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Comment by bigredtech | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of Linode. Have had one of their mid-range servers for about 2 years now and have had no troubles. When it came time to upgrading, or any other questions I had, their support staff is 1) quick, 2) knowledgable, 3) thorough & helpful.

I've used DO in the past for quick spin-ups, and they're great for that. But for long running applications I'd stay away. Was actually considering DO for a new project, but this kind of tipped the scales the other way.

If you're looking to switch, I think Linode gives you the best bang and reliability for your buck. Have also used Rackspace for a previous startup. A bit more pricey, but also a great service if you're considering switching.

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Linode can't silo resources on a per VPS basis and constantly will harass you for over-utilizing your share of arbitrarily enforced limits. Just a heads up if you actually utilize your instances.

Are you talking about the "Linode Alert" emails? Those are user-configurable — in the email, they specifically state "This is not meant as a warning or a representation that you are misusing your resources. We encourage you to modify the thresholds based on your own individual needs."

If that's not what you're talking about, I apologize, but I've been using Linode for years (often with very compute-intensive projects) and I haven't seen what you're talking about.

Just out of pure laziness, I use the CPU and disk access emails as makeshift notifications for when my backups run.

Really? I find that odd. I do load testing on their instances all the time. which maxes out cpu/disk to give me an idea of performance changes for stuff I have high throughput on.

Hell, I've gotten DDoS'd for like 2 Gbps and they were like "Oh, ya, its fine."

So, can you explain more about what happened?

Have run a web-app with 30K+ users. Only been 'harassed' when I've been warned that I'm running the CPU at 350% of max rate and I should be concerned. That's ok in my book.

I find that surprising. Linode support never contacted me regarding resource usage. Not even when one of the servers has been under DDOS. I contacted them first notifying of such event. And that was it.

I agree with harpastum. I think you're confusing automatic email notifications based on your own settings with Linode support. I feel like you have to seriously abuse their infrastructure to get them to contact you.

Disclaimer: has been a happy Linode customer for over 4 years now.

http://i.imgur.com/UCPWdBq.png

I was not confusing automated emails with direct contact from Linode support. I fully understand and can appreciate the need to be a "nice neighbor" in a shared environment but what baffles me is:

1) Linode doesn't have the capability to actually enforce any sort of quota or limit. It's 2014, there's been numerous advancements in the area of virtualized servers in the past decade. cgroups is a very easy way that works across xen, kvm and lxc.

2) Linode doesn't publish these arbitrary limits nor give guidance on which node size comes with what acceptable usage levels.

This is ridiculous. Would suggest you move out of Linode right away.

It's their job to limit resources on your node, not your job to self-limit. Asking you to limit resources because it's "affecting other customers' performance" is not only outrageous, but also unfair with the other customers being impacted.

This reminds me of the late 90's [1], when web hosting meant sharing the same box with hundreds of other customers, and very limited tools to enforce limits. When you had a resource hog, the only option was really to get them to reduce usage, or move them to a separate box (which wasn't as easy as today).

[1] ps: I know this well; used to have a web hosting company at the time. We had to frequently move customers around, and in some cases to terminate their contracts - e.g., porn sites. But this was a good 10 years before Xen become commonplace.

Yup. That's the conclusion we reached and also why I suggested approaching Linode with caution. They're attempting to compete with the "cloud" providers but running their business the same as they did a decade ago.

Thanks for explaining. :)

Anything I have that uses that level of disk i/o I don't run in a VPS which would explain why I've never noticed before.

Thanks for the answer.

1) I don't know enough to talk about resource limiting that Linode might do. There might be a reason they don't want to or can't use it with their infrastructure.

2) I agree, they could publish some guidelines for resource usage, but this is hardly baffling. I'd guess most of the customers just don't hit this problem, so there's no need to list all of the limitations.

If you'd used their servers for a bit longer, you'd have plenty of trouble. Linode is notorious for dreadful security practices. Their main ColdFusion app (yes, really) has been hacked on numerous occasions, including at least once incident that involved customer data loss. Linode dodged the issue and didn't tell their customers until badgered.

I can agree that DO isn't suited for production apps, but Linode isn't either. They're both VPS playgrounds.

Is there a better alternative you would suggest? While Linode has done better than DO, that fiasco left me feeling somewhat uneasy as well.

There are a great many VPS and server providers out there. I've had good experiences with gandi.net, Rackspace, moln.is and pgrmr. I've seen Ramnode and Lithium Hosting get a lot of praise. You could also use AWS if you don't have any ethical objections to using Amazon products.

Same question as antsar. What would you suggest then?

I use DO because they have servers in Amsterdam, which happens to be very close to my country.

I never had problems with DO that weren't resolved promptly.

Just a note, Linode is very US-centric anyway... (and that one London location doesn't make it international very much)

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