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Some people on HN hate Linode because of their past security screwups (which is valid), but having used both DO and Linode quite a lot, the support on Linode is

Some people on HN hate Linode because of their past security screwups (which is valid), but having used both DO and Linode quite a lot, the support on Linode is way, way, way better than DO's. DO's tier 1 support is almost useless. I set up a new account with them recently for a droplet that needed to be well separated from the rest of my infrastructure, and ran into a confusing error message that was preventing it from getting set up. I sent out a support request, and a while later, over an hour I think, I got an equally unhelpful support response back. Things got cleared up by taking it to Twitter, where their social media support folks have got a great ground game going, but I really don't want to have to rely on Twitter support for critical stuff. DO seems to have gone with the "hire cheap overseas support that almost but doesn't quite understand English" strategy, whereas the tier 1 guys at Linode have on occasion demonstrated more Linux systems administration expertise than I've got.

slig 7y ago
I've been with Linode since 2009, and only got bitten once when their entire Atlanta DC went down near Christmas. I was eager to try the new DO managed Postgres service, but I guess I won't after this blunder.
millettjon 7y ago
+1 I have used both as well. Linode support has always been good and DO support has been a blocking barrier.
znpy 7y ago
I have interviewed with DO and they tried diverting me towards a support position. They told me that on a single day a support engineer was supposed to help/advice customers on pretty much whatever the customer was having issue with and also handle something between 80-120 tickets per day. It's nice to see that DO is willing to help on pretty much anything they (read: their team) has knowledge about, but with 80-120 tickets per day I cannot expect to give meaningful help. Needed EDIT: it seems to me that this comments is receiving more attention than it probably deserves, and I feel it's worth clarifying some things: 1. I decided not to move forward with the interview as I was not interested in that support position, so I have not verified that's the volume of tickets. 2. From their description of tickets, such tickets can be anything from "I cannot get apache2 to run" to "how can I get this linucs thing to run Outlook?" (/s) to "my whole company that runs on DO is stuck because you locked my account".
- hackermailman 7y ago
  I once worked for eBay a long time ago, and support consisted of 4 concurrent chats, offering pre-programmed macros often pointing to terribly written documentation the person had already read and was confused about. If you took the time to actually assist somebody you were chastised in a weekly review where they went over your chat support. The person doing mine told me I had the highest satisfaction record in the entire company, and a 'unique gift of clear and concise conversation, like you're actually talking to them face to face' then said I'd be fired next week because my coworkers were knocking off hundreds of tickets a day just using automated responses, leaving their customers fuming in anger with low satisfaction ratings, as people are very aware of being fed automated responses but the goal was not real support, it was just clearing the tickets by any means possible. I decided to try half and half, so if the support question was written by somebody who obviously would not understand the documentation (grandma trying to sell a car), I would help them but just provide shit support to everybody else in the form of macros like my coworkers. Of course this was unacceptable and I got canned the next week as promised. Was an interesting experience, I can imagine DO having an insane scope to their support requests like 'what is postgresql'. Anyway imho you should have taken the support position and schemed your way into development internally. This was my plan at eBay before they fired me, though they shut down the branch here a few months later and moved to the Philippines anyway so I wouldn't have lasted long regardless.
  - zeta0134 7y ago
    I'm fortunate that my own company (Rackspace) at least has a level head about this sort of thing. My direct manager looks at my numbers (~60-80 interactions per month) and my colleagues (many hundreds of interactions per month) and correctly observes that we have different strengths, and that's the end of the discussion. I have a tendency to take my time and go deep on issues, and my coworkers will send me tickets that need that sort of investigative troubleshooting. My coworker meanwhile will rapidly run through the queue and look for simple tickets to knock out. He sweeps the quick-fix work away, but also knows his limits and will escalate the stuff he's not familiar with. Let me stress here, this is not nearly as easy of a problem to solve as it appears to be on the surface. We're struggling as a company right now because after our recent merge, a lot of our good talent has left and we're having to rebuild a lot of our teams. Even so, I'm still happy with our general approach. Management understands that employees will often have wildly different problem solving approaches and matching metrics, and that's perfectly OK as long as folks aren't genuinely slacking off and we as a team are still getting our customers taken care of. I think that's important to keep in mind no matter how big or small your support floor gets.
