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I love Linode but they've done a poor job communicating with their customers. Compare the Linode Twitter feed, their mentions, and the lack of replies to how Sl

I love Linode but they've done a poor job communicating with their customers. Compare the Linode Twitter feed, their mentions, and the lack of replies to how Slack handled it: https://medium.com/swlh/slackdown-a-lesson-in-brand-interaction-17f8c82b9fce#.4vsz21c0u https://medium.com/swlh/slackdown-a-lesson-in-brand-interact.... The Main Twitter account still hasn't announced the Atlanta DoS. https://twitter.com/linode?lang=en https://twitter.com/linode?lang=en I understand the severity of the issue is different to Slacks', but there should be a bunch of people on the Twitter account replying to people and saving customers. A lot of their customers are angry about lack of communication as much as they are about the downtime.

empressplay 11y ago
Although I'm not sure how important it is to announce outages on social media, I'm a customer and I haven't seen an e-mail either warning of an outage or explaining the situation. Generally I think linode is great but taking the tack of "Oh, if they don't notice, we shouldn't point it out to them" is just a bit cowardly.
- pan69 11y ago
  I love Linode and I agree with you here. It does depend on the situation and I don't think it's necessary to start sending emails for each bit of down time, I mean, if you're savvy enough to run a VPS you should be able to monitor what your running, but since the severity of what's happening at the moment I would have at least expected an email by now explaining what's going on. Did receive my invoice though.. :) It's basically the same with the status updates, I have to "poll" for status updates rather than to be notified. They have this mobile app (which is pretty useless as it currently sits) which would be a great platform to receive push notifications on, even if it was to let you know that there is a change on the status page. There's certainly some missed opportunities here, but then again, I assume they're pretty busy at the moment...
  - tsturzl 11y ago
    I agree with this. They're service clearly doesn't include monitoring as a mention commodity, and the monitoring that they provide pro-bono isn't network monitoring. If you want to know that kind of thing, you should have the monitoring in place to do so, or simply subscribe to their RSS. No VPS provider ever has sent out emails. The only hosting company I ever left was DigitalOcean, because they kept having really silly problems and at the time NY1 was the only datacenter with private networking, which is ridiculously silly to think that your infrastructure communicates over the internet. And the private networking was "experimental" for the longest time, and very limited. I don't think Linode did anything wrong. And moving to another host, I garuntee you that they will not do this either. Chances are if you move hosts you may feed the shitty business who performed this DDoS.
- dan1234 11y ago
  They have a status page[0] that you can subscribe to for email/rss/atom notifications. You could use an IFTTT recipe to send the RSS feed to twitter[1] or even a Slack channel[2], if you wanted. Personally, I use Uptimerobot[3] to monitor my nodes and post any issues into a Slack channel. This lets me know if it's a problem with my VPS or Linode (or any of the other providers I use). [0]http://status.linode.com/ http://status.linode.com/ [1]https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter [2]https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/slack https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/slack [3]https://uptimerobot.com https://uptimerobot.com
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Yes, or a company that isn't providing the service you're paying for could be honest about it and let you know. Especially when it happens to fall on a major holiday. I am moving my account ASAP and probably wouldn't if I had heard from them before I found out myself.
- damm 11y ago
  Close. By making customers aware of the downtime they will have more customers ask for credit. If you suffer 1-2days of downtime and your customer doesn't notice to ask for credit; you win. It's terrible; but unfortunately cost savings is drilled in from every darned angle.
  - ugexe 11y ago
    Pretty much. I've already been billed my full monthly amount, and when asked about it they said its because its automatic and that the credits have not been processed yet...
- adamzoz 11y ago
  yes my Atlanta linode just runs a few old non essential services and has been failing on its own randomly over the last through months mainly due to neglect. I assumed it was failing when I got the first few pingdom alerts over Christmas and rebooted it several times. They should have done a mail out.
alegen 11y ago
https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=linode%20status https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=linode%20status Twitter is not that relevant to be honest. I assume many customers are not active on Twitter either. I do not see why it is so important to have activity on the account when there is a dedicated page for informing customers of what is going on. Also, if you look at the medium post, the tweets are mostly sorry/thank you/everything should be fine soon. No actual information on what is going on. How could you put relevant technical details in a tweet? How does a short, uninformative tweet help you more? edit: also, there is up-to-date technical discussions taking place on the irc channel #linode on oftc
