>> This is either a completely new level of DDoS or they are just completely incompetent in their way of handling it. My take is that it's somewhere in the mid

>> This is either a completely new level of DDoS or they are just completely incompetent in their way of handling it. My take is that it's somewhere in the middle. This type of outage has in the past, and will potentially in future, hit providers at all price points regardless of their SLAs and guarantees. In my experience (and other comments indicate) Linode are genearlly very reliable. This isn't a mickey mouse, dirt-cheap VPS operation. The communication hasn't been awesome but by keeping an eye on status.linode.com I personally have felt reasonably well informed. If you trust they're working on it and doing the best they can. Other commenters suggest this is a fairly sophisticated, deliberate and sustained attack. They're putting significant resources toward it. It also seems whoever is behind it has potentially gained inside knowledge of their network topology. Based that understand, I'm not wasting my time calling them or sitting around hitting F5. I'm working to improve my systems' architecture for resiliency in this type of situation. That involves geo-distributed, multi-site redundancy and fail-over. My advice: be optimistic and proactive.