nikanj 7y ago
Linode is definitely in the minority here. Most companies, in tech and outside of it, seem to follow the DO model. Twitter provides decent service, and the official help channels provide canned responses and template emails. I somewhat blame people in tech, actually. More than one company is creating products that "cut customer service costs via machine learning", which is code for "pick keywords from incoming tickets and autoreply with a template"
- guhidalg 7y ago
  There’s nothing wrong with that approach, the person raising the support ticket likely hasn’t read through all the documentation of the product they’re using.
  - thaumaturgy 7y ago
    If implemented well, sure -- sometimes, maybe often, you can point a customer to a support document that directly answers their specific question and relieves some of the load on your staff. That's great. But the execution matters a lot, and DO's is currently not great. IIRC, it takes clicking through a few screens of "are you sure your question isn't in our generic documentation? How about this page? No? This one then? Still no? You're really sure you need to talk to someone about this error? sigh Okay, fine then." These systems should not be implemented as a barrier to reaching human support, but they often are.
  - Pxtl 7y ago
    In all my experience with support, I have been referred to a document that helped me with my problem literally zero times, because if something went wrong the first thing I did was Google it and so I already saw the unhelpful document.
- walrus01 7y ago
  ISP here: The margins in bulk hosting services are incredibly thin, and companies have resorted to automation tools. If somebody asked me to run backend infrastructure for something like DigitalOcean or Linode, I would run away screaming. It would literally be my own personal hell. I would rather run any other sort of ISP services on the planet than a bulkhosting service where anybody with a pulse and $10 to $20/month can sign up for a VPS. I truly feel sorry for their first and second tier customer support people. I imagine the staff churn rate is incredible. People who work for these sorts of low-end hosting companies inevitably quit and try to work for an ISP that has more clueful customers. When you have people paying $250/month to colocate a few 1RU servers, the level of clue of the customer and amount of hassle you will get from the customer is a great deal less than a $15/month VPS customer.
ksec 7y ago
And Linode has always had faster CPU, I/O, Network. And lots of small things like that DO only catches up in the recent years, like pooled bandwidth. Although these days I tend to go with UpCloud, it is very similar to Linode and DO, except you can do custom instances like 20x vCPU with 1GB Memory, spin it up for $0.23 an hour. Compared to standard plan on Linode and DO, 20 vCPU with 96GB Memory would be $0.72/Hr.
- notacoward 7y ago
  I'd love to see the benchmarks you used. I've done a bunch over the years, mostly I/O focused because that's the most common bottleneck for the kind of work I do. While Linode does pretty well, especially compared to the cloud giants, DO has pretty much always come out on top.
  - vbtechguy 7y ago
    Really depends on underlying hardware of the Linode and DO VPS servers as they can vary greatly especially on DO depending on datacenter and region you end up in. Newer DO datacenters getting newer hardware so difference compared to older DO datacenters is huge - benchmarks of same DO droplet plan on different hardware https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-us-15-month-droplet-benchmarks-intel-xeon-e5-2630lv2-vs-intel-xeon-gold-6140.16248/ https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-us-15-...
- EugeneOZ 7y ago
  I love Linode, their support is awesome, their CPUs on "Dedicated CPU Plans" are great (by benchmarks - similar to GCP n1 CPU), disks io bandwidth just amazing. But I had to leave them because their network is not so reliable. It was difficult decision and I tried to return few weeks ago (because I really love them), but again network in London was just not so great.
brlewis 7y ago
Long-time Linode customer here. What were the security screwups? I tried a couple searches but didn't turn up anything.
- ilikepi 7y ago
  Here's a search that will help, look no further than the site you're already on: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linode%20security&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linode%20security&sort=byPopul... They've had several high-profile breaches over the years.
