7 ms·

Two large, lengthy outages within a few months of each other? I hate to piggy-back on Amazon's follies, but it's times like these that make me love my Linode bo

Two large, lengthy outages within a few months of each other? I hate to piggy-back on Amazon's follies, but it's times like these that make me love my Linode boxes. Total downtime over the last 5 years? 5 hours. I really couldn't ask for a better hosting company. Edit: The 5 hours are what I've noticed from either personal servers or those of friends/acquaintances. YMMV.

Derferman 15y ago
I must have picked a bad time to become a Linode customer. My node in Fremont has been up for two days and has already seen two network outages.
- techiferous 15y ago
  Just a fluke. I've been a Linode customer since 2008 and have managed multiple Linodes (on the East coast) and as far as I can tell, Linode has given me more than four nines.
- rednaught 15y ago
  Overall they have great service. Only their Fremont location has been a bit touchy this year. I've been with them since the days they used UML before Xen and if it's any consolation, I have experienced at least one downtime in each DC(but this was over the course of many years now). Unless you plan for distributed systems, expect some failures from time to time no matter who is the provider.
- jwilliams 15y ago
  From what I've encountered, and what I've read, Fremont has been the most patchy Linode DC - they've had two outages there recently. One just a day or two ago, and another in early May. Apparently there was a significant outage late last year too. p.s. The last two weren't network outages - they were total power failures. Your 'node would have been hard-booted as a result.
- jccodez 15y ago
  I noticed the same outage. I signed up a week ago and was moving some stuff to the freemont site. Maybe I should have picked Dallas.
d2 15y ago
I'm with you there yo.
rednaught 15y ago
I'm guessing you haven't been affected by any of the Fremont(Hurricane Electric DC) outages? I have a lot of Linode boxes and love their service but I'm still splitting load with different providers as well.
- techiferous 15y ago
  Do you know how long the total downtime was?
  - rednaught 15y ago
    Linode is pretty good about accurate updates for Requests For Outages(RFO): http://status.linode.com/ http://status.linode.com/ I don't keep track of the totals but I think it you search their forums, I seem to recall someone who had monitored them with Pingdom or Wormly(or equivalent) for a fair period of time.
    - techiferous 15y ago
      Thanks. I went through and counted up the downtime and came up with 16.5 hours down for Fremont in the past year (from today).
      - mrinterweb 15y ago
        I remember the outages at the Freemont location. Every outage this year has been related to power issues. The company running the Fremont datacenter is Hurricane Electric. I hope Hurricane Electric gets things sorted soon at the Fremont datacenter. Every time I think about the company name "Hurricane Electric", I think "now there's a company name that inspires confidence." The name "Disaster Service" must have already been taken.
- whakojacko 15y ago
  Yep, the Fremont DC has been down at least 3 times in the past year. I still love Linode, but i'll probably move my (personal) VPS to another of their facilities.
doubaokun 15y ago
Linode down for 1 hour 1 day ago.
- sriramk 15y ago
  Yes and it was particularly painful since my blog was on HN's front page when my VPS went down
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
dbingham 15y ago
Yep. A year a half so far with my linode. Not so much as a minute of down time.
dasil003 15y ago
It's worth pointing out that I am in the US-East with 8 beefy instances and my site stayed up during the entirety of both outages, so don't assume you're getting better uptime than all AWS customers.
techiferous 15y ago
Yep, I'm on Linode, too. Love it. Linode guarantees three nines but in practice it gets close to four nines. EC2 looks like it's falling below three nines for some regions this year, even though it guarantees 99.95%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nines_(engineering) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nines_(engineering)
rexreed 15y ago
For the vast majority of projects I've worked on, I just can't seem to justify the cost of Amazon or similar cloud environments, especially given the relatively poor performance and increasing risk. A simple shared host works for most of what I'm doing, and when it doesn't, a virtual dedicated or something like Linode works well. While these environments don't protect from single points of failure, it seems that neither does Amazon. A smart clustering / distributed approach would work equally well in the Amazon cloud as it would for shared hosting / VPS type services. I'm not sure I understand the draw of Amazon for startups. Even from an economic perspective, it seems to me to be more expensive than I had hoped, and the promise that the Cloud allows for highly flexible scale at low risk doesn't seem to match to reality. Then again, there have been precious few outages, so maybe the reliability is there? In any case, it was the economics and poor performance, rather than these outages, that leave me wondering if Amazon is really worth it.
troels 15y ago
I see a lot of Linode customers here. Where are all the Rackspace users? Or are we a rareity on hn?
- mocko 15y ago
  I run a handful of virutal machines on Rackspace's private cloud. And while their customer service tends to be dire the VPS's themselves are pretty solid. Desperately needs more features though - with a private back-end network between the servers (rather than shared!?) it'll be appropriate for many more applications.
wisty 15y ago
You don't get what you don't pay for. "Linode works for me" is just anecdotal. I suspect Linode has smaller margins than Amazon, though, and tries to pass savings onto their customers despite not having Amazon's economies of scale. An Amazon small instance has 1.7 GB of memory, and 160 GB of "local instance storage" (which Amazon will wipe when your instance goes down), and "1 EC2 unit" (a single core on a 1.2 GHz 2007 Xeon processor). It will cost you about $60 a month. A similar plan on Linode will give you 1.5 GB RAM, and 60 GB storage. They will also throw in bandwidth and persistent storage, though. Amazon tends to give you more flexibility (on demand prices, spot prices, dedicated prices, bigger instances, smaller instances, persistent storage, cheap temporary storage, and so on). But it's not as easy to use as Linode. Linode targets people who want a cloud server. Amazon has a number of uses.
- astrodust 15y ago
  An Amazon "small" instance in no way compares to a Linode 1.5GB server. Linode beats the pants off of Amazon at every price point so badly that it's hard to even compare the two. A 4GB Linode performs faster than an 8GB EC2 "large" instance. Only the Amazon "High-CPU" instances come close, so you'd need to compare an EC2 "medium" with a Linode 2GB to make it even close to fair. The Linode also comes with 8 virtual cores, the EC2 unit with 2. The real trouble with Amazon is the erratic performance of the EBS system which can kill an otherwise fast system. Linode's I/O does seem to be much more consistent and predictable. Amazon's storage capacity and the cost of storage is unmatched, though. If you have a mountain of data, Linode will be prohibitively expensive.

