Linode under large DoS attack
status.linode.com
status.linode.com
Needless to say, all of my clients now reside on other platforms and are entirely attack-free now and have been since moving off of Linode.
Their service has gone so far downhill.
Linode support has been absolutely crude and even berating in their responses to me. They have lost all sense of professionalism.
It is sad to see a once promising hosting company go so far downhill so fast, but such is the nature of trying to be the lowest-cost option.
Also, Linode is not really the "lowest-cost" option as Digital ocean and similar providers offer better deals for the low price VPS market.
And also it is impossible to verify someone did it unless you are inside their network.
it's like saying, yeah it's totally ok to host a bunch of violent gang members in our town, since they only attack people in the next town over.
I've been using DigitalOcean for about a year, and I experience downtime with them (NYC1) about once or twice every month. But they're $5.
This sort of thing happens to every VPS provider at some point, and switching to DigitalOcean isn't going to make a huge difference in that respect.
I do wish Linode were a bit better about updating their status page. I don't like relying other peoples angry tweets to determine if it's Linode, or just me.
Even still, the downtime is frequent enough to where it'd be a bad fit for anything too serious. If our platform at work were to go down for 10 minute periods every month, our inboxes would be full of "What's going on?!?!" emails in short order.
I usually stick up for Linode for their excellent CS but this was disappointing. My site was in the middle of a large traffic for an event signup when it went down. SSH failed, accessing Linode's website failed, no mention on twitter or other social media, status page only mentions regular maintenance and not even the last incident. No knowing what was going on, left me feeling helpless. :(
Excerpt from the chat:
>...The two very large attacks we experienced recently were both targeting the Dallas data center however.
They have been doing this for years and clearly they still haven't learn.
So Linode's not alone in that, but hopefully they can get better at it anyway.
I do wish they'd take advantage of their pretty nifty infrastructure and make it so their management system isn't all housed in Dallas. Every time there's an issue in Dallas their management system becomes unusable.
Having been told second would have been atleast comforting. I was disappointed because there was no mention or report of the last DoS attack or downtime, as if it never happened. The last incident lasted for about 17mins but since it was off peak hours, it din't bother me much. Then the same thing replayed today but this time at the peak of the traffic. You would atleast expect a hosting company to have their main page/portal balanced across different regions but nope. Its just sad because except their handling of situations like this, there is nothing really to complaint against them.
but they don't have the big name brand with geek cred, and can't do it for $19.95, so you probably won't. you'll come very close, and then you'll get cold feet because of a million reasons you come up with at the last minute.
instead, you will go to another large hosting provider, because you crave the comfort of knowing there are a million other people just like you, and you will undoubtedly experience the same problems again in 6 months.
interesting world we live in, isn't it? where imaginary problems are worse than real ones. it's truly fascinating.
There ops/sysadmins shouldn't be handling customer relations/support.
It takes about 3 seconds to stand up and yell across the room to the frontline staff, telling them that servers are down and you're working on it.
Then the frontline staff should only have to make a few clicks for announcements to go out (pre-written templates outlining what's going on and what's being done to fix it) via social media, etc.
I wonder if Dallas is being affected disproportionately because Linode's own website and management console are hosted there, and that's what the DoSers are targeting.
They don't have many of the features Linode, DigitalOcean, etc. have. But they've been super responsive to the (two?) questions I had. Their one ~$85/mo server replaced five Linodes I had. Better performance for less money. Though, as I understand it, Linode has upgraded their offerings since then.
Edit: It is a Dallas instance and we had few minutes of downtime. It is working now normally.
Most of what I've seen comparing any of these always brings up price, but that's like bickering over couch change if it matters to your business.
$ host dreamhoststatus.com
dreamhoststatus.com has address 96.126.109.82
$ nslookup 96.126.109.82
Non-authoritative answer:
82.109.126.96.in-addr.arpa name = li366-82.members.linode.com.
$ nslookup > set type=ns > dreamhoststatus.com Server: 192.168.1.1 Address: 192.168.1.1#53
Non-authoritative answer: dreamhoststatus.com nameserver = ns3.dreamhost.com. dreamhoststatus.com nameserver = ns2.dreamhost.com. dreamhoststatus.com nameserver = ns1.dreamhost.com.