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  The two major ones were: A Bitcoin theft via the Linode Manager interface in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3654110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3654110 and a second Linode Manager compromise in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 In both cases, if you dig into the context a bit, the story turned out that Linode wasn't fully disclosing the breaches to their customers until they were forced to do so when the news about them reached a certain volume. They also may have been -- almost certainly were -- dishonest about the extent of the damage and how it may have impacted their other customers. At the time, their Manager interface was a ColdFusion application, which tends to be a big pile of bad juju. They started writing a new one from scratch after, I think, the second compromise. The really bad thing here is that they got soundly spanked for being less than truthful the first time, and then four years later -- when they'd had ample time to learn from that mistake -- they did it again. So there's a nonzero chance at any given time that Linode's infrastructure has been compromised and they know it and have decided not to tell you about it. That's what prompted me to start exploring DigitalOcean more. Unfortunately, I've found that there's a far greater chance that I'll experience actual trouble exacerbated by poor support than that I'll be impacted by an upstream breach, so about half my stuff still lives on in Linode.
  - Twirrim 7y ago
    > So there's a nonzero chance at any given time that Linode's infrastructure has been compromised and they know it and have decided not to tell you about it. This is entirely the roots of my distrust of them right now. Mistakes happen. Companies I trust demonstrate that they've learned from their mistakes. My tolerance for mistakes is pretty low when it comes to security related things, though. If something has gone wrong, let me know so I can take remedial steps. Their handling of both of those incidents suggested I can't trust them to tell me in sufficient time to protect myself.
rapind 7y ago
I've been on Linode for 8+ years now (moved there from Slicehost when Rackspace swallowed them up) and their service (not necessarily customer support) has significantly degraded. Not sure I blame them though. They've become far more popular since I started with them and are probably doing their best to grow... but I no longer recommend them as I used to. Just my experience though.
- theturtletalks 7y ago
  That's how I feel about Scaleway. Scaling customer service is no easy task especially technical companies that require agents to have some understanding of the product.
  - metildaa 7y ago
    I drop all traffic from Scaleway, they do not care about abuse coming from their network: https://badpackets.net/ongoing-large-scale-sip-attack-campaign-coming-from-online-sas-as12876/ https://badpackets.net/ongoing-large-scale-sip-attack-campai...
  - chillidoor 7y ago
    Call me cynical but for those prices I don't expect amazing service or stability, so I don't run any production stuff there.
- v4ult 7y ago
  So who would you recommend?
  - rapind 7y ago
    I don't really have a low budget alternative. I know that for our service we're evaluating both google and amazon cloud offerings, but only for our high availability services. I figure DO is in the same boat if not worse.
  - kudu 7y ago
    I've been using Hetzner Cloud and have been quite happy with it.
AYBABTME 7y ago
> DO seems to have gone with the "hire cheap overseas support that almost but doesn't quite understand English" strategy, whereas the tier 1 guys at Linode have on occasion demonstrated more Linux systems administration expertise than I've got. That's simply not true. There's support engineers hired around the world, and depending on when your ticket is posted, someone awake at that time will answer. DO is super remote friendly and as a result, has employees (and support folks) everywhere on the planet. Not "cheap oversea support" at all. There's a lot of support folks in the US, Canada, Europe, and in India where they have a datacenter. disclosure: ex-employee
- eganist 7y ago
  > That's simply not true. There's support engineers hired around the world, and depending on when your ticket is posted, someone awake at that time will answer. DO is super remote friendly and as a result, has employees (and support folks) everywhere on the planet. Not "cheap oversea support" at all. There's a lot of support folks in the US, Canada, Europe, and in India where they have a datacenter. Going to guess from this tweet https://twitter.com/AntoineGrondin/status/1130962818822393856 https://twitter.com/AntoineGrondin/status/113096281882239385... that you're currently staffed at DO. That's fine; I know two people who do great work on DO's security team. But it would be helpful if you could disclose this when you comment about your employer publicly so that readers don't have to dig up your keybase and then your twitter account to understand it.
  - AYBABTME 7y ago
    I don't work at DO anymore, but you're right I should disclose that I used to do so. Will edit my original post.
    - eganist 7y ago
      Much appreciated, thanks!
- Aeolun 7y ago
  But, isn’t hiring all over the world exactly because it is cheaper for the same kind of talent. I’m sure the company doesn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. Then of course, there is no guarantee these people speak and understand english perfectly.
terppy 7y ago
In response to my first support request DO sent me instructions for closing my account. I followed up and they refunded me a random few dollars.
ausjke 7y ago
second this, Linode for 15+ years here, tried DO a few times(but never left Linode), now 100% back with Linode. Linode even has an irc channel(you can use browser to access it), I rarely need support, but when I really need it, it is always fast, to the point, available.