Derferman 15y ago

I must have picked a bad time to become a Linode customer. My node in Fremont has been up for two days and has already seen two network outages.

techiferous 15y ago
Just a fluke. I've been a Linode customer since 2008 and have managed multiple Linodes (on the East coast) and as far as I can tell, Linode has given me more than four nines.
rednaught 15y ago
Overall they have great service. Only their Fremont location has been a bit touchy this year. I've been with them since the days they used UML before Xen and if it's any consolation, I have experienced at least one downtime in each DC(but this was over the course of many years now). Unless you plan for distributed systems, expect some failures from time to time no matter who is the provider.
jwilliams 15y ago
From what I've encountered, and what I've read, Fremont has been the most patchy Linode DC - they've had two outages there recently. One just a day or two ago, and another in early May. Apparently there was a significant outage late last year too. p.s. The last two weren't network outages - they were total power failures. Your 'node would have been hard-booted as a result.
jccodez 15y ago
I noticed the same outage. I signed up a week ago and was moving some stuff to the freemont site. Maybe I should have picked Dallas.

d2 15y ago

I'm with you there yo.

rednaught 15y ago

I'm guessing you haven't been affected by any of the Fremont(Hurricane Electric DC) outages? I have a lot of Linode boxes and love their service but I'm still splitting load with different providers as well.

