderstanding

> A few times we had extended outages due to "unscheduled maintenance"

Hardware isn't magic.

It sucks that you didn't have a good experience, but this is highly anecdotal.

All hosts have hardware and network issues. What matters is how they respond to them and that's why I would hesitate to move anything that matters to a new host before I was satisfied with their track record for dealing with unexpected problems.

You're right. We had a lot of issues with servers not being able to communicate on the internal network at the datacenter.

Here's an uptime report of our hosts on Linode from Pingdom: http://i.imgur.com/KggJZ.jpg

I handle customer support for us in a helpful and compassionate way. The support we were getting from linode sometimes felt like they didn't even read what we wrote to them.

I'm seeing 24 support threads listed in Gmail with them from 5/21 to 8/31 for various networking and uptime issues.

My experiences with Linode have been excellent as far as support is concerned. That's just anecdotal and YMMV.

With that said, would you trust a $5/mo. VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?

That is the question. They are the new kids on the block. I plan on moving some less critical projects to DigitalOcean. I'll be monitoring uptime very closely.

We've been around for a year and hope to be around longer, if you notice any problems just let us know.

I'm actually experimenting with DigitalOcean for a side-project, but we've moved our main site on to dedicated hardware so no plans to try DigitalOcean for that.

I am also one of the happy linode customers for more 3 years, but I also think we shouldn't judge by using the price tag only - constructive competition is always good for us.

I still remember the old days when I switched from slicehost to linode, 30% (360MB vs 256MB instance) cheaper and later 50% (512MB vs 256MB)..

That's a BS argument, that's like saying Windows servers are better than Linux because they cost more. There's no reason to distrust them SOLELY because they are cheap. You're getting 1/4th the cores, that's why it's so cheap.

I disagree. Windows is a product, Linux is a project, so they're harder to compare when price is involved.

When you're comparing two businesses, you can safely assume that given the free market, most products with similar features converge to a similar price range. If a product offered by a company appears to be similar in features to another established product but does it at 1/4 the cost, it is completely valid to wonder what costs are being cut to achieve that price. Is it their infrastructure? Their support? Do they pay their team less? These are all valid questions, whether you are able to answer them given the available information or not.

This market is not established and is rapidly evolving. There's zero reason to assume pricing in the virtual computing market will stabilize anytime soon. Plus these services are not equal, he makes a pretty clear point that DO offers less in certain areas.

>VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?

You do realise that in the past user VPSs were rooted, Bitcoins stolen and Linode users had to find out from Reddit that their VPS was potentially hacked.

If you trust Linode (or any VPS really) with mission critical stuff then you are (being) an idiot. I am sorry but you are.

Edit: The idiot is a reference to behaviour not anything personal.

Did they ever publish a post-mortem of how their internal customer service portal was "hacked"? A quick search turns up nothing.

No.

And frankly I can't understand how a VPS provider can act in this way and still have people acting like they have great support. As a customer I found out from Reddit before Linode. That's a pretty disgraceful effort.

Two things:

1) I don't think your comments labelling those who disagree with you as "idiots" is constructive or in keeping with the spirit of HN.

2) "Mission critical" to one person may mean something else to someone else. Depending on their requirements, those who consider something to be "mission critical" may be willing to accept varying levels and/or guarantees of uptime or security.

We live in a complex society. Most of the things you trust with your life are totally out of your control.

Exactly. Which is why transparency and honesty is key.

Look at Cloudflare's handling of their incident. Then look at Linode's.

good thing expensive enterprise windows hosting is never hacked.

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