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I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of support. That thinking was reinforced when you

• fastball 6y ago
  You might be experiencing a form of survivorship bias / confirmation bias here. If you work at Linode, presumably people would come up to you asking about something they then couched to you as a Linode clone. That doesn't mean it's how people were talking about DO when not directly speaking with someone at Linode.
  • yte14 6y ago
    I don’t understand how that impacts my point at all. If an opinion is only held in one context it’s not actually held? Is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry, I don’t follow. Before DO VPS was (and somewhat remains) a community even among competition. I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the example given.
    • jiofih 6y ago
      He is saying that your perspective as a Linode employee might not represent how others saw Digital Ocean at the time. Which for me is glaringly obvious from your comments. EDIT: s/general public/others
      • yte14 6y ago
        I wasn’t talking about the general public. I was talking about the incumbents. I said competitors, not customers, and that wasn’t a corrected typo. Edit: I responded to something that’s now been silently edited out and replaced with “others”.
        • jiofih 6y ago
          I guess you may think of that in the same way the incumbents considered Amazon “another e-commerce play” or Google as “another search engine” while being blind to the real changes happening underneath.
        • random5634 6y ago
          I've noticed that the folks who aren't so attentive to product / market fit and other items (customer ergonomics maybe?) tend not to really see what they are missing, what's different about the "other" guy that means they are in some ways cleaning up. I wonder if that describes linode a bit. Security: One issue early on for Linode was just abysmal security despite claims. Lots of denial and lack of transparency too which was even worse. For a biz focused offering that was just a no go. Even 8 year ago there was stuff with the bitcoin hacks? Do folks remember any of this? They might have been using cold fusion or something because they got hacked again I think just like a year later? These weren't just little corner case hacks / issues - but major with plenty of denial and obfuscation from linode. There was this hack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 I'm sure I'm missing others (unsecured mysql databases etc?). --- Anyways, at least in my world linode was actually seen as the cheap/crappy offering even though they actually cost more which was weird. But I def told folks to stay away just because of the repeated lack of care around security. I had no idea DO was at 350M+ ARR - nice job by them - wow!
  • fourstar 6y ago
    Lol. Typical HN midwit reply. Edit: lol at the child poster to this who told me to “go back to my hole” before editing it with the HR-approved reply. Didn’t want to risk any precious karma eh? And yes you’re right that this is “the wrong forum” — all the real hackers left HN years before you joined.
    • jiofih 6y ago
      You seem to be in the wrong forum - personal attacks are not welcome here.
• jiofih 6y ago
  > it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their web UI also has always been miles ahead. The competition also didn’t have SSD as an option until much later, and that was a HUGE selling point for digital ocean at the time.
  • shiftpgdn 6y ago
    Lol, what? DO was basically a page for page copy of linode's site and product offering in 2011-2013.
    • disgrunt 6y ago
      They were both modeled after services like Slicehost I believe.
      • yte15 6y ago
        Negative. Slicehost launched in the middle of Linode pivoting virtualization stacks after proving out the business and running into limitations of their first stack (UML). Slicehost was ... 2006, if memory serves? Linode was a few years old by that point. For those keeping score, Linode then went to Xen and now KVM just like everyone else. Linode and Slicehost were very similar stories, though. Slicehost bootstrapped as well and was run by good people.
        • neom 6y ago
          You do know that Jason Seats, the founder of Slicehost, was pivotal in the DigitalOcean story also?
          • yte15 6y ago
            Yes. What’s your point?
• havelhovel 6y ago
  Whether your claim is true or not, there’s more to a product than the underlying technology. Frankly, this line of discussion reads as sour grapes and reflects poorly on the Linode team.
  • wastedhours 6y ago
    > more to a product than the underlying technology Back when I was just hacking about on some SaaS ideas I looked into both Linode and DO. The positioning of both seemed quite separate to me, and DO "felt" more like the product I should be using. Whether or not the tech was different, or that feeling was justified by anything other than an initial veneer is well up for debate - but entirely agree, they're discreet products, and this doesn't really reflect well on Linode.
  • webmobdev 6y ago
    I don't think it reflects poorly on them at all. When DO started everyone still used the help document of Linode and Slicehost to setup and spin a server on DO. They could do that because DO was a clone of these services. To their credit DO improved and grew, and that's no mean feat.