- vogt 11y ago
  I don't disagree with your general premise, but was a LMDDGTFY link (much less a LMGTFY link) necessary there to make the point?
- dantiberian 11y ago
  If you look at their Twitter mentions (especially earlier in the day), you will see a ton of angry people. I'm sure lots of people aren't on Twitter, but why not engage with those that are and are feeling angry? > How does a short uninformative tweet help you more? The point I've been trying to get across is that a lot of people just want to have their frustrations acknowledged. An honest, real reply from a human (not a bot like lots of airlines use) can make people feel heard and do a lot to restore goodwill. They can also link to the status page in replies for more technical details.
manojlds 11y ago
I guess there is also apprehension over how much to communicate, lest the info is also uses by the perpetrators.
StanAngeloff 11y ago
I agree Linode have mishandled the situation, badly. The lack of information about the ongoing attacks is disconcerting. We have 40+ nodes in London and Frankfurt and are dreading the attacks resuming in those locations. Due to lack of information about the specifics of the attacks, the measures Linode are taking and an explanation why this has happened in the first place, we can't communicate any sound information back to our customers. The only way forward is to switch providers until this quiets down and more details surface.
- tsturzl 11y ago
  Out of the top 10 hosting companies, only the 3 largest ones could probably have sustained these attacks, and even those providers would like suffer at least minor outages. The problem wasn't lack of prevention, but scale of attack. There comes a point where the attack, even when mitigated can cause issues. They were able to mitigate the attacks quickly, but their bandwidth was saturated.
  - StanAngeloff 11y ago
    I don't disagree and hopefully it didn't come across as blaming Linode for not handling the DDoS more efficiently. My comment was with regards to their inability to communicate with customers about on-going attacks and what was being done to mitigate them. There has been (after nearing 2 weeks of DDoS) just one statement on the status page by a network engineer. No company statement, no information on the measures taken, no e-mails, no support tickets. Nada. We have customers in the Middle East that are geo-blocked from accessing nodes in London. We had to find this ourselves. [1] Furthermore their billing system didn't account for all the downtime. Looking at our latest statement, all instances have been at 100% uptime. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/linode_back_at_last_after_ten_days_of_hell/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/linode_back_at_last_...
pinkunicorn 11y ago
I jokingly commented a few days back to a friend of mine that Slack is probably the last company I would bet a billion dollars on, to succeed. To be honest, I was very very wrong - Slack is incredible! Anybody can definitely build a Slack clone - its not an out of the world engineering challenge, but it will never be Slack, it will never have the love that Slack pours into its products and dev APIs. <3 Slack!
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  Well, the interesting part is that Slack is engaging in underhanded advertisement. I'll make sure to move the hell away from it.
  - click170 11y ago
    I've not heard of this and am not having luck with searches. Source - details?
- pinkunicorn 11y ago
  I honestly don't know why this comment is being downvoted to hell. I am not an investor in Slack and heck I've been an IRC user all along. I use Slack because my company forces me to. This was a genuine appreciation - I now know better to not praise good things on HN. Not sure whatever happened to the post about "Less negativity" a few months back.
  - jakeway 11y ago
    This is just an assumption, but maybe it is because your comment had no relevance to the topic at hand.
reefoctopus 11y ago
They have dramatically improved communication in the last couple of days. They got a lot of flack for it in the thread a couple of days ago, and they seem to have responded to it. Updates are on status.linode.com.
tsturzl 11y ago
Linode has always been this way. They are not extremely open from a business standpoint, but from what I can see they are fairly transparent from a technical standpoint. They have released a statement about this outage, and past outages. Smaller outages usually don't get public announcements, but often you'll see something on the forums, or you can figure out the problem by opening a ticket. I've had pretty good communication with Linode and I've always had really good customer service. I don't think Linode is nearly as verbose about their internal business affairs and going-ons as the startup world seems to be, but I think competition has driven many companies to do the same, and the rapid evolution in this market makes it a reasonable effort to constantly keep the public in the loop. As far as my experience, they've never with held information that I needed to know. But I understand why people are suspicious, and I think this suspicion is paranoia. These attacks are clearly espionage, and if they knew who was doing it, they'd have taken legal action by now.

