Payment is due upon invoicing. Service may be interrupted on accounts that reach 10 days past due.

Gripe: Linode's deletion policy and Ever heard of a phone?

Man, this is a BAD ONE:

I just found out that one of my client's sites has been wiped out because he failed to renew his payment cycle. As I suspected, simply a case of the client not getting the emails as they were pre-tagged by the ISP as junk mail and never saw them. And the irony: This client is rich.

But ONLY after 13 days, Linode delete his node (which makes sense) and wipes out his site, his back ups. Everything is gone. GONE.(which is INSANE!!)

While I understand Linode is not a managed solution and very strict about its services, I think is beyond RECKLESS to:

A) Only contact the primary account holder. I mean....Really? How hard is -as matter of common sense- to ALSO notify the additional persons in the account of ANY deletion. That just seems like a horribly bad idea.

B) I understand Linode wants to keep cost down by running the whole shebang on a web-only system...But for CHRIST!!....How hard is it to set up a simple, last minute, use-only-in-extreme-case VoIP automated call system? I mean...I have this set up for a client using a freaking 19.95 dollar a month Vonage account and it would at least make sense in cases.

C) The "We are sorry, but your account and all its images were deleted" answer is going to come up short for the average client. Hey, I am responsible, I know how things work, I have all my Linode flags set up and after 12 years in the business I know clienst can be just dumb and irresponsible about this.....BUT, clients coulf have 100 reasons why the did not get the notification: An illness, an emergency, the ISP pre-tagging Linode emails as junk, etc, etc.

D) To not keep a copy for a certain amount of days? INSANE. Delete the account all you want, that is, after all, justified....but NOT to keep a safety copy for at least another 30 days is crazy. In a scale 1 to 10, that is a 9.

And here is why all these points are important:

The average client may be just a regular mom-n-pop and under these circumstances they will usually either shrugged it off, do a facapalm, curse God and take it. Fine.

But what will happen when Linode does this to a client that has more money than GOD? What happens when that client is a shrewd, tough, no-bs person with 20 years in the business and ex-CEO of a major online site with a legal team bigger than a football team? What happens when that client is so furious the words "I will contact my lawyers" come out of his mouth? is Linode REALLY willing to get itself embroiled in a legal battle over........13 days of non-payment and the deletion of an account, all its contents and the subsequent fall out? Because in this case that looks the direction this is going, unless by some miracle this can be solved....which I doubt.

I have no dog in this fight. After all, this is between Linode and my client, not me. About the only thing I probably did wrong was rely on Linode's back up to back up the site, but beyond that, it is not my problem to deal with. That said, it seems Linode has the "libertarian" (you are responsible for yourself) dial at an 11. It would do good for Linode to turn it down to at least to a 6 or a 7.

And KEEP IN MIND....I am a Linode-head. I LOVE LINODE. I have migrated all my clients to LINODE.

Let it rip.

Sorry to hear you got snagged by this. Please let me clarify a few facts:

It is ~35 days (or more), not 13. We shut Linodes down on the 10th, cancel them on the 20th, and then the data will remain for a minimum of two weeks before going into an as-needed-queue to be scrubbed and freed.

In all cases we send many notifications. Please update your billing info, you have an outstanding balance, warning that you'll be suspended, warning that we're about to suspend, update that we did suspend... In this particular case we sent 7 notification emails to the account's email addresses over about a two week period before taking any or each action.

We don't have a phone number on that account. You can add one here: https://manager.linode.com/account/contact

Sorry...

-Chris

Wow, that's good to know, and really nice of Linode to do. Far above and beyond any other host I know.

obs: And your comment would be pointless as - of course- there is and offsite back up,.....But when you run a database-based website, stuff that happens between updates gets lost.

Costing Linode probably another couple of years of 19.95$ a month