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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

For me the performance of Linode isn't the greatest factor, the greatest factor (and the reason I spend ~$300/m with them when I could get the 10 servers for 1/5th the price elsewhere) is that support is second to none. I have never experienced better support than I have with Linode. If I have a problem and submit a ticket (which is rare) it's answered within a few minutes, if there's a network or hardware issue they open a ticket with me before I've even noticed. No other provider I've used has ever had that quality of service.

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I've been on Digital Ocean for around 6 months now and I have to say that their support is pretty awesome - very responsive when needed. I couldn't be happier with DO so far.

That's good to hear, I was thinking of switching to Linode which I use for work, but I think I will try buying two 512MB DO servers instead.

Seconded, DO's support is as quick to respond to technical issues as linode (and they're helpful on IRC as well).

Thirded. DO is pretty fanatical about support.

Good to know. I just set up a $5 a month server with a $20 promotional coupon code. That's 4 months free, yeesh. I love linode too, but my needs are modest as all I really do is host a few small traffic sites for friends and staging sites for clients. As much as I love linode, my next year of hosting will go from $240 to $40. And with their prices if I'm happy I now have a great affordable host to recommend to clients.

What is the $20 promotional coupon code you used? Care to share?

"SSDBEAR20" without the quotes (from the serverbear.com site).

As a new user on Digital Ocean, I gotta agree, it took them less than 2 minutes to reply to a ticket I opened (so fast that I got a reply from two supporters on the same time) on a question concerning moving my server to the Amsterdam center since it'a a bit closer to me :)

It'd be cool if one of these spammy hosting comparison sites actually did some work to do things like monitor downtime, support ticket response times, and so on and so forth.

Good support counts for a lot, especially when the shit hits the fan, but resources/dollar count too, and it'd be nice to know exactly what kind of tradeoffs you're making, or if a hosting provider is simply below the curve.

Just curious why you think the article is "spammy"? That is a pretty pejorative term to toss around.

It seems like sound testing and analysis of the things that are readily tested.

He doesn't even have a link to either provider. Doesn't look like he is looking for referral $ or anything other than sharing what he learned.

> Just curious why you think the article is "spammy"? That is a pretty pejorative term to toss around.

I did not say anything about the article being spammy. I said "hosting comparison companies". The article is quite obviously on someone's blog.

Going off on a little tangent here: Listings at hosting "comparison" sites are more or less universally based on how much of a kickback the site owner is getting from the host, and/or how good of a promotional deal they can give their visitors when they sign up for that host.

Compared to these sites, this article is chock-full of data. And I don't see a referral link anywhere. :)

Most of them are, I replied a few comments above you in this thread because my startup's goal is to fix the pay to play hosting review space. You seem to have experience dealing with it and I would love to hear your thoughts.

how do you expect to do that with a for-profit entity?

Make it transparent. It keeps me honest and let's you verify. Also using tons of data. I've got somewhere near ~130,000 reviews in my database. Once it's setup, it runs itself, the costs are quite low. The marketing is honest reviews. Something nobody else can really claim, if I cheat, I lose my only advantage. Take a look at the linode page and tell me what you think http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/24/linode

I will be clear, I am not profit maximizing at all. The amount of companies trying to buy placement is staggering. It's very easy to understand why my competitors would do it. I could probably make 10x the money if I accepted their offers. But I don't plan on just doing web hosting forever, my goal is to scale the technology and review lots of things. If I sell out my brand now, who would ever use it later?

The trick is to do both. Create one site that's honest and pure (like you have), and a completely separate site where you sell higher placements to companies. You then don't care about what people think about the profit making page.

...and by so doing, make the world just that little bit worse off by making it harder for people to find and identify genuine information. Would that fewer entrepreneurs were totally okay with that.

Actually, you DID kind of say that:

"one of these spammy hosting comparison sites..."

Well, you did say "these spammy hosting comparison sites", which seems to imply that the linked blog is one of them.

I feel your pain and while my startup doesn't exactly monitor those issues, I try and monitor them by proxy. How? I am tracking what users are saying about the company, I also break it down by type of comments - support, uptime/downtime, price. I am trying to avoid that 'spammy' feel by making it transparent with all the data being publicly collected and sourced to social media. I'd love to hear your feedback because avoiding the 'spammy' label is what I am trying to fix in that industry.

http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting

Hi there. I tried your Hosting Helper at that link, and couldn't get it to give any different results no matter what I entered in the various fields, or how big of a budget I selected. It always recommended shared hosting, with the same list of five recommendations. Is it supposed to do that?

Honestly, it needs a lot of work. It will recommend VPS/Dedicated stuff as well if you mark any of the check boxes. It's been a big issue trying to figure out how to automatically recommend what type of hosting someone needs. The majority of the visitors to the site need shared hosting and don't know it. So it caters to them for the most part. The underlying assumption is developers know what kind of hosting they are looking for on a macro level and can get straight to the data. But maybe that's not entirely true?

I am very open to new ideas and suggestions to improve it.

We monitor uptime :)

http://serverbear.com/9683/linode#view-uptime-beta

Plus benchmarks etc (user run, which means you get a decent dataset to compare by server spec/location).

http://serverbear.com/9683/linode#view-benchmarks http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean#view-benchmarks

We've actually considered ticket response times, a lot of hosts use WHMCS to manage their nodes - which we could make a plugin for. But a large amount of the more established hosts use a custom system.

Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality. Anyone could respond with a "We're looking into it" within 5 mins & not get a resolution for a few hours.

> Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality.

I didn't say it would be easy... you'd have to have a somewhat subjective metric of "did a person answer?" and "did they tell me something useful?". Maybe you could use Amazon's mechanical turk or something like that...