nodesocket 7y ago
This headline is grossly misleading and very clickbaity "Killed our company". It's not exactly big business that you scale up to 10 droplets for short bursts, I am willing to bet their spend on DigitalOcean is less than $500 a month, yet the author is expecting enterprise support. DigitalOcean should go the route of AWS and kill off free support completely and offer paid support plans. Something like $49 a month or 10% of the accounts monthly spend. If you are a serious company with paying Fortune 500 customers, you need to act serious and pay up for premium support and stop expecting free.
- unilynx 7y ago
  They’re working on that and were sending out surveys a couple of weeks ago whether customers would be interested. They had a slightly higher minimum amount in mind for premier support You already get bumped to a higher tier of support once you hit 500/month spend for no additional fees but that just gives you promises for lower response times
  - justforyou 7y ago
    I'm done using DO. It's usually a bad sign when a company can't meet current needs/expectations and then decides to try and productize their failures.
- rat9988 7y ago
  Well, not locking you your account for false negatives and unlocking it when you ask for it should be in the free support plan of any company. No one pays to get locked out, support plan or not.
nickpsecurity 7y ago
I'll throw in Prgmr.com. One of their owners, Alyn Post, is on Lobsters with us. They even donate hosting to the site. He's been a super-nice guy over the years. Given how cost-competitive market is, they mainly differentiate on straight-forward offerings with good service. So, I tell folks about them if concerned about good service or more ethical providers. https://prgmr.com/xen/ https://prgmr.com/xen/ Main, potential caveat is they're Xen-based hosting. That may or may not matter depending on what one wants to run. They support the major Linux's.
- bluedino 7y ago
  Luke used to post here quite a bit too
Havoc 7y ago
>the support on Linode is way, way, way better than DO's. Can't comment about support, but DO's tutorials on linux server random task 101 are fantastic. I was surprised how much of my ubuntu server setup googling ended up on DO pages.
- ficklepickle 7y ago
  So true! Well written, to the point and kept up to date.
- bluedino 7y ago
  most of them are well written. It’s the community though, not DO
chaostheory 7y ago
Does DO have different levels of support that you can pay for like AWS? I like that system. You pay when you need it. You pay more if you need more support. The difference in support DO vs Linode is probably due to DO being cheaper.
- yeukhon 7y ago
  AWS support is fixed contract. There is basic, business and enterprise. What do you mean by “you pay when you need it”?
  - chaostheory 7y ago
    I can cancel the fixed contract any time. e.g. when I need support I buy a month of basic or business.
- oefrha 7y ago
  > The difference in support DO vs Linode is probably due to DO being cheaper. What? Most DO and Linode plans have exact same specs and cost exactly the same, and IIRC it was DO matching Linode. Although DO didn't seem to enforce their egress budget while Linode does. (I've been a customer of both for many years, and only dropped DO a few months ago.) EDIT: Also, according to some benchmarks (IIRC), for the exact same specs Linode usually has an edge in performance.
dannyw 7y ago
Linode support helped me diagnose some rare and obscure Linux OS error. They went above their call of duty and it’s why I’m still a customer.
api 7y ago
Vultr is underrated too. I've had nothing but positive tech support experiences with them. Their weird branding turns people off but they do not seem fly by night. We have used them for various things for years with very few problems.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  My only issue is the provisioning weirdness. I've had interesting issues automating deployment to the point that my current build script provisions 9 VMs, benchmarks them and shuts down the worst performing 6. Some of their co-location is CPU stressed.
- kijin 7y ago
  I've dealt with many Vultr instances on behalf of my clients, and I've had nothing but negative experiences with them. Unstable performance even on top-tier plans. Internal network issues that support keeps trying to blame their customer for. Nowadays when I find that a new or prospective client has been using Vultr, the first thing I recommend is to move off of Vultr. When there's an issue with Linode's platform, they discover it before I do and open a ticket to let me know they're working on it. When there's an issue with Vultr, the burden of proof seems to be on me to convince them that it's their problem not mine.
randomsearch 7y ago
Having used both for years, I’d probably recommend DO. None of the big security issues, but also I’ve found more downtime with Linode, don’t know if they’re upgrading their infrastructure a lot for some reason.
ajford 7y ago
My current employer uses Linode, and yeah, they have pretty good support. However, I've been using DO for the last 5 years, and haven't needed to reach out to support once. But I've had to contact Linode support about 5 times in the last year.

