Hi,
I'm really disappointed from the Linode's customer service.

In recent years, Linode's customer service tends to hide problems to customers.
They advertise problems like "possibly packet loss" but not more serious problems.

Some months ago they had a big problem on the backup service.
This problem was responsible for corrupting the linode backup, no advertisement on this problem arrived from Linode.
After months of corrupted backup, I noticed the problem when I had a problem on my Linode and I tried to use my backup.
You can imagine my nervousness when I noticed that the backup was corrupted, the backup is something that you never use,
but when you need it, it must work. It didn't worked correctly. Many other linodes was affected but no advertisement has been done from linode.
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=10480

Some small other problems occured on my linode, something like apache hanging, networking problems and similar.
My linode works without problems since many many years, in the last year I noticed so much problem, nothing
has been advertised from linode, but I'm sure, that this small problems depends on the linode side.

Today, a new problems occured.
My Linode underwent an abrupt shutdown from Linode,
the downtime lasted three hours and half.

I was three hours and half without email and without my services.
The abrupt shutdown caused my multiplexer to not start during the reboot process,
this caused problems on my SSL services, so the downtime lasted until I noticed that something
bad happened to my linode.

Linode does an abrupt shutdown to my server, it leaved it down for 3.5 hours and it doesn't saied anything.

I don't trust linode anymore.

I'm with them since more than 5 years but not it's time to switch a more safe alternative.

Have you looked at status.linode.com? Or opened a ticket to ask?

_________________

/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */

I noticed now that they wrote the problem here:
http://status.linode.com/

very interesting to now that they abrupt shutdown my server and they don't even send me an email or a ticket to inform me about the problem.

Linode didn't shut your server down, a power failure did (which was out of linodes control)

viewtopic.php?t=10942&p=63123#p63123 might come in handy too

Posting major problems on the status blog rather than sending out a bazillion individual emails has always been Linode's practice. I don't think you're the first person to complain about it, but it's easy to work around: when something's wrong, check both your email and the status blog.

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

sblantipodi,
The emails announcing the "Host initiated restart" events went out to everyone when their Linodes were restarted after the power failure. That's how we knew to start checking our Linodes.

The 11:51pm EDT announcement of connectivity issues was right when things started to happen. Linode kept us up to date, and their support staff was responsive while dealing with this power failure.

This was an unplanned, and unanticipated event. I'm not pleased that the backup power infrastructure did not prevent this outage, but there's no way to claim that Linode kept us in the dark about what was going on (no pun intended).


MSJ

no i'm disappointed in linode too. I was happy linode was aware of the issue before I needed to open a ticket during the first signs of problem. Unfortunately the 2am eastern "host initiated restart" which produced no connectivity to the internet in my node was unacceptible. This is the 2nd time this has happened where I had to manually restart the container.

the email arrived at the end of the problem.

Perhaps you might want to look into an 'uptime' monitor like uptimerobot.com (they are a free service;I have no affiliation with them). They can notify you any time your server(s) are not responsive.

To tell you if you didn't already know that your service had been interrupted. Good.

My offsite monitoring system paged me before any notice from Linode. I looked at the status page (nothing there), sent in a ticket. I had 2 different client linodes in the NJ data center effected. They responded to my ticket fairly promptly identifying a problem at the data center. After a while the status page updated with the information what it was.

I have no issues with this.

If you don't know your system is down that is your fault. There are lots of resources to do that without any cost to you.

Should they notify each linode when there is a problem, yes, eventually. However the priority should be on getting the service back online, not correspondence. That is what the status page is for.

Should it be instant.... no because many times you don't know what the problem is. My understanding is that they at first thought it was a massive DDOS.


While inconvenient, I thought they handled it good enough for what I pay for. My monitoring let ME know I was having problems so that I could contact the clients to let them know. Makes my clients know that I am actively monitoring their sites.

_________________
Kevin a.k.a. Dweeber

Good luck with that.

_________________
/ Peter

The biggest problem I see with your complaint is that all of your problem discovery centers around "when I noticed it".

"When I noticed it", is not server monitoring. You don't pay Linode to monitor your server in granular detail. You pay them for space on their infrastructure, and they're responsible for keeping that infrastructure up and running. If they have issues, which they did, they post about it on their status page, which is their custom.

I've had a few instances as well where a power outage or other failure has caused my linode to shut down unexpectedly and be moved to another host, sometimes taking time to do so.

You're expecting a fully managed service, for $10 or $20 a month, and i'm sorry, that's unrealistic. My employer offers virtual machines in a similar fashion, and we have a team and monitoring infrastructure that looks at every single aspect of our customers virtual machines. If you have a high CPU spike, we'll look at it. Disk at 99% at 3AM in the morning? We'll investigate it and help you fix it. But you don't get that for $20/month, you get that for $250/month.

Linode isn't here to hand hold you. They're here to give you full root access to a machine, keep an eye on the overall host that your machine is sitting on, and fix the machine if it breaks.

If you don't have your own monitoring set up to alert you of failures, that's your loss and neglect.

Good luck trying to find another provider, that for $10-20/month, will monitor your stuff so you can just twiddle your thumbs.

- D

Necropost -- why?

_________________
/ Peter