I've used Linode for 10+ years with a handful of long running projects. Support in the rare occasion (until 1 slow ticket recently) has always been absolutely amazing - real humans. If Josh is reading this your name has come up on a few tickets and answered promptly. A grade! Services have been solid. And pricing has been very reasonable. (knock on wood...) never ever had a significant outage and just don't think about going anywhere else for small scale projects. Even when I've needed some stuff from AWS I just host the core bits in Linode and pick and choose the AWS items.
Linode's great support is what is preventing us to migrate to AWS or GCP.
Funny story: 2 months ago GCP blacklisted a few of Linode's IP subnets and we were cut out from using Google APIs. I was unable to get in touch with GCP support (not event complaining on social media) as they charge for support.
I asked to Linode's support if there is something that I could do even though it was not an issue created by them and they were aware of the issue and offered me to migrate our VMs to an IP subnet that was not banned.
Yeah. I've never paid for any sort of support contract and have never once ran into an issue where (1) I couldn't reach someone and (2) that person wasn't empowered to fix my issues. And by "issues" in some cases I'm talking like "facilitate a $150k refund".
Hell, I've been testing some "beta" products in AWS on my personal account with a spend of like... a couple grand a year and been put in touch with the lead engineer on the team responsible for the product to dig into my problems.
Google, on the other hand, even paying over a million a year for AdWords I regularly ran into problems that crossed into other domains and while the AdWords support staff were relatively easy to get a hold of, even once you were over the wall they were pretty honest in saying they wouldn't be able to get support on issues crossing into other teams and just suggested trying to find workarounds.
Yeah I'll continue to use Linode for the foreseeable future. Although they're kind of expensive, the support is top notch.
A year ago I was between jobs and broke, and asked for my upcoming $65 bill to be delayed until the month after. Since I had been a customer for quite a few years Support comped the then outstanding $65 and added another $65 to my Linode balance so I got a free month.
I hope the aquisition by Akamai makes their volume storage a bit cheaper though ;)
Not OP, but I can answer - also was very happy with Linode for boxes, but there's a lot more than just boxes these days - queues, streaming, metrics, monitoring, containers, etc. Once an application moves from 'runs on a fixed number of boxes' to 'autoscaling, automatic healing/recovery and distributed databases', the overhead of DIY gets high (and I'm paid to do that!).
My clients pay a fairly high premium for AWS because it allows them to move _faster_, not that it's _cheaper_.
Depends on the day of the week - literally. For one client, I wear the devops hat, enabling developers, automating CI pipelines, etc. For another, my role is more "experience in the room", telling you 'no, you really don't want to do that, here's your risks, here's your tradeoffs, here's a better way'.
The jobs both derive out of a very similar set of tools and expertise, it's typically the client that decides what hat I'm wearing.
I can give you a counter example. Previously I was a Linode customer - for nearly a decade up until the point I was not. My account was frozen, and when I called, I was told I was not [any longer] the account owner. I provided a billing statement -9- years old to validate that I was indeed the account holder, and always had been. The support rep had to talk to their manager, and asked me to call back(not wait on hold, or wait for them to call me). When I called back, I was told the situation is "very sensitive legally". Then they asked if I knew a first and last name combination that was not mine, because that name was now listed as the account owner. I said that I did indeed know this person, they were the C-level employee at a company I previously worked for. The C-level employee had contacted Linode and cowed them into believing they were the rightful owner of an account that existed before I ever worked for them. They gave the account to them, refused to give it back, and suggested I retain an attorney for any further movement on the issue.
If Linode is reading this - the incident took place over summer/fall of 2018. Yes, I'm that guy. No, I haven't forgotten. I've told _everyone_ who will listen this exact story, and warned them of having their own hard work and assets misappropriated by anyone with a fancy job title calling Linode support and demanding it. A phone call from Linode after everything was settled would have completely changed this sentiment. There's my own story of your outstanding lack of customer support. I was your biggest fan(for 9 years!) up until that point, and referred a dozen or more customers to your service.
What was very visible for me personally is that support people are very highly qualified, and can actually solve the problems themselves instead of escalating. So think of exposing higher qualified people to the front lines of support. Moreover, the feeling of speaking to a real person, who actually cares is something hyperscale cloud guys will never give you.
Well I'm sure there's always opposite stories - but mine is I just get tickets answered whenever which is important as I've often ticked at some ungodly hour in the US (being overseas). You get human responses and even when a couple of times it's been outside of Linodes control or responsibility (routing/peering issues) they've been helpful and informative.
Everyone will have their own counter of course but I've been happy with what I've been getting for the money!
It's not that bad, but not amazing in my opinion, yes they reply, yes they will answer promptly and share info if you prompt them - tell me what happened etc.. But it's not very forthcoming, delayed acknowledgements of data center wide issues has been an issue for several years, every pledge to update the status page within minutes has never materialized - I think I saw an update within 15minutes once and nearly fell out my chair, but it's still poor when you have to hit Twitter to find dozens of other people with broken connectivity and find the momentary relief that it's probably not your VMs.
Hope Akamai doesn't do the dirty...