I have been a Linode customer for about 5 months now. In the past 2 months, some of my nodes has been shut down due to "Emergency Maintenance" twice. I completely understand that every hosting business runs into issues and requires maintenance.

With that said, I am extremely frustrated this time around. My node was down for 59 minutes in total. That's a long, long time on the internet.The maintenance also happened to affect my single point of failure this time around unfortunately so my whole site was affected. I guess the positive thing out of this is that I learned that I have to fix this single point of failure.

I love Linode for its customer service and value. But if I can pay more for stability elsewhere, maybe I will have to take a hard look.

My question is:
How often do you guys experience this "Emergency Maintenance"? and how long does it go down for usually?

I've only had emergency maintenance once in ~1.5 years or so, which took maybe 15-20 minutes or so.

I don't recall this happening to me, you might want to submit a ticket and ask them to move your instance to a different machine.

I've been hosting here for years. Some of my nodes have never had emergency maintenance. I've had a few "We've detected an issue on the host and scheduled a migration to a new host" which I tend to think is their way of saying "We're getting rid of old hardware" or perhaps I'm just cynical . I've had a few host lockups which just require a reboot. I've never had an hours downtime which wasn't a network problem as far as I can remember.

Perhaps you have a problematic host? Try requesting a migration to a new box.

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The first time it happened a couple of months ago my node was down for 10 minutes, which was much more acceptable.

@jebblue I will send them a ticket to see how to prevent htis from happening again

We've been using Linode for about two years and have never experienced "emergency maintenance". Our only downtime has been when migrating to the new hardware or the SSD Beta (both were done on our schedule - we placed our Linodes in the queue and had no wait time before our migrations started).

In terms of the total timing, my guess based on past experiences is that it depends where your guest ends up in the reboot cycle. The guests on a host are not all started simultaneously (that would take the host to its knees) but in sequence, which I think may be randomized on each boot.

So on a reasonably full host, if Linode does nothing more than reboot the host - no actual work - you could be back up in a few minutes or it could take much longer (I had one in the 40+ minutes range, though that was with older hosts). Obviously add extra time to that if Linode actually needs to do something with the host more than just a reboot. So the difference in your two events could be a combination of actual work time, and then where your guest ended up in the reboot queue.

In terms of the actual number of such maintenances, I've had very few (certainly as a fraction of total Linodes over time), but there have been some, and at one point after a host had multiple instances, I did request a migration after Linode couldn't confirm they had concretely resolved the issue.

From an expectations perspective, I'd recommend that if your host ends up going down (even if just to reboot immediately), a conservative assumption of up to to an hour interruption for the guest is probably reasonable. It should be better than that on average (and it's possible the newest hardware should be better), but someone has to boot last, and it could be you.

-- David

PS: Oh, the above all assumes a Linode 1024, which has the maximum number of guests. Everything should get faster on larger plans since there are fewer guests to boot.

In general, hardware can fail, no ISP no matter who they are or how large can guarantee 100%.

Exactly - you have no control over your host's setup (except for staying or leaving that host), and numerous things can effect your uptime, so plan (or not) accordingly.

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I can only recall two down time incidents with any of my linodes since starting in 2009 or so. One was a large scale incident the other only involved a few servers. I have been using servers from hosting providers since 2000 everyone has down time sooner or later, even the likes of HostGator. My experience here has been exceptional.

Just my 2 cents,
Jeff

I had one incident of downtime in a single data center. Other websites in other data centers were fine though. It seems good. Far better than GoDaddy and their random domains that go down or MySQL databases that suddenly won't work unless you use the auto installer.

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We've been on one of our linodes since 2004... back when the VM's were UML instead of Xen and haven't had ANY downtime except for an occasional reboot from our side. But I still try and build redundancy and plan for an outage should it ever happen

Well, here it is again this morning. Another emergency Maintenance that brought my master DB down (a different node than last time) for a good 2 hours!!

"This host has experienced catastrophic hardware failure. We are now liaising with datacenter personnel to effect a transfer of the hard disks from this host into a new chassis. We will continue to keep you updated via this ticket as this work progresses."

I think I have given Linode a good chance. 4 emergency maintenance to my fleet of nodes within 2 months. I have no choice to look elsewhere.

Did you submit a ticket to have your node migrated to a different machine? Why do you seem to have such failures while the rest of us do not? It seems odd to me.

@jebblue I would like to know the same. I have indeed open a ticket discussing reliability issue on our nodes. Let's see what linode has to say.