I’ve been with Linode since almost their day one, I’ve never had reason to complain. Over the years they have upgraded the various machines I’ve had for free, I’ve had machines with near 1000 days uptime with them, their control panel is great, their support is great. They have a mature set of value added services around the core like load balancers, backups etc. I’ve recommended them to 10s of businesses and friends who are all hosted there. In total over the years I’ve probably had or been involved in over a thousand Linode VMs.
This is changing though, I recently moved 4 machines to their London datacenter and they have all been locking up randomly. You get helpful notices saying something like “Our administrators have detected an issue affecting the physical hardware your Linode resides on.” and on pushing the matter I got:
I apologize for the amount of hardware issues that you have had to deal with lately. After viewing your account, their have been quite a few hardware issues in the past few months. Unfortunately, we cannot easily predict when hardware issues may occur, but I can assure you that our administrators do everything possible to address and eliminate the issues as they do come up.
If you do continue to have issues on this host, we would be happy to migrate your Linode to a new host in order to see if that alleviates the issues going forward.
Which is something I can understand, yes hardware fail randomly, unpredictably etc. I’m a systems guy, we’ve all been on the wrong end of this stick. But here’s the thing, in the longer than 10 years I’ve been with Linode and had customers with Linode this is something that happens very infrequently, my recent experience is completely off the scales bad. It’s clear there’s a problem, something has to be done. You expect your ISP to do something and to be transparent about it.
I have other machines at Linode London that were not all moved there on the same day and they are fine. All the machines I moved there on the same day recently have this problem. I can’t comment on how Linode allocate VMs to hosts but it seems to me there might be a bad batch of hardware or something along these lines. This is all fine, bad things happen – it’s not like Linode manufactures the hardware – I don’t mind that it’s just realistic. What I do mind is the vague non answers to the problem, I can move all my machines around and play russian roulette till it works. Or Linode can own up to having a problem and properly investigate and do something about it while being transparent with their customers.
Their community support team reached out almost a month ago after I said something on Twitter with “I’ve been chatting with our team about the hardware issues you’ve experienced these last few months trying to get more information, and will follow up with you as soon as I have something for you” I replied saying I am moving machines one by one soon as they fail but never heard back again. So I can’t really continue to support them in the face of this.
When my Yum mirror and Git repo failed recently I decided it’s time to try Digital Ocean since that seems to be what all the hipsters are on about. After a few weeks I’ve decided they are not for me.
- Their service is pretty barebones which is fine in general – and I was warned about this on Twitter. But they do not even provide local resolvers, the machines are set up to use Google resolvers out of the box. This is just not ok at all. Support says indeed they don’t and will pass on my feedback. Yes I can run a local cache on the machine. Why should every one of thousands of VMs need this extra overhead in terms of config, monitoring, management, security etc when the ISP can provide reliable resolvers like every other ISP?
- Their london IP addresses at some point had incorrect contact details, or were assigned to a different DC or something. But geoip databases have them being in the US which makes all sorts of things not work well. The IP whois seems fine now, but will take time to get reflected in all the geoip databases – quite annoying.
- Their support system do not seem to send emails. I assume I just missed some click box somewhere in their dashboard because it seems inconceivable that people sit and poll the web UI while they wait for feedback from support.
On the email thing – my anti spam could have killed them as well I guess, I did not investigate this too deep because after the resolver situation became clear it seemed like wasted effort to dig into that as the resolver issue was the nail in the coffin regardless.
Technically the machine was fine – it was fast, connectivity good, IPv6 reliable etc. But for the reasons above I am trying someone else. BigV.io contacted me to try them, so giving that a go and will see how it look.