techiferous 15y ago
Do you know how long the total downtime was?
- rednaught 15y ago
  Linode is pretty good about accurate updates for Requests For Outages(RFO): http://status.linode.com/ http://status.linode.com/ I don't keep track of the totals but I think it you search their forums, I seem to recall someone who had monitored them with Pingdom or Wormly(or equivalent) for a fair period of time.
  - techiferous 15y ago
    Thanks. I went through and counted up the downtime and came up with 16.5 hours down for Fremont in the past year (from today).
    - mrinterweb 15y ago
      I remember the outages at the Freemont location. Every outage this year has been related to power issues. The company running the Fremont datacenter is Hurricane Electric. I hope Hurricane Electric gets things sorted soon at the Fremont datacenter. Every time I think about the company name "Hurricane Electric", I think "now there's a company name that inspires confidence." The name "Disaster Service" must have already been taken.
whakojacko 15y ago
Yep, the Fremont DC has been down at least 3 times in the past year. I still love Linode, but i'll probably move my (personal) VPS to another of their facilities.

doubaokun 15y ago

Linode down for 1 hour 1 day ago.

sriramk 15y ago
Yes and it was particularly painful since my blog was on HN's front page when my VPS went down

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

dbingham 15y ago

Yep. A year a half so far with my linode. Not so much as a minute of down time.

dasil003 15y ago

It's worth pointing out that I am in the US-East with 8 beefy instances and my site stayed up during the entirety of both outages, so don't assume you're getting better uptime than all AWS customers.

techiferous 15y ago

Yep, I'm on Linode, too. Love it. Linode guarantees three nines but in practice it gets close to four nines. EC2 looks like it's falling below three nines for some regions this year, even though it guarantees 99.95%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nines_(engineering) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nines_(engineering)

rexreed 15y ago

For the vast majority of projects I've worked on, I just can't seem to justify the cost of Amazon or similar cloud environments, especially given the relatively poor performance and increasing risk. A simple shared host works for most of what I'm doing, and when it doesn't, a virtual dedicated or something like Linode works well. While these environments don't protect from single points of failure, it seems that neither does Amazon. A smart clustering / distributed approach would work equally well in the Amazon cloud as it would for shared hosting / VPS type services. I'm not sure I understand the draw of Amazon for startups. Even from an economic perspective, it seems to me to be more expensive than I had hoped, and the promise that the Cloud allows for highly flexible scale at low risk doesn't seem to match to reality. Then again, there have been precious few outages, so maybe the reliability is there? In any case, it was the economics and poor performance, rather than these outages, that leave me wondering if Amazon is really worth it.

troels 15y ago

I see a lot of Linode customers here. Where are all the Rackspace users? Or are we a rareity on hn?

mocko 15y ago
I run a handful of virutal machines on Rackspace's private cloud. And while their customer service tends to be dire the VPS's themselves are pretty solid. Desperately needs more features though - with a private back-end network between the servers (rather than shared!?) it'll be appropriate for many more applications.

wisty 15y ago

You don't get what you don't pay for. "Linode works for me" is just anecdotal. I suspect Linode has smaller margins than Amazon, though, and tries to pass savings onto their customers despite not having Amazon's economies of scale. An Amazon small instance has 1.7 GB of memory, and 160 GB of "local instance storage" (which Amazon will wipe when your instance goes down), and "1 EC2 unit" (a single core on a 1.2 GHz 2007 Xeon processor). It will cost you about $60 a month. A similar plan on Linode will give you 1.5 GB RAM, and 60 GB storage. They will also throw in bandwidth and persistent storage, though. Amazon tends to give you more flexibility (on demand prices, spot prices, dedicated prices, bigger instances, smaller instances, persistent storage, cheap temporary storage, and so on). But it's not as easy to use as Linode. Linode targets people who want a cloud server. Amazon has a number of uses.

astrodust 15y ago
An Amazon "small" instance in no way compares to a Linode 1.5GB server. Linode beats the pants off of Amazon at every price point so badly that it's hard to even compare the two. A 4GB Linode performs faster than an 8GB EC2 "large" instance. Only the Amazon "High-CPU" instances come close, so you'd need to compare an EC2 "medium" with a Linode 2GB to make it even close to fair. The Linode also comes with 8 virtual cores, the EC2 unit with 2. The real trouble with Amazon is the erratic performance of the EBS system which can kill an otherwise fast system. Linode's I/O does seem to be much more consistent and predictable. Amazon's storage capacity and the cost of storage is unmatched, though. If you have a mountain of data, Linode will be prohibitively expensive.