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I was really close to becoming a Linode customer last week for several large boxes, but ended up buying hardware and self-hosting. The cost to cut in an enterp

I was really close to becoming a Linode customer last week for several large boxes, but ended up buying hardware and self-hosting. The cost to cut in an enterprise fiber link (1000/400) to our office was surprisingly low. My experience trialling linode as a paying customer was really positive (VERY competitive price, great performance), only complaint being their NodeBalancer can’t automatically handle certificates like CF and AWS can. Also, it needs to be mentioned because there’s a lot of negative in this thread: HUGE shout out to Linode for being massive community supporters and donating HEAPS of free compute to uni clubs and such, pretty much anyone with a charity certificate who asks for it. Fantastic company that’s easy to ‘just talk to people’ rather than trying to find the right support silo.

telesilla 5y ago
We've moved to AWS since, but we started our early cloud infra on Linode and was always so impressed by their customer support. Genuine good quality. Let's hope it keeps going well.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Customer support really is top notch. Linode and DO are so close/competitive on most things, but the DO support is garbage and they will screw you over with no remorse. Linode on the other hand will answer you with a human who cares. Even if it's a stupid PEBKAC issue. I may end up moving to AWS, but I'm dreading the pricing. Just estimating alone you damn near have to hire an expert. There's dozens of different ways to screw yourself and pay too much.
  - JanSt 5y ago
    I have only great experiences with DO support. Really fast and helpful. I even got some free credits ($50?) at some point for a small inconvenience .
- danuker 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, why did you move to AWS?
  - telesilla 5y ago
    We needed to scale quickly, AWS allowed us to consolidate a lot of services, and our team made the collective decision to migrate and take advantage of all there is to offer. It's worked out very well. We spend more, yes, on services but less on hours spent working.
christophilus 5y ago
Their support is the best of any cloud provider I’ve used. Hands down. They are excellent.
- graderjs 5y ago
  I agree but one thing I noticed was like the first couple of tickets I opened responses were almost immediate. And then after that response times went down to 24 hours. I'm not sure if that's because I was on free trial credits and I hadn't actually made any purchases so it was deprioritized. Or if maybe I was using the wrong support email address? Has anyone had this experience? At first I uniformly thought their support was top notch as well, and I still think the quality is among the best I've seen, but the response times went down. I don't know why.
- karmasimida 5y ago
  Could it possibly be that their customers base is limited so they can have better support for each of them?
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Try vultr, they've worked well for me for small->medium projects.
- blooalien 5y ago
  I've heard really good things about Vultr. I'll have to keep their bookmark handy in case Akamai brutally screws Linode up.
- cutler 5y ago
  Likewise with Hetzner. Great prices with decent support.
RowanH 5y ago
I've used Linode for 10+ years with a handful of long running projects. Support in the rare occasion (until 1 slow ticket recently) has always been absolutely amazing - real humans. If Josh is reading this your name has come up on a few tickets and answered promptly. A grade! Services have been solid. And pricing has been very reasonable. (knock on wood...) never ever had a significant outage and just don't think about going anywhere else for small scale projects. Even when I've needed some stuff from AWS I just host the core bits in Linode and pick and choose the AWS items. Hope Akamai doesn't do the dirty...
- dmingod666 5y ago
  Second that, fond memories of using their service ages ago. First VMs I had was from them. They had very good documentation and everything was simple. Then I was introduced to 'wall of text' as a service, AWS, and never looked back.
  - no_wizard 5y ago
    Why move to AWS if you’re happy with Linode? Genuine question
    - abofh 5y ago
      Not OP, but I can answer - also was very happy with Linode for boxes, but there's a lot more than just boxes these days - queues, streaming, metrics, monitoring, containers, etc. Once an application moves from 'runs on a fixed number of boxes' to 'autoscaling, automatic healing/recovery and distributed databases', the overhead of DIY gets high (and I'm paid to do that!). My clients pay a fairly high premium for AWS because it allows them to move _faster_, not that it's _cheaper_.
      - dielll 5y ago
        are you a devops or SRE?
        5y ago

telesilla 5y ago

We've moved to AWS since, but we started our early cloud infra on Linode and was always so impressed by their customer support. Genuine good quality. Let's hope it keeps going well.

freedomben 5y ago
Customer support really is top notch. Linode and DO are so close/competitive on most things, but the DO support is garbage and they will screw you over with no remorse. Linode on the other hand will answer you with a human who cares. Even if it's a stupid PEBKAC issue. I may end up moving to AWS, but I'm dreading the pricing. Just estimating alone you damn near have to hire an expert. There's dozens of different ways to screw yourself and pay too much.
- JanSt 5y ago
  I have only great experiences with DO support. Really fast and helpful. I even got some free credits ($50?) at some point for a small inconvenience .
danuker 5y ago
Out of curiosity, why did you move to AWS?
- telesilla 5y ago
  We needed to scale quickly, AWS allowed us to consolidate a lot of services, and our team made the collective decision to migrate and take advantage of all there is to offer. It's worked out very well. We spend more, yes, on services but less on hours spent working.

christophilus 5y ago

Their support is the best of any cloud provider I’ve used. Hands down. They are excellent.

graderjs 5y ago
I agree but one thing I noticed was like the first couple of tickets I opened responses were almost immediate. And then after that response times went down to 24 hours. I'm not sure if that's because I was on free trial credits and I hadn't actually made any purchases so it was deprioritized. Or if maybe I was using the wrong support email address? Has anyone had this experience? At first I uniformly thought their support was top notch as well, and I still think the quality is among the best I've seen, but the response times went down. I don't know why.
karmasimida 5y ago
Could it possibly be that their customers base is limited so they can have better support for each of them?

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Try vultr, they've worked well for me for small->medium projects.

blooalien 5y ago
I've heard really good things about Vultr. I'll have to keep their bookmark handy in case Akamai brutally screws Linode up.
cutler 5y ago
Likewise with Hetzner. Great prices with decent support.

RowanH 5y ago

I've used Linode for 10+ years with a handful of long running projects. Support in the rare occasion (until 1 slow ticket recently) has always been absolutely amazing - real humans. If Josh is reading this your name has come up on a few tickets and answered promptly. A grade! Services have been solid. And pricing has been very reasonable. (knock on wood...) never ever had a significant outage and just don't think about going anywhere else for small scale projects. Even when I've needed some stuff from AWS I just host the core bits in Linode and pick and choose the AWS items. Hope Akamai doesn't do the dirty...

dmingod666 5y ago
Second that, fond memories of using their service ages ago. First VMs I had was from them. They had very good documentation and everything was simple. Then I was introduced to 'wall of text' as a service, AWS, and never looked back.
- no_wizard 5y ago
  Why move to AWS if you’re happy with Linode? Genuine question
  - abofh 5y ago
    Not OP, but I can answer - also was very happy with Linode for boxes, but there's a lot more than just boxes these days - queues, streaming, metrics, monitoring, containers, etc. Once an application moves from 'runs on a fixed number of boxes' to 'autoscaling, automatic healing/recovery and distributed databases', the overhead of DIY gets high (and I'm paid to do that!). My clients pay a fairly high premium for AWS because it allows them to move _faster_, not that it's _cheaper_.
    - dielll 5y ago
      are you a devops or SRE?
      - 5y ago