empressplay 11y ago

Although I'm not sure how important it is to announce outages on social media, I'm a customer and I haven't seen an e-mail either warning of an outage or explaining the situation. Generally I think linode is great but taking the tack of "Oh, if they don't notice, we shouldn't point it out to them" is just a bit cowardly.

pan69 11y ago
I love Linode and I agree with you here. It does depend on the situation and I don't think it's necessary to start sending emails for each bit of down time, I mean, if you're savvy enough to run a VPS you should be able to monitor what your running, but since the severity of what's happening at the moment I would have at least expected an email by now explaining what's going on. Did receive my invoice though.. :) It's basically the same with the status updates, I have to "poll" for status updates rather than to be notified. They have this mobile app (which is pretty useless as it currently sits) which would be a great platform to receive push notifications on, even if it was to let you know that there is a change on the status page. There's certainly some missed opportunities here, but then again, I assume they're pretty busy at the moment...
- tsturzl 11y ago
  I agree with this. They're service clearly doesn't include monitoring as a mention commodity, and the monitoring that they provide pro-bono isn't network monitoring. If you want to know that kind of thing, you should have the monitoring in place to do so, or simply subscribe to their RSS. No VPS provider ever has sent out emails. The only hosting company I ever left was DigitalOcean, because they kept having really silly problems and at the time NY1 was the only datacenter with private networking, which is ridiculously silly to think that your infrastructure communicates over the internet. And the private networking was "experimental" for the longest time, and very limited. I don't think Linode did anything wrong. And moving to another host, I garuntee you that they will not do this either. Chances are if you move hosts you may feed the shitty business who performed this DDoS.
dan1234 11y ago
They have a status page[0] that you can subscribe to for email/rss/atom notifications. You could use an IFTTT recipe to send the RSS feed to twitter[1] or even a Slack channel[2], if you wanted. Personally, I use Uptimerobot[3] to monitor my nodes and post any issues into a Slack channel. This lets me know if it's a problem with my VPS or Linode (or any of the other providers I use). [0]http://status.linode.com/ http://status.linode.com/ [1]https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter [2]https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/slack https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/slack [3]https://uptimerobot.com https://uptimerobot.com
- jonknee 11y ago
  Yes, or a company that isn't providing the service you're paying for could be honest about it and let you know. Especially when it happens to fall on a major holiday. I am moving my account ASAP and probably wouldn't if I had heard from them before I found out myself.
damm 11y ago
Close. By making customers aware of the downtime they will have more customers ask for credit. If you suffer 1-2days of downtime and your customer doesn't notice to ask for credit; you win. It's terrible; but unfortunately cost savings is drilled in from every darned angle.
- ugexe 11y ago
  Pretty much. I've already been billed my full monthly amount, and when asked about it they said its because its automatic and that the credits have not been processed yet...
adamzoz 11y ago
yes my Atlanta linode just runs a few old non essential services and has been failing on its own randomly over the last through months mainly due to neglect. I assumed it was failing when I got the first few pingdom alerts over Christmas and rebooted it several times. They should have done a mail out.

alegen 11y ago

https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=linode%20status https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=linode%20status Twitter is not that relevant to be honest. I assume many customers are not active on Twitter either. I do not see why it is so important to have activity on the account when there is a dedicated page for informing customers of what is going on. Also, if you look at the medium post, the tweets are mostly sorry/thank you/everything should be fine soon. No actual information on what is going on. How could you put relevant technical details in a tweet? How does a short, uninformative tweet help you more? edit: also, there is up-to-date technical discussions taking place on the irc channel #linode on oftc

vogt 11y ago
I don't disagree with your general premise, but was a LMDDGTFY link (much less a LMGTFY link) necessary there to make the point?
dantiberian 11y ago
If you look at their Twitter mentions (especially earlier in the day), you will see a ton of angry people. I'm sure lots of people aren't on Twitter, but why not engage with those that are and are feeling angry? > How does a short uninformative tweet help you more? The point I've been trying to get across is that a lot of people just want to have their frustrations acknowledged. An honest, real reply from a human (not a bot like lots of airlines use) can make people feel heard and do a lot to restore goodwill. They can also link to the status page in replies for more technical details.