slig 7y ago

I've been with Linode since 2009, and only got bitten once when their entire Atlanta DC went down near Christmas. I was eager to try the new DO managed Postgres service, but I guess I won't after this blunder.

millettjon 7y ago

+1 I have used both as well. Linode support has always been good and DO support has been a blocking barrier.

znpy 7y ago

I have interviewed with DO and they tried diverting me towards a support position. They told me that on a single day a support engineer was supposed to help/advice customers on pretty much whatever the customer was having issue with and also handle something between 80-120 tickets per day. It's nice to see that DO is willing to help on pretty much anything they (read: their team) has knowledge about, but with 80-120 tickets per day I cannot expect to give meaningful help. Needed EDIT: it seems to me that this comments is receiving more attention than it probably deserves, and I feel it's worth clarifying some things: 1. I decided not to move forward with the interview as I was not interested in that support position, so I have not verified that's the volume of tickets. 2. From their description of tickets, such tickets can be anything from "I cannot get apache2 to run" to "how can I get this linucs thing to run Outlook?" (/s) to "my whole company that runs on DO is stuck because you locked my account".

hackermailman 7y ago
I once worked for eBay a long time ago, and support consisted of 4 concurrent chats, offering pre-programmed macros often pointing to terribly written documentation the person had already read and was confused about. If you took the time to actually assist somebody you were chastised in a weekly review where they went over your chat support. The person doing mine told me I had the highest satisfaction record in the entire company, and a 'unique gift of clear and concise conversation, like you're actually talking to them face to face' then said I'd be fired next week because my coworkers were knocking off hundreds of tickets a day just using automated responses, leaving their customers fuming in anger with low satisfaction ratings, as people are very aware of being fed automated responses but the goal was not real support, it was just clearing the tickets by any means possible. I decided to try half and half, so if the support question was written by somebody who obviously would not understand the documentation (grandma trying to sell a car), I would help them but just provide shit support to everybody else in the form of macros like my coworkers. Of course this was unacceptable and I got canned the next week as promised. Was an interesting experience, I can imagine DO having an insane scope to their support requests like 'what is postgresql'. Anyway imho you should have taken the support position and schemed your way into development internally. This was my plan at eBay before they fired me, though they shut down the branch here a few months later and moved to the Philippines anyway so I wouldn't have lasted long regardless.
- zeta0134 7y ago
  I'm fortunate that my own company (Rackspace) at least has a level head about this sort of thing. My direct manager looks at my numbers (~60-80 interactions per month) and my colleagues (many hundreds of interactions per month) and correctly observes that we have different strengths, and that's the end of the discussion. I have a tendency to take my time and go deep on issues, and my coworkers will send me tickets that need that sort of investigative troubleshooting. My coworker meanwhile will rapidly run through the queue and look for simple tickets to knock out. He sweeps the quick-fix work away, but also knows his limits and will escalate the stuff he's not familiar with. Let me stress here, this is not nearly as easy of a problem to solve as it appears to be on the surface. We're struggling as a company right now because after our recent merge, a lot of our good talent has left and we're having to rebuild a lot of our teams. Even so, I'm still happy with our general approach. Management understands that employees will often have wildly different problem solving approaches and matching metrics, and that's perfectly OK as long as folks aren't genuinely slacking off and we as a team are still getting our customers taken care of. I think that's important to keep in mind no matter how big or small your support floor gets.

