I'd like to thank Deaton for his rapid response time and quick resolution of a very recent outage we had.

Our public facing site went down and when I visited the Dashboard saw that a Lassie initiated boot was in perpetual execution (For about 10 mins by the time I got to the dashboard).

I raised a support ticket and within 5 minutes had a response that emergency maintenance would be performed as monitoring contact with our particular host had been lost.

I was given updates on the progress every few minutes (and in one instance within 1 minute of a post I made).

All in all we only experienced 30 minutes downtime and a majority of that was waiting for the system to reboot and our own processes to kick off.

Excellent work Deaton (and others). Impressive support.

David McDonald
Bad Uncle Games

That is awesome. So rare to read about such responsiveness in the hosting business.

I too was affected by this outage. Pingdom reported that it lasted 50 minutes for me though.

After I first caught on, I tried several things, and then when all else failed contacted support. They responded blazingly fast. Obviously any kind of outage is undesirable, but I have to give Linode props for their support here.

What outage is this you guys speak of? Was it just one host or a DC or what?

Nothing is mentioned here:
http://status.linode.com/

or here:
http://blog.linode.com/

An e-mail from Linode:

I think Linode stopped general reporting on single host outages when they stopped using the system and network status topic here for that purpose (which I think was also around the period when status.linode.com came online).

So at this point single host outages appear to be handled directly with those customers who are on that host.

I sort of miss the prior level of detail, though I can appreciate it providing the potential to appear too negative (given that even a small percentage of host issues in absolute terms can appear to be a lot of issues) and I don't think any other competitors report on that level of detail either. Some don't even discuss service issues at all outside of customer-restricted forums.

-- David

I like and dislike that at the same time. I like that deal with those customers directly. But it sounds like they send emails to them, what if your node that went down is your mail server?....

Now if they are also posting a notice under your account on the Linode Manager, great.

My previous host did and still does post notices for every server on their site. But I think they may only do that for their shared servers. For the managed VPS servers I don't think they have a public status page and for their other services, dedicated, colo, etc the only public status page available is their overall network status page.

I can certainly understand why they wouldn't want to post host-specific problems on status.linode.com. It might make them look like they're less reliable than they really are.

That said, it does suck when your website is down and you can't get any details as to why without e-mailing support.

Perhaps as a solution, Linode could add something to their dashboard so that in this kind of situation, if I log in, it would say, "Hey, there's a host-specific problem affecting you. Here are the details."?

It's a good idea to have your linode account email hosted on a service outside of your linodes (google apps, hotmail, yahoo, mobileme etc).

_________________
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

I found this out the hard way. I had my Pingdom up/down alerts going to my Linode hosted e-mail. My Linode was down, so I didn't get them until after it was back up. Doh!

My solution was to add a user to my linode account with an email address for my cell phone. That way I get email both on my linode mailserver for archive purposes and on my cell.

--
Travis