5 ms·

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 offi

by 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.
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  This race to the bottom has reached a point that it's harming customers. It's okay to be more expensive than the competition if you provide a better service.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    Imho, that point was reached in hosting over 15 years ago (which is why I sold the hosting company I had back then). We’ve seen some short lived upticks periodically since then, but they all end up going back to shit as they tried to scale.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    Personal opinion, it's really important in the ISP/hosting world to identify what market categories are a race to the bottom, and if at all possible, refuse to participate in them. I look at companies selling $5 to $15/month VPS services and try to figure out how many customers they need to be set up for monthly recurring services, in order to pay for reasonably reliable and redundant infrastructure, and the math just doesn't pencil out without: a) massive oversubscription b) near full automation of support, neglect of actual customer issues, callous indifference caused by overworked first tier support Conversely, as a customer, you should be suspicious when some company is offering a ridiculous amount of RAM, disk space and "unlimited 1000 Mbps!" at a cheap price. You should expect that there will be basically no support, it might have two nines of uptime, you're responsible for doing all your own offsite backups, etc. If you use such a service for anything that you would consider "production", you need to design your entire configuration of the OS and daemons/software on the VM with one thing in mind: The VM might disappear completely at any time, arbitrarily, and not come back, and any efforts to resolve a situation through customer support will be futile.
    - alexis_fr 7y ago
      There is the same risk of being kicked off when using Amazon AWS. The rules are different, but there will be situations where you lose everything (imagine you become visible for a political reason and the landscape shifts a bit).
fouc 7y ago
Linode was more of a bootstrapped business, it grew slowly and steadily. Digital Ocean was always built to grow fast from the beginning. I think that the size of the company or how fast they grow is a good proxy for having poor customer support. What we should be doing is finding the slow growing businesses or the mid-tier (not too small, not too big) businesses to take our business to.

by nikanj 7y ago

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.

thaumaturgy 7y ago
This race to the bottom has reached a point that it's harming customers. It's okay to be more expensive than the competition if you provide a better service.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  Imho, that point was reached in hosting over 15 years ago (which is why I sold the hosting company I had back then). We’ve seen some short lived upticks periodically since then, but they all end up going back to shit as they tried to scale.
- walrus01 7y ago
  Personal opinion, it's really important in the ISP/hosting world to identify what market categories are a race to the bottom, and if at all possible, refuse to participate in them. I look at companies selling $5 to $15/month VPS services and try to figure out how many customers they need to be set up for monthly recurring services, in order to pay for reasonably reliable and redundant infrastructure, and the math just doesn't pencil out without: a) massive oversubscription b) near full automation of support, neglect of actual customer issues, callous indifference caused by overworked first tier support Conversely, as a customer, you should be suspicious when some company is offering a ridiculous amount of RAM, disk space and "unlimited 1000 Mbps!" at a cheap price. You should expect that there will be basically no support, it might have two nines of uptime, you're responsible for doing all your own offsite backups, etc. If you use such a service for anything that you would consider "production", you need to design your entire configuration of the OS and daemons/software on the VM with one thing in mind: The VM might disappear completely at any time, arbitrarily, and not come back, and any efforts to resolve a situation through customer support will be futile.
  - alexis_fr 7y ago
    There is the same risk of being kicked off when using Amazon AWS. The rules are different, but there will be situations where you lose everything (imagine you become visible for a political reason and the landscape shifts a bit).

fouc 7y ago

Linode was more of a bootstrapped business, it grew slowly and steadily. Digital Ocean was always built to grow fast from the beginning. I think that the size of the company or how fast they grow is a good proxy for having poor customer support. What we should be doing is finding the slow growing businesses or the mid-tier (not too small, not too big) businesses to take our business to.