banned after 1h or free trial

Hi Linode,

yesterday I registered for free account, because I was considering your VPS and wanted to test it before purchase and your VPS packages seem nice.

First, the Gentoo install you offer is slightly broken - the portage profiles are completely missing, and it's almost impossible to emerge anything before fixing that. Not sure how that happened, but you should probably fix that. For those who run into this problem, do "emerge –sync && emerge portage" and then switch to current profile using "eselect profile" and you should be fine.

But that's not the main issue. I've done a few basic system tests to get at least some feeling of this VPS, i.e. fio to see the disk performance, a bit of pgbench to see how this works with the database I use. See how the monitoring stuff works. After ~1h of using the linode instance, I was reasonably happy with the results so I did "emerge -uD world" to see how this works, and withing 10 minutes I got banned. The linode abruptly turned off and my IP is banned on virtually all linode domains (except this one, for some reason).

I can't see support contacts, I can't read the damn FAQs, I can't even check the TOS to see if I violated something.

I'm really wondering why …

1. I'm not aware of anything nasty I might have done during the test. Basic tests, which is the purpose of the trial.

2. 1. I do understand you need to be more careful about the free accounts, but I'd expect at least a simple e-mail message explaining what happened. You do have my e-mail after all.