I would like to know what steps they have taken to improve their security. They have had serious security breaches in the last couple of months, and I don't trust them any more.

It's nice that AWS and GCE also have premium support offerings now. Seems like a good source of revenue as well as cost savings.

I'm pretty sure I'd never trust Linode even as just a bare VPS provider, let alone giving them more access to my machines to provide this support, though, given their long and horrible track record.

I've been on Linode for a few months, after years on AWS, and I'm not nearly convinced to trust them with these "Managed Services".

Why? Too much "scheduled downtime" (few hours/month) vs. AWS's 99.999% uptime.

Why else? Well, it's a perverse incentive. If they have less reliable systems, the pain goes up, to where more people will sign up for "Linode Managed". We should all get good uptime, not have to pay extra.

Most importantly, their offering is not an SLA. I don't see anywhere in the "Linode Managed" where they are guaranteeing uptime %'s, or penalties for lower performance. And, how can they realistically handle even 50% of the 3AM panic problems, if some of those will be my website's inability to talk to 3rd party sites (which neither of us have control over).

If they really can fix 90% of the 3AM problems, then they are the root cause of most of those in the first place. There's not many good reasons why Linux will break at 3AM often if you've setup your stack correctly.

There is no industry standard for what "managed" means. On their page they describe some of the services as co-managed. I suspect in reality "managed" consist of a comprehensive monitoring solution, along with "best effort" support. They are either going to to provide a support level well bellow customers expectations (not making ANY changes unless they have specific written consent) or they are going to take risks on customers servers which will blow up in their face from time to time.

Apart from the hacking indecent they have a really good brand with a reputation for doing the right thing. They provide infrastructure as a service, the service is clearly defined and they deliver. Unless they are really sharp then a managed service is not going to be clean, It's full of grey areas and trade off's about whether the team gave correct advice or did the right thing. They should have spun this off to a separate company.

Reading about Linode Managed on their website [1] appears to be nothing more than (1) OS backups, and (2) a monitoring agent installed on the OS to report the server is up and running.

Am I missing something here?

[1] https://www.linode.com/managed/

I really don't see where all of the Linode hate comes from. That last hack was a pretty messy situation the way that I read it, but they seemed to do what was best for their customers when the shtf.

I've also had very few network outages or performance issues in Linode's Dallas datacenter, multiple uptimes of > 1 year on instances and I've only had one unscheduled reboot/failure in almost 7 years of being a customer.

From here [1] it seems that if sign up for Linode Managed, all your linodes are enrolled and you'll have to pay 100/month for each one i.e., there's no way to pay only for specific linodes.

[1] https://blog.linode.com/2013/05/29/introducing-linode-manage...

While from the blogpost it isn't 100% clear to me how far their management goes (do they restart apache if needed? Do they do security updates?), I think this fills a huge need!

Fully managed servers are really expensive and often inflexible, while with VPS you are all on your own, which not every developer wants (or feels confident in). I was just discussing a week ago how there is a big market in doing this management.

$100 per month isn't bad for the inevitable crisis when you really will need a good sysadmin's help.

For me, the biggest reason for paying for managed services like Heroku etc. is avoiding that risk. This sort of thing would make me far happier to ship some of the load back onto Linode. Can't fault their hardware. :)

Interesting. I think this could be particularly popular if Linode introduces some fully supported stacks for common configs. Although at that point they would really just become a managed provider, but perhaps that is the natural progression of at least part of the hosting business.

There's something about the picture that's rather unsettling (apart from the number of Macs ;).

My EC2 hosts have had horrid uptimes. From the big event in VA last year or so to a bunch of random events. Support was useless as well.

My Linodes are rock solid. Yeah Linode got hit by a cold fusion vulnerability and had the bitcoin issue, but for company as old as it is, that's still a good track record imho.

Meanwhile we're leaving EC2. Don't need it really and certainly don't need the headaches. The CPU on those things are pretty weak as well.

I've literally never had my servers go down on Linode's account, having run 'em for years now. Maybe the management panel goes down from time to time, but that's a totally different number than AWS's 99.999%—is that what you were referring to? Or has Linode actually killed your servers?

I've never had my linode machines taken offline, but I've received many "Instance scheduled for retirement" messages from AWS.

>vs. AWS's 99.999% uptime.

SLA numbers are not insurance. At best, they give you back some of your hosting costs... but if you are doing anything serious? that's a very small fraction of what you lost due to the downtime.

Also, 'uptime' means a different thing on a VPS than in a cloud. In a cloud? if a server goes bad, you shoot the server and the customer spins up nodes on another one. the local data is gone. This is not counted as downtime.

On a VPS? that's counted as downtime and as data loss.

Yeah. 'managed' hosting is /way/ harder to provide (at least while maintaining a reasonable reputation) than unmanaged hosting, primarily because:

>There is no industry standard for what "managed" means.

Managing expectations here? really hard. Really, really hard. I mean, for $100/month, the provider is probably not going to be involved with the planning and day to day operation; this means you end up with setups where the customer builds a site, gets it working, starts depending on it, and then something horrible happens, and at that point, linode sysadmins will have to step in and fix it. I mean, yeah, a good sysadmin can usually pull it off, but it's "heroic" work, in my mind... You have to sit there and figure out all the weird hacks the last amateur the customer hired used to get the system working. if you ask me to do something like that, I'm going to set an expectation of failure. But that's the problem with managed services, the customer expectation is always success.

This will not be fun for the sysadmin involved. It's much harder to fix a system you are unfamiliar with than a system you are familiar with, and the customer is going to have expectations that the success rate will be as if the sysadmin was familiar with the system. (I mean, hell, I go way out of my way to tell people I sell completely unmanaged stuff, and I still get customers blaming me when their out of date php whatever gets compromised.)

The situations where I would be willing to offer a competing product would be if I could charge (and limit the customers per sysadmin) such that a member of my staff could have weekly or monthly meetings with the customer, going over their architecture and what change have happened, and what problems might happen. (I'm guessing this is going to be more in the $500-$1500/month range, so it's not really competing.)

Alternately, I would be willing to provide a manged service where the customer doesn't have root, except through my tools. Idea being that then all the systems I manage would be substantially similar. I could do this for dramatically less money, had I the time to dedicate to setting it up, and enough customers to make building the tools worth it.

I wish Linode much luck. As a competitor to their unmanaged product, I know I will be referring my customers who need more handholding to this service. There is a whole lot of need in the industry for managed services; VPSs are so cheap these days that people who have no ability or interest in systems administration want to buy them, and they need a lot of help.

My expectation? the customer will generally get a good deal for $100/month. But sometimes? it won't be enough, and that customer will go away very angry and (publicly) disappointed.

> Do they do security updates?

Hah!

As with all things in this market, it really depends on the execution.

If the remote hands are awesome, this is well worth $100 per node. If they are anything but awesome, this wouldn't be worth it for any amount of money.