I have had multi million dollar accounts with both Akamai and AWS.
Akamai's support was woeful bordering on incompetent.
AWS on the other had has been at a very high standard. And no robots.
> Akamai's support was woeful bordering on incompetent.
Isn't that the point? Akamai's weakness and Linode's strength.
I've no experience with Akamai at all so i'm interested in your's. However support quality and service quality are not always correlated, especially when support has been highly siloed or outsourced. Obviously they affect each other, but are you able to distinguish them? Would you be able to offer us any insight into the quality of the service they provided separate from the support issues?
> I have had multi million dollar accounts [...] AWS on the other had has been at a very high standard. And no robots.
I mean, once you are paying millions you are guaranteed a real person. I was talking about the small scale support issues which from what I hear on AWS usually results in automated responses. This is where Linode and AWS definitely differ.
Even small accounts (<10K) will get phone calls from reps asking about your use case / if they can help you, and if you pay the $30/mo for dev support the cases that need it will get a person.
Amazon are huge so mistakes will be made but AWS's support reputation is not just hype. (My experiences were APAC region, can't speak for rest of world).
Yeah now that I think about it, it's going to be hard to generalise because experience will depend on the type of issues. Ok, here goes for me:
Limit increases: looked automated?, person might get involved if automation can't approve.
Stuff outside the control plane (e.g. how do I install nginx on this?): - no idea, never asked those questions, don't expect they'd hold your hand much unless you're spending a lot. Maybe they'll send you a link.
Something broken with AWS in general: usually not timely responses but path here is to use PHD (personal health dashboard).
Something broken with AWS in my account: occasionally stuff inside AWS gets "stuck". I've had issues with CloudFormation, CloudFront, Custom Domain Names and ACM certs - when I was creating / destroying these things lots of times in integration tests. I generally got timely response for these and eventually the issue stopped happening.
> Something broken with AWS in general: usually not timely responses but path here is to use PHD (personal health dashboard).
Ah, I think this is the type of issue i've heard of where you hit a wall on AWS.
In my experience with Linode when there has been infra issues they are very open if pushed, which is useful because sometimes there are ways you can mitigate it if you understand what's going on... they will also pre-emptively open a ticket with your account in case you want to discuss it, most of the time these resolve themselves, but you can dig if you have concerns. e.g one time we had a few VPSs go through a vague "physical host failure" migration unusually close in time, so I asked if there was anything going on with hypervisor bugs (turns out there was a regression) and whether we could pre-emptively migrate stuff to patched hosts on our own terms rather than wait for it to be randomly picked - and they just opened up, explained what was going on and helped us schedule our other VPSs.
> Stuff outside the control plane (e.g. how do I install nginx on this?): - no idea, never asked those questions
Me neither, it's usually Linode specific support I use, they also have extended paid support for that type of stuff and I've never used it but it's there for people who need it.
