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"?
With that said, would you trust a $5/mo. VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?
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.
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)..
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.
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.
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.
Look at Cloudflare's handling of their incident. Then look at Linode's.