Comment by tbranyen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbranyen | Hacker News Reader

For reference, I've been using Linode for almost 5 years now ("Your account has been active since March 11, 2009", Jersey colo).

I haven't considered switching to a cheaper service like Digital Ocean, because Linode offers peace of mind and excellent customer retention. There is something special about dialing a number and getting a real person who knows how to configure DNS and troubleshoot your international propagation and provide real assistance and empathize without sounding like they are feeding you canned BS.

I've never rebooted my Linode, except for their free upgrades. Recently I've purchased their backup service, which saved my ass when I decided to upgrade my Arch Linux install and butchered a package conflict which resulted in effectively destroying my box. I was able to quickly spin up a new install of Arch, mount my previous server, and copy over configurations. The LISH console has also saved my ass as well... too many times; I'm not a server admin!

I feel very much in control of the remote box and that is primarily why I will always recommend. However, they had one hiccup during my time with them, where they leaked sensitive information and withheld accountability for a while. It was frustrating, because I gave them benefit of the doubt, but secretly agreed that it was sketchy. If anyone reads this who works there, staying quiet matters negatively towards your credibility.

With the way that Linode recently handled the hack which exposed customer CC's and data[1], I would find it hard to have any peace of mind with them.

I don't know if DO would fare any better, and they have issues[2] of their own though.

Evaluating the two, DO makes me less uncomfortable and costs less.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097

"With the way that Linode recently handled the hack which exposed customer CC's and data[1], I would find it hard to have any peace of mind with them."

I hear this repeated over and over but did you just read the headline and draw your own conclusion? From all the articles I read, the hacker maybe got some worthless encrypted cc data. I don't think anyone lost sleep over this and kudos to Linode for encrypting user data. Also the breach had nothing to do with the individual VPS accounts.

Around that same time Amazon had the most epic multi-day outage in history and their storage servers were leaking user data. By comparison, the Linode hack wasn't a big deal, IMO.

PS: As far as Linode holding back information, were you a Linode cusotomer last year or are you just repeating rumors? Your Slashdot article was posted April 15th. Linode announced the "security incident" on the 12th https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/12/security-notice-linode-ma... also https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/ I did not get the impression they were holding back information.

You can judge which you think is worse, but the facts are that Linode got hacked and hid it for as long as possible.

I don't care what the hackers got per se, just that Linode was so opaque. However, the opaqueness in light of credit cards being stolen (encrypted or not (can most likely be decrypted anyway)) is even worse imo.

Their databases have been un-encrypted ever since they began their business. I used to hang out with "crackers" in ~2007 and at that time the database was already available to a certain group of people. All CC's plain-text, same with passwords.

I suspected this and thought I heard about it somewhere, but I didn't have any proof of it. Thanks for adding the input. Provided this is true, it makes me even more skeptical of Linode.

<snide> Though I'm skeptical enough of anyone still using Cold Fusion. </snide>

Well, to be fair, you still have only "heard about it somewhere", and still don't "have any proof of it" (unless you really trust the parent commenter, and I see the account was created 3 days ago).

Not saying you should trust Linode, but that your confidence in thar rumour probably shouldn't have improved after the parent comment.

I agree actually. It's easy to agree with confirmation bias sometimes though, lol.

Was a phpBB hack at the time. Injecting SQL trough the restore database option, good old days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com