manojlds 11y ago

I guess there is also apprehension over how much to communicate, lest the info is also uses by the perpetrators.

StanAngeloff 11y ago

I agree Linode have mishandled the situation, badly. The lack of information about the ongoing attacks is disconcerting. We have 40+ nodes in London and Frankfurt and are dreading the attacks resuming in those locations. Due to lack of information about the specifics of the attacks, the measures Linode are taking and an explanation why this has happened in the first place, we can't communicate any sound information back to our customers. The only way forward is to switch providers until this quiets down and more details surface.

tsturzl 11y ago
Out of the top 10 hosting companies, only the 3 largest ones could probably have sustained these attacks, and even those providers would like suffer at least minor outages. The problem wasn't lack of prevention, but scale of attack. There comes a point where the attack, even when mitigated can cause issues. They were able to mitigate the attacks quickly, but their bandwidth was saturated.
- StanAngeloff 11y ago
  I don't disagree and hopefully it didn't come across as blaming Linode for not handling the DDoS more efficiently. My comment was with regards to their inability to communicate with customers about on-going attacks and what was being done to mitigate them. There has been (after nearing 2 weeks of DDoS) just one statement on the status page by a network engineer. No company statement, no information on the measures taken, no e-mails, no support tickets. Nada. We have customers in the Middle East that are geo-blocked from accessing nodes in London. We had to find this ourselves. [1] Furthermore their billing system didn't account for all the downtime. Looking at our latest statement, all instances have been at 100% uptime. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/linode_back_at_last_after_ten_days_of_hell/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/linode_back_at_last_...

pinkunicorn 11y ago

I jokingly commented a few days back to a friend of mine that Slack is probably the last company I would bet a billion dollars on, to succeed. To be honest, I was very very wrong - Slack is incredible! Anybody can definitely build a Slack clone - its not an out of the world engineering challenge, but it will never be Slack, it will never have the love that Slack pours into its products and dev APIs. <3 Slack!

LoSboccacc 11y ago
Well, the interesting part is that Slack is engaging in underhanded advertisement. I'll make sure to move the hell away from it.
- click170 11y ago
  I've not heard of this and am not having luck with searches. Source - details?
pinkunicorn 11y ago
I honestly don't know why this comment is being downvoted to hell. I am not an investor in Slack and heck I've been an IRC user all along. I use Slack because my company forces me to. This was a genuine appreciation - I now know better to not praise good things on HN. Not sure whatever happened to the post about "Less negativity" a few months back.
- jakeway 11y ago
  This is just an assumption, but maybe it is because your comment had no relevance to the topic at hand.

reefoctopus 11y ago

They have dramatically improved communication in the last couple of days. They got a lot of flack for it in the thread a couple of days ago, and they seem to have responded to it. Updates are on status.linode.com.

tsturzl 11y ago

Linode has always been this way. They are not extremely open from a business standpoint, but from what I can see they are fairly transparent from a technical standpoint. They have released a statement about this outage, and past outages. Smaller outages usually don't get public announcements, but often you'll see something on the forums, or you can figure out the problem by opening a ticket. I've had pretty good communication with Linode and I've always had really good customer service. I don't think Linode is nearly as verbose about their internal business affairs and going-ons as the startup world seems to be, but I think competition has driven many companies to do the same, and the rapid evolution in this market makes it a reasonable effort to constantly keep the public in the loop. As far as my experience, they've never with held information that I needed to know. But I understand why people are suspicious, and I think this suspicion is paranoia. These attacks are clearly espionage, and if they knew who was doing it, they'd have taken legal action by now.