Thank you for ServerBear, I use it all the time and send others to it often.

Can I give you a feature request? Can you track terms of service or somehow summarize them? I would love to filter/find hosts based on how liberal their terms are.

See also this comment/response from armored_mammal re: DigitalOcean's ToS:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5207693

Thanks! ^_^

That is a pretty good idea, I'll pop it into our roadmap. We've got a chunk of time allocated this month to work on some stuff & that's an easy quick win :)

I have another one: add South America/Brazil to the location filter.

I suggested to remove I/O in Unixbench on WHT, is that still being considered?

Good support is not exclusive to Linode (_especially_ at that price range). For equally good support at cheaper prices look at BuyVM (NY/CA), Prometeus (Italy), Ramnode.com (Atlanta, if you need SSD/SSD-cached) and SecureDragon (FL). And thats just the ones I have used for my personal use.

I've been using BuyVM for about a year now, and I've had several instances of downtime, including one for half a day, and one due to hardware failure where I lost my data. Also, their support wasn't all that responsive when the server was down.

I'm considering switching to DigitalOcean just for the backups. Are these included in the cost?

I can attest to Linode's great service: One Sunday morning I was playing around with a Chef script, which meant occasionally wiping the machine so I could re-run the script from scratch. At some point the machine wouldn't come back up. I sent in a ticket, but I figured the rest of my Sunday was shot. By the time I'd made some tea and sat back down, I had a reply that the problem was fixed!

My former houesemate works at Linode. Based on how he ran the servers in the house, this is about what I'd expect! :)

I've used VPS on dreamhost and glesys for a couple of years now and I don't see when you really need support.

One time I had to reset a VPS but in the end it was due to a mistake I made as root.

Generally I treat VPS like any other co-location hosting operated by a 3rd party. I make sure to have redundancy and backups managed seperately.

The only other situation I can imagine is site-wide issues, which you can do nothing to help with anyways so just sit back and wait for them to get their stuff together.

In other words, if you know your way around the shell and your server OS, the need for support becomes very insignificant.

I've had the opposite experience, similar to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5209207. I'm using a VPS so I'm not really looking for support.

On a few occasions, the machine has gone down because of some maintenance or some issue that comes up. I was not notified of this and had to submit a ticket myself, after which I was told that the techs had taken down my machine. After asking why I wasn't notified, I was given no direct response.

I've had the same experience with Linode. They have great support.

I haven't had too much experience with using the support at Digital Ocean since they're pretty stable but I don't think it is as fast as Linode. I've had the same experience with Linode too--everything gets responded to in under 5 minutes. Digital Ocean is good to checkout though, they seem to be committed to providing good service and added Arch Linux :)

Well, you can see the benchmarks here. As you'd expect, Digital Ocean does better on IO-bounded tasks (because it uses SSDs) while Linode has better peak CPU performance (because it offers four cores instead of one).

I don't have a lot of experience with DO's support, but my one request was solved in under 10 minutes. Other than shared hosts, I've had this type of support from all hosting provides I've used. If a provider took more than 15 minutes to respond to an urgent request (eg server down) I'd find a new provider.

Great documentation and support and there a lot of others using it.

+1 Linode.

A lot of people use Windows, that doesn't attest to quality.

Depeds how you define quality. Quality as in for developers? Sure windows is not preferred. Quality as in "Lets me do my things the easiest way when I want to browse internet, watch movies and most importantly, have a GUI that even my grandma can use". Windows wins hands down.

Sent from my Macbook.

Unless we're talking about Windows 8, that is, in which case you're dealing with the most confusing and unusable interface in modern computing.

Both OSX and Ubuntu easily fill your requirement.

After I got my retina macbook, I disabled the 3G on my Cr-48 running Ubuntu (with Unity) and let my 10 yo daughter use it. At one point, all kids got all their screens confiscated, and it sat in my dresser for a few weeks. A week or so later, she started using my old white 2008 MacBook. It's got an Intel SSD and 4GB RAM: far superior to the Cr-48, minus the 3G radio.

While re-arranging the garage, I found some USB speakers and ran across the Cr-48, and set it up for some music in the garage. My daughter immediately wanted it back. She prefers Ubuntu with Unity to OS X and prefers the Cr-48 even though she agrees it isn't as snappy as the MacBook.

My grandpa sucks with Windows XP AND Ubuntu. Same goes for my 6 yr old brother. A lot less what people think is intuitive is actually just learned.

You mean to say high quality is something built with lowest common denominator in mind like windows?

Selling VM's is a very competitive market. Success in such a market is a testament to quality.

True, but when looking at review averages, having a large body of users matters.

The FUD surrounding Microsoft Windows is misplaced. Microsoft Windows is a quality product. It is the desktop computer with the Apple OS at far distance. I can understand Win3.1 and Wind95 were frustrating. I regularly saw the blue screen of death because screwed it up with several game installs. I never had an issue with WinXP or Win7. It looked decent, the apps worked. For XP, I have seen others that go several viruses. They were regularly on suspect porn sites. They never received the security updates. They never setup a username password and they installed any application they could click on. Is it really Microsoft's fault that some dumb users ruin their experience because they trust any website they visit? Plus, that was mostly Win95, maybe WinXP and never Win7.

McDonald's isn't a quality product even though it is mass produced and a lot of people like it. Why isn't quality? Because analysts have questioned the quality of the meat in their products. Is meat? People who overeat the food might develop illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. That is a low quality product.

Microsoft Windows is a quality OS. A lot of people like it. A minority don't like. They have the top leaders of UI design and OS engineering working on the product.

If Windows is not a quality product? Then how do you define quality?

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