    • ksec 6y ago
      Yes. For those of us that actually went through the Slicehost, Linode era, the time when paying per month and not per hour for a simple VPS before everything was rolled into the word Cloud. Those comment read more like an accurate account of history while others read it as an attack of a company.
    • selcuka 6y ago
      They all offered a VPS, which is basically a Linux box with root access. Any Linux tutorial would work on all three services. I'm not arguing if DO was a clone or not, but saying that "you could use Linode/Slicehost documentation because DO was a clone" is a bit of a stretch.
• stanmancan 6y ago
  I was a huge Linode fan for years. I used them exclusively. DO showed up and slowly but surely started being the better deal. Lower entry points, better specs, and then finally a more robust product line. I slowly found myself going to DO for new servers and eventually moved everything there for simplicities sake. Linode still has a special place in my heart, but they have some work to do if they want to remain competitive.
  • jamroom 6y ago
    Wow - really? I use both Linode and DO extensively and Linode is better on almost all fronts in my experience. Faster servers, better network, Linode's Object Storage is way better than DO's "spaces" and Linode's support is hands down the better of the two. If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless you're already there?
    • maximus024 6y ago
      > If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless you're already there? I would go with anyone other than Linode, considering they left the control plane running a publicly accessible unpatched version of ColdFusion, which led to multiple instances of them losing control of customer's data. Anyone but Linode.
      • jamroom 6y ago
        Yeah I know about that incident - but also believe companies have the ability to learn from past mistakes and do better.
        • maximus024 6y ago
          Unfortunately it wasn't a single incident.. fool me once..
      • jjav 6y ago
        I mean that was terrible, but I know full well that every company ever will have dumb vulnerabilities occasionally, so by that metric I could never use anyone.
• jcampbell1 6y ago
  As an original Slicehost customer, and long time Digital Ocean and Linode customer, your version of history is bullshit. I was looking to move from Rackspace after the Slicehost aquisition. Moved to Digital Ocean because of the SSD offering. It performed wonderfully. Needed bigger servers, and Linode had just created an offering competitive with Digital Ocean. I signed up and ran some benchmarks and Linode was about 25% faster than DO. I moved everything to Linode and the company has been there ever since. For what it is worth, my Linode bill is currently about $2000, and DO is $40. I am calling you out as a loyal Linode customer who thinks Linode is great.
• thaumaturgy 6y ago
  I've been a customer of both for years -- in Linode's case, since 2009. Your comments are coming across like sour grapes, so I think this is a good opportunity to hear about some of Linode's mistakes from a longtime Linode customer. First, you guys had the customer support interface compromise in 2013, and the worst part about that was the way that it was handled by your organization. Linode wouldn't own up to the compromise initially, dragged their feet on announcing anything about it, and then tried to downplay it. Then there was another similar incident in 2016, and, amazingly, the response from Linode was nearly identical to 2013. No lessons learned. After that, I started seeing influential people on HN say things like, "don't use Linode". I stayed on Linode, but I also started using DigitalOcean after the 2013 compromise and split my hosted services evenly between the two of you after 2016. DigitalOcean aggressively iterated multiple aspects of their products in that time period. They announced block storage in 2016. Your customers immediately started asking when Linode would come out with a competing service, and that didn't happen until 2018. Here, it was Linode rushing to build a DigitalOcean feature. Linode initially focused on expanding RAM and disk space for your customers' instances at the same price points. Every year, you'd announce, "hey, we're doubling your RAM!" or some such thing. It was awesome, but I also thought at the time that you were shooting yourselves in the foot. How many customers looked at that and went, "yep, cool, now I can downsize my Linode and give them less money each month"? I know I did, at least a couple of times. Then, you chose to try to compete with DigitalOcean on price. As a long time Linode customer, I never wanted that. If I want a $5 VPS, I'll just go to DigitalOcean. Hell, you shouldn't even want me as a customer for $5. Let them deal with me instead. I wanted Linode to be the larger, slightly more expensive provider with the even better support. I've had to deal with Linode support a few times over the years. They've mostly been awesome and first class. I've never been unhappy enough with Linode to want to leave altogether. Both of you should be focused on eating AWS, not each other; showing up to a competitor's HN thread to complain about them being copycats is really poor form.
  • ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
    This just nailed just about everything I was going to say. I’ve used and liked both since both started and this entire thread is pretty embarrassing.