nikanj 7y ago

Linode is definitely in the minority here. Most companies, in tech and outside of it, seem to follow the DO model. Twitter provides decent service, and the official help channels provide canned responses and template emails. I somewhat blame people in tech, actually. More than one company is creating products that "cut customer service costs via machine learning", which is code for "pick keywords from incoming tickets and autoreply with a template"

guhidalg 7y ago
There’s nothing wrong with that approach, the person raising the support ticket likely hasn’t read through all the documentation of the product they’re using.
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  If implemented well, sure -- sometimes, maybe often, you can point a customer to a support document that directly answers their specific question and relieves some of the load on your staff. That's great. But the execution matters a lot, and DO's is currently not great. IIRC, it takes clicking through a few screens of "are you sure your question isn't in our generic documentation? How about this page? No? This one then? Still no? You're really sure you need to talk to someone about this error? sigh Okay, fine then." These systems should not be implemented as a barrier to reaching human support, but they often are.
- Pxtl 7y ago
  In all my experience with support, I have been referred to a document that helped me with my problem literally zero times, because if something went wrong the first thing I did was Google it and so I already saw the unhelpful document.
walrus01 7y ago
ISP here: The margins in bulk hosting services are incredibly thin, and companies have resorted to automation tools. If somebody asked me to run backend infrastructure for something like DigitalOcean or Linode, I would run away screaming. It would literally be my own personal hell. I would rather run any other sort of ISP services on the planet than a bulkhosting service where anybody with a pulse and $10 to $20/month can sign up for a VPS. I truly feel sorry for their first and second tier customer support people. I imagine the staff churn rate is incredible. People who work for these sorts of low-end hosting companies inevitably quit and try to work for an ISP that has more clueful customers. When you have people paying $250/month to colocate a few 1RU servers, the level of clue of the customer and amount of hassle you will get from the customer is a great deal less than a $15/month VPS customer.

ksec 7y ago

And Linode has always had faster CPU, I/O, Network. And lots of small things like that DO only catches up in the recent years, like pooled bandwidth. Although these days I tend to go with UpCloud, it is very similar to Linode and DO, except you can do custom instances like 20x vCPU with 1GB Memory, spin it up for $0.23 an hour. Compared to standard plan on Linode and DO, 20 vCPU with 96GB Memory would be $0.72/Hr.

notacoward 7y ago
I'd love to see the benchmarks you used. I've done a bunch over the years, mostly I/O focused because that's the most common bottleneck for the kind of work I do. While Linode does pretty well, especially compared to the cloud giants, DO has pretty much always come out on top.
- vbtechguy 7y ago
  Really depends on underlying hardware of the Linode and DO VPS servers as they can vary greatly especially on DO depending on datacenter and region you end up in. Newer DO datacenters getting newer hardware so difference compared to older DO datacenters is huge - benchmarks of same DO droplet plan on different hardware https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-us-15-month-droplet-benchmarks-intel-xeon-e5-2630lv2-vs-intel-xeon-gold-6140.16248/ https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-us-15-...
EugeneOZ 7y ago
I love Linode, their support is awesome, their CPUs on "Dedicated CPU Plans" are great (by benchmarks - similar to GCP n1 CPU), disks io bandwidth just amazing. But I had to leave them because their network is not so reliable. It was difficult decision and I tried to return few weeks ago (because I really love them), but again network in London was just not so great.

brlewis 7y ago

Long-time Linode customer here. What were the security screwups? I tried a couple searches but didn't turn up anything.

ilikepi 7y ago
Here's a search that will help, look no further than the site you're already on: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linode%20security&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linode%20security&sort=byPopul... They've had several high-profile breaches over the years.
thaumaturgy 7y ago
The two major ones were: A Bitcoin theft via the Linode Manager interface in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3654110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3654110 and a second Linode Manager compromise in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 In both cases, if you dig into the context a bit, the story turned out that Linode wasn't fully disclosing the breaches to their customers until they were forced to do so when the news about them reached a certain volume. They also may have been -- almost certainly were -- dishonest about the extent of the damage and how it may have impacted their other customers. At the time, their Manager interface was a ColdFusion application, which tends to be a big pile of bad juju. They started writing a new one from scratch after, I think, the second compromise. The really bad thing here is that they got soundly spanked for being less than truthful the first time, and then four years later -- when they'd had ample time to learn from that mistake -- they did it again. So there's a nonzero chance at any given time that Linode's infrastructure has been compromised and they know it and have decided not to tell you about it. That's what prompted me to start exploring DigitalOcean more. Unfortunately, I've found that there's a far greater chance that I'll experience actual trouble exacerbated by poor support than that I'll be impacted by an upstream breach, so about half my stuff still lives on in Linode.
- Twirrim 7y ago
  > So there's a nonzero chance at any given time that Linode's infrastructure has been compromised and they know it and have decided not to tell you about it. This is entirely the roots of my distrust of them right now. Mistakes happen. Companies I trust demonstrate that they've learned from their mistakes. My tolerance for mistakes is pretty low when it comes to security related things, though. If something has gone wrong, let me know so I can take remedial steps. Their handling of both of those incidents suggested I can't trust them to tell me in sufficient time to protect myself.

