4 ms·

With all these negatives, there must be a really compelling reason to stay. What is it?

PietKachelhout 6y ago
The owner of the company thinks they are great because you can call them when there is a problem. I'm having a hard time convincing him that these are issues I've never had at other providers. Certainly not so many. We are moving everything away. Most of our servers are with another provider already. And we haven't had any similar issues there. I've never called them! And I forgot to mention the connectivity issues at Linode. When the whole London datacenter was unreachable for 2 hours we lost some customers.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  This is something more companies need to realize: Yes, you should be easily and quickly reachable by phone so that when (not if) things go wrong, I can get good service and resolve it quickly. But if I'm calling you, you have most likely already failed. If I'm calling for information, your documentation has failed to make that information accessible (it either wasn't documented, or not easy enough to find). If I'm calling to resolve an issue (technical or billing), it would have been a lot better if it didn't happen in the first place.
- gerhardlazu 6y ago
  I use Digital Ocean, Scaleway, Linode, Google, Cloudflare & Amazon on a daily basis, and I have experienced networking issues on all providers this year. It's all public, some even wrote lengthy post-mortems, most have been posted on HN. When failures happen, it's always a series of unfortunate incidents. When we've hit issues with Linode, we reached out and worked on what we can improve in our changelog.com setup, and discussed about the improvements that we can expect on the Linode end. Our common interest is a more resilient system, which requires a healthy collaboration, and Linode has been a great technology partner for us. Expect to see these write-ups on changelog.com as soon as these improvements have shipped, and we have hard data to support the claims ; ) I'm sorry to hear that things have not been as smooth for you on Linode. I hope that you will find an infra provider that you will be able to rely on and work with as we do. Not all collaborations will work out, and that's OK. It's also OK to be annoyed, fed up with the way things are and look for something different, something more suitable for you. My only ask is that you share your migration story with the changelog.com community. That is something that I would want to hear about.
shaicoleman 6y ago
In a previous job a couple of years ago, I experienced regular issues with Linode (hypervisor errors, storage errors, performance issues, networking issues, etc.). Despite all that, management decided to stay with Linode for the following reasons: * Change is hard, and "better the devil you know" mentality. * The instance pricing looks cheap compared to AWS. e.g. c5.xlarge ($124) vs 8GB-Balanced ($40) that Linode charges. In reality it isn't so cheap because it's poor oversold technology. * AWS/GCP have exorbitant bandwidth pricing. Linode bandwidth is very generous, as its pooled across all servers in the account. * Having someone to pick up the phone 24/7 when there's a problem is a big plus in theory. However, it's much better not to need to call in the first place because things just work. * Migrating providers can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavour. * Technical debt, interdependencies, manually configured snowflake servers and infrastructure, no documentation, etc. makes changes risky. * Not enough DevOps on the team, and too many fires to put out, and shiny features to ship means cloud provider migration is low on the priority list.

The owner of the company thinks they are great because you can call them when there is a problem. I'm having a hard time convincing him that these are issues I've never had at other providers. Certainly not so many. We are moving everything away. Most of our servers are with another provider already. And we haven't had any similar issues there. I've never called them! And I forgot to mention the connectivity issues at Linode. When the whole London datacenter was unreachable for 2 hours we lost some customers.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
This is something more companies need to realize: Yes, you should be easily and quickly reachable by phone so that when (not if) things go wrong, I can get good service and resolve it quickly. But if I'm calling you, you have most likely already failed. If I'm calling for information, your documentation has failed to make that information accessible (it either wasn't documented, or not easy enough to find). If I'm calling to resolve an issue (technical or billing), it would have been a lot better if it didn't happen in the first place.
gerhardlazu 6y ago
I use Digital Ocean, Scaleway, Linode, Google, Cloudflare & Amazon on a daily basis, and I have experienced networking issues on all providers this year. It's all public, some even wrote lengthy post-mortems, most have been posted on HN. When failures happen, it's always a series of unfortunate incidents. When we've hit issues with Linode, we reached out and worked on what we can improve in our changelog.com setup, and discussed about the improvements that we can expect on the Linode end. Our common interest is a more resilient system, which requires a healthy collaboration, and Linode has been a great technology partner for us. Expect to see these write-ups on changelog.com as soon as these improvements have shipped, and we have hard data to support the claims ; ) I'm sorry to hear that things have not been as smooth for you on Linode. I hope that you will find an infra provider that you will be able to rely on and work with as we do. Not all collaborations will work out, and that's OK. It's also OK to be annoyed, fed up with the way things are and look for something different, something more suitable for you. My only ask is that you share your migration story with the changelog.com community. That is something that I would want to hear about.

shaicoleman 6y ago

In a previous job a couple of years ago, I experienced regular issues with Linode (hypervisor errors, storage errors, performance issues, networking issues, etc.). Despite all that, management decided to stay with Linode for the following reasons: * Change is hard, and "better the devil you know" mentality. * The instance pricing looks cheap compared to AWS. e.g. c5.xlarge ($124) vs 8GB-Balanced ($40) that Linode charges. In reality it isn't so cheap because it's poor oversold technology. * AWS/GCP have exorbitant bandwidth pricing. Linode bandwidth is very generous, as its pooled across all servers in the account. * Having someone to pick up the phone 24/7 when there's a problem is a big plus in theory. However, it's much better not to need to call in the first place because things just work. * Migrating providers can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavour. * Technical debt, interdependencies, manually configured snowflake servers and infrastructure, no documentation, etc. makes changes risky. * Not enough DevOps on the team, and too many fires to put out, and shiny features to ship means cloud provider migration is low on the priority list.