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Comment by nivla | Hacker News Reader

This is the second or third time this has happened this week. They put this status on their page right after it was back up and after I had complaint to them about the random outages and no mention of it on the page. Not claiming they put it up because of the complaint but that it coming after they whole debacle made it the least useful.

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.

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When there's a metaphorical fire in the data center, a lot of companies have a tendency to focus first on putting out the fire and second on letting the customers know there's a problem.

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.

>a lot of companies have a tendency to focus first on putting out the fire and second on letting the customers know there's a problem.

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.

your best bet is to move to a smaller MSP with better customer service, one that actually knows your name and gives a shit about you. there might even be an account manager who calls you once every 3 months and asks if things are going well.

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.

It's not a one-man shop, is it?

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.

This is what happens when you pay lip service to customer support but keep them at the bottom of the food chain. You must employ good CS managers and empower them to communicate. You must then ensure that any variance in service good or bad is communicated either by your social networking presence or to your key customers. Sadly most places I've worked are run egocentric idiots who are so insecure they couldn't possibly allow autonomy on the front lines.

Seriously switch to something else.

They have been doing this for years and clearly they still haven't learn.

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