rapind 7y ago

I've been on Linode for 8+ years now (moved there from Slicehost when Rackspace swallowed them up) and their service (not necessarily customer support) has significantly degraded. Not sure I blame them though. They've become far more popular since I started with them and are probably doing their best to grow... but I no longer recommend them as I used to. Just my experience though.

theturtletalks 7y ago
That's how I feel about Scaleway. Scaling customer service is no easy task especially technical companies that require agents to have some understanding of the product.
- metildaa 7y ago
  I drop all traffic from Scaleway, they do not care about abuse coming from their network: https://badpackets.net/ongoing-large-scale-sip-attack-campaign-coming-from-online-sas-as12876/ https://badpackets.net/ongoing-large-scale-sip-attack-campai...
- chillidoor 7y ago
  Call me cynical but for those prices I don't expect amazing service or stability, so I don't run any production stuff there.
v4ult 7y ago
So who would you recommend?
- rapind 7y ago
  I don't really have a low budget alternative. I know that for our service we're evaluating both google and amazon cloud offerings, but only for our high availability services. I figure DO is in the same boat if not worse.
- kudu 7y ago
  I've been using Hetzner Cloud and have been quite happy with it.

AYBABTME 7y ago

> DO seems to have gone with the "hire cheap overseas support that almost but doesn't quite understand English" strategy, whereas the tier 1 guys at Linode have on occasion demonstrated more Linux systems administration expertise than I've got. That's simply not true. There's support engineers hired around the world, and depending on when your ticket is posted, someone awake at that time will answer. DO is super remote friendly and as a result, has employees (and support folks) everywhere on the planet. Not "cheap oversea support" at all. There's a lot of support folks in the US, Canada, Europe, and in India where they have a datacenter. disclosure: ex-employee

eganist 7y ago
> That's simply not true. There's support engineers hired around the world, and depending on when your ticket is posted, someone awake at that time will answer. DO is super remote friendly and as a result, has employees (and support folks) everywhere on the planet. Not "cheap oversea support" at all. There's a lot of support folks in the US, Canada, Europe, and in India where they have a datacenter. Going to guess from this tweet https://twitter.com/AntoineGrondin/status/1130962818822393856 https://twitter.com/AntoineGrondin/status/113096281882239385... that you're currently staffed at DO. That's fine; I know two people who do great work on DO's security team. But it would be helpful if you could disclose this when you comment about your employer publicly so that readers don't have to dig up your keybase and then your twitter account to understand it.
- AYBABTME 7y ago
  I don't work at DO anymore, but you're right I should disclose that I used to do so. Will edit my original post.
  - eganist 7y ago
    Much appreciated, thanks!
Aeolun 7y ago
But, isn’t hiring all over the world exactly because it is cheaper for the same kind of talent. I’m sure the company doesn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. Then of course, there is no guarantee these people speak and understand english perfectly.

terppy 7y ago

In response to my first support request DO sent me instructions for closing my account. I followed up and they refunded me a random few dollars.

ausjke 7y ago

second this, Linode for 15+ years here, tried DO a few times(but never left Linode), now 100% back with Linode. Linode even has an irc channel(you can use browser to access it), I rarely need support, but when I really need it, it is always fast, to the point, available.

