If you don't mind me asking, how many nodes do you have and in what DCs?

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

@obs 5 all in Fremont

Hello.

I just want to reassure everyone that we do the very best we can to ensure the reliability of our hardware and network - from RAID arrays, dual PSUs, and redundant networking from our uplinks right down to each host. We use the highest quality networking and host components. We spend a lot of time diagnosing each and every hardware issue, corroborating failures across components with where they were sourced from, and ultimately, if need be, working with the vendors and manufacturers to rectify issues if a pattern of component failure is determined.

The incentives to do so are in obvious alignment with our customers - as downtime sucks for everyone. But even disregarding that fact, ignoring reliability issues is just not how we, as a company, want to do business. It's not in Linode's DNA. Unfortunately, some problems just aren't obvious at first and it can take time for them to be resolved to our satisfaction.

When host problems to occur, our team does an incredible job restoring service as quickly and as safely as possible, and I think they do a fantastic job at it.

I also want to point out that, although it sounds like you've had a bad run and I'm sure the team will be looking into the specifics of your experiences with host issues, it's not due to a lack of caring or negligence on our end.

Sorry for the problems. Please let me/us know if there's anything else we can do.

-Chris

@Chris I have no doubt that Linode takes reliability and customer service very seriously. In fact, that is why I came over here in the first place. I might just be the unlucky one with a high percentage of node failure.

I am currently evaluating the cost / time for moving the stack over to AWS ELB, EC2 and RDS, which claims to make HA a couple of clicks away, versus setting up something similar on Linode. Can anyone point me to a straight-forward resources for setting up a HA MySQL cluster?

Only 5 and you've had this many problems, sounds like a very bad run of luck.
There used to be a guide in the linode library on HA MySQL but it seems to have gone missing (or I'm just blind it is morning).
One warning about AWS, you don't get anywhere near as much bang for your buck, it'll cost you a fortune to run compared to Linode.

My preferred way of MySQL HA is to have a slave running that pings the master and if the master stops responding takes control, of course you have to make sure your apps are notified of this and you have to monitor that the slave is replicating properly (check out percona tools for this, especially heartbeat and checksum).

AWS does handle failover for you (even across physical locations), it's pretty easy to make a redundant stack there but it really is expensive.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

Were all these failures on the same host server?

@Guspaz I don't think so since each emergency maintenance only affected one node at a time.

For what it's worth I have been using Linode for multiple years and have only had 2 outages, both due to power issues. Neither lasted more than an hour.

I won't go anywhere else unless forced

I assume any Linode maintenance is scheduled unless some emergency type situation? And all Linode renters are notified well in advance in the former case?

I certainly would hope so!!!


Ray

Most of the time they give you 10-14 days notice and you're notified by email and then again closer to the time. The maintenance normally involves moving you to a new host (or in my experience it does anyway). Emergency maintenance is done immediately and is normally a reboot (i.e. host kernel lockup) or a immediate migration. Again you're notified by email.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

Very good. Thanks.

Ray

Hey all. I just wanted to chime in here and say that the only down time that I had with my linode was when I was rebooting my own server and was breaking things. Lol. I'm using the Dallas data center and t has never had a problem with me.

Host specific issues generate a ticket, which all who have access to that Linode under your account will be notified via email.

-Chris

That happens by default. Ticket creation and updates generate emails to the addresses on file for your user (in the "my profile" section).

- Les