I think it's a stupid perspective.

Run that idea past Target (hey Target, twice now I purchased defective products from your store, please issue me a 5% off card for ALL future purchases or I'll start shopping at Shopko) and see what happens.

If downtime has a negative impact on your business model, then plan (and budget) for it. If your plan is a single host in a single datacenter, then you get what ya get.

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

First off your analogy is inherently flawed to begin with because "one bad product = I DEMAND ALL FUTURE THINGS I BUY FROM YOU TO BE CHEAPER" is not the same thing as "this poor service is poor = I shouldn't be paying so much for this poor service".

Second off you completely missed the point. As I previously mentioned I've found several other hosts with statistically better uptime than I've had at linode for 1/4th of the price. I've now already purchased a VPS with Digital Ocean to investigate how reliable they are compared to linode. The thing is, I can buy 2 VPSes from digital ocean and set up a load balancer for half the price of my 1 vps at linode. The same setup at linode would be 3x the price of what I'm already paying linode. I'm doing linode a kind gesture by saying, "statistically your service has been unreliable. I will purchase an additional vps from you and load balancing to correct this issue. You will earn an *extra* $500 a year from me, so I would like $5 off a month of the service I already have with you that costs me $240 a year". This is certainly me being generous and this is an excellent offer for linode. Even though linode has demonstrated to me that they have an unreliable service, I am willing to spend more money to purchase more services from them, and even with $5 off a month linode is still walking away with one heck of a lot more money than the $10 a month this would cost at another host. Even if I didn't experience all the downtime this is an appealing exchange, so withstanding downtime, the sheer indifference I've encountered from linode is quite surprising.

If linode isn't interested in selling their services, or interested in fixing a customer's service when that service has been irrefutably unreliable, then I'll take my business and my money elsewhere.

Linode works great for me.

Few things:

• Les did not dodge anything in his reply to you. He was actually more direct to you than you'll find at many other hosting companies.
• He also made no acknowledgement that Linode's service has been poor and did not imply telling you to do anything, nor did he in fact give you any advice whatsoever.
• You are fighting with Linode because computer hardware fails and are expecting Linode to offer you a discount because computer hardware fails. You might as well ask for a discount for the weather, too.

I have no information on the specific nature of your case but, often, these emergency maintenance procedures rectify a situation on the system that could lead to even worse problems than having your Linode rebooted.


Take four six-figure salaries for a developer in the Bay Area. Add them together.

I've been an on-call administrator on an Amazon account that costs that much every month, and a significant portion thereof was dedicated to premium support. We had several hundred instances unreachable for over eight hours and our tickets sat unanswered for all of that time, and nobody answered the only phone number we had. You had one instance's host machine fail twice, Linode was communicative with you, and you expect Linode to bend over backwards for you. Amazon did not even credit us.

Your assertion that support quality has any relationship with account spend is, as demonstrated, flawed. Linode is known among operations people as having among the best support in the industry. DigitalOcean doesn't wipe their drives when you delete an instance and, when this gaping security hole is reported to them, goes after the person reporting the issue as being irresponsible. Good luck with what you pay for at DigitalOcean and consider all sensitive information on your "droplet" as immediately compromised.


I thought it was two. I ruled out your diagram as useless when it had a four month outage in it.


You are not. DigitalOcean is the gas station burrito shelf, Linode is Chipotle. They are not in competition with each other, though one likes to think they are.

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

/me grins at Jed being able to say it like it is now that he no longer works for Linode