nodesocket 7y ago

This headline is grossly misleading and very clickbaity "Killed our company". It's not exactly big business that you scale up to 10 droplets for short bursts, I am willing to bet their spend on DigitalOcean is less than $500 a month, yet the author is expecting enterprise support. DigitalOcean should go the route of AWS and kill off free support completely and offer paid support plans. Something like $49 a month or 10% of the accounts monthly spend. If you are a serious company with paying Fortune 500 customers, you need to act serious and pay up for premium support and stop expecting free.

unilynx 7y ago
They’re working on that and were sending out surveys a couple of weeks ago whether customers would be interested. They had a slightly higher minimum amount in mind for premier support You already get bumped to a higher tier of support once you hit 500/month spend for no additional fees but that just gives you promises for lower response times
- justforyou 7y ago
  I'm done using DO. It's usually a bad sign when a company can't meet current needs/expectations and then decides to try and productize their failures.
rat9988 7y ago
Well, not locking you your account for false negatives and unlocking it when you ask for it should be in the free support plan of any company. No one pays to get locked out, support plan or not.

nickpsecurity 7y ago

I'll throw in Prgmr.com. One of their owners, Alyn Post, is on Lobsters with us. They even donate hosting to the site. He's been a super-nice guy over the years. Given how cost-competitive market is, they mainly differentiate on straight-forward offerings with good service. So, I tell folks about them if concerned about good service or more ethical providers. https://prgmr.com/xen/ https://prgmr.com/xen/ Main, potential caveat is they're Xen-based hosting. That may or may not matter depending on what one wants to run. They support the major Linux's.

bluedino 7y ago
Luke used to post here quite a bit too

Havoc 7y ago

>the support on Linode is way, way, way better than DO's. Can't comment about support, but DO's tutorials on linux server random task 101 are fantastic. I was surprised how much of my ubuntu server setup googling ended up on DO pages.

ficklepickle 7y ago
So true! Well written, to the point and kept up to date.
bluedino 7y ago
most of them are well written. It’s the community though, not DO

chaostheory 7y ago

Does DO have different levels of support that you can pay for like AWS? I like that system. You pay when you need it. You pay more if you need more support. The difference in support DO vs Linode is probably due to DO being cheaper.

yeukhon 7y ago
AWS support is fixed contract. There is basic, business and enterprise. What do you mean by “you pay when you need it”?
- chaostheory 7y ago
  I can cancel the fixed contract any time. e.g. when I need support I buy a month of basic or business.
oefrha 7y ago
> The difference in support DO vs Linode is probably due to DO being cheaper. What? Most DO and Linode plans have exact same specs and cost exactly the same, and IIRC it was DO matching Linode. Although DO didn't seem to enforce their egress budget while Linode does. (I've been a customer of both for many years, and only dropped DO a few months ago.) EDIT: Also, according to some benchmarks (IIRC), for the exact same specs Linode usually has an edge in performance.

dannyw 7y ago

Linode support helped me diagnose some rare and obscure Linux OS error. They went above their call of duty and it’s why I’m still a customer.

api 7y ago

Vultr is underrated too. I've had nothing but positive tech support experiences with them. Their weird branding turns people off but they do not seem fly by night. We have used them for various things for years with very few problems.

WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
My only issue is the provisioning weirdness. I've had interesting issues automating deployment to the point that my current build script provisions 9 VMs, benchmarks them and shuts down the worst performing 6. Some of their co-location is CPU stressed.
kijin 7y ago
I've dealt with many Vultr instances on behalf of my clients, and I've had nothing but negative experiences with them. Unstable performance even on top-tier plans. Internal network issues that support keeps trying to blame their customer for. Nowadays when I find that a new or prospective client has been using Vultr, the first thing I recommend is to move off of Vultr. When there's an issue with Linode's platform, they discover it before I do and open a ticket to let me know they're working on it. When there's an issue with Vultr, the burden of proof seems to be on me to convince them that it's their problem not mine.

randomsearch 7y ago

Having used both for years, I’d probably recommend DO. None of the big security issues, but also I’ve found more downtime with Linode, don’t know if they’re upgrading their infrastructure a lot for some reason.

ajford 7y ago

My current employer uses Linode, and yeah, they have pretty good support. However, I've been using DO for the last 5 years, and haven't needed to reach out to support once. But I've had to contact Linode support about 5 times in the last year.