Live data from Hacker News

Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

blog.linode.com

151–160 of 165 posts

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#151
post #92

This is a coincidence. I had a funny experience with Linode just today! I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago. "Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all." So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for…

A reasonable thing to do would be for them to call if your credit card expires to see if you accidentally let it slip without updating the info. If it was any other situation (e.g. the card was declined but still valid date-wise), I think how they handled it would be perfect.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#152
post #20

I switched from Webfaction to Linode about six months ago, because the WF server I was on kept experiencing hard drive failures leading to an unacceptable amount of downtime. Once is tolerable, but they should have replaced the drive then. They didn't, and two months later it failed again. Again they tried to repair the filesystem. It failed two days later again. When I challenged them on this, they admitted they kne…

Same here; Linode has one my heart for three very important reasons, that will mean a lot to anybody looking for small-scale hosting:

1. Proper provisioning. They aren't the cheapest option in the market, but they actually provide what you're paying for. I've never had CPU, disk, or memory contention issues on my Linode because they packed too many instances on a host.

2. Great peering. Their network guys know what they're doing, and it shows in the low latency I've seen on my server hosted there, even coming from Japan.

3. Great staff. I wanted to set up my DNS with a wildcard MX record for subdomains, so that I could route mail without having to manually add MX records for every new account. The RFC for DNS allows this, but the Linode DNS management interface didn't... until I contacted them and asked for it. Initially, they gave the 'sorry, but we don't support that' line, but after I pointed out the relevant bit in the RFC, the feature was added within two days. I have never had a hosting provider respond like that.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#154
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr; Didn't back up data/config files, expected hosting company to store data for free

Actually, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a hosting company to store some data for free. Not in the sense that I'm entitled to it as a customer, but in the sense that it might be in their best interests: if the data is deleted, that's a pretty good guarantee that the client won't reactivate; if the data is saved and it's trivial to reactivate, some percentage of customers will do so.

Actually that is unreasonable. You'd like to think they might, but expecting it is foolish, they are providing a service, if you don't pay you aren't entitled to the service. Linode aren't unreasonable, I have gotten an extension for payment in the past when I needed it, but I didn't do it by not checking my email for a month, I did it by reaching out to them and letting them know I needed some time to catch up a payment. As a result they didn't delete my account.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#155
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had sites on linode and slicehost, and have found Slicehost to have less downtime, packet loss, network problems (unreachable), and so on. I'm satisfied with both, overall.

That is very curious I've had a linode in dallas for a long time (2 or more years) and the only downtime that I have experienced on my server is from those few (I think it has been less than 10 times and they weren't more than a few hours) times everyones dallas linode went down.

I have one in Dallas, too. Nothing curious about it, take a look at http://linode.typepad.com/ Perhaps my requirements or expectations are higher than your own. The downtime hasn't been excessive, but sometimes, it is down for an hour before I see anything on their status update blog, and meanwhile, I'll have received a few notes from site users and advertisers.

There are three incidents listed in the past two weeks of packet loss, routing issues, and so on for 1-3 hours. There were other issues in May, I don't know where those are listed now.

Yes, it's only going down for a couple of hours at a time. Considering I'm using the server for images for a medium traffic website - an hour or two is VERY noticeable to my customers, and as noted, it adds up to more than the downtime on my Slicehost account (St. Louis).

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#156
post #83
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had sites on linode and slicehost, and have found Slicehost to have less downtime, packet loss, network problems (unreachable), and so on. I'm satisfied with both, overall.

Which data centers?

Slicehost: St. Louis Linode: Dallas

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#157
post #4

Wow, that's really great. Makes me feel better about the outages we've been dealing with at the Dallas center. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1392700

Yeah, I'm glad they have the linode.typepad.com status blog - when Dallas is down, I can't connect to members.linode.com or status.linode.com to see what is going on! I know DOS attacks aren't their fault, but we've had a few more interruptions recently compared to usual.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#158
post #11

How much is the extra traffic, again? 200GB of traffic included seemed good at the time, but it doesn't already. I'm seeing (and using) more offers lately that have much more traffic included.

Their traffic allotment is fairly generous compared to comparable services. Sure, if you compare it to something like 1and1 with 'unlimited' for $12, maybe not, but you don't get the same control and reliability for something like that. If you compare it to how much it would cost to serve the same requests on Amazon S3, it's much cheaper.

Re: Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

#159
post #129
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can't agree. How long should they keep a backup of every user's virtual machines, after they stop paying? 20 days is reasonable, a month would have been better (If only since it's more predictable) but they really didn't do anything unreasonable. Keep in mind, even if it's only $2/month (After redundant backus, etc), if you have had 10,000 customers, that really adds up! Keeping files forever "Just in case"…

How many of the customers stop paying? Probably not many. How much disk space are these customers using? Probably not much. How much disk space do they have sitting on their servers unused? Probably a whole lot.

Credit Cards expire every 2 years. I would guess that a very large percentage of them don't preemptively re-verify their credit card until a billing fails.
Post reply on HN