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.<p>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".<p>Why? Too much "scheduled downtime" (few hours/month) vs. AWS's 99.999% uptime.<p>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.<p>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).<p><i></i>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.<i></i>
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.<p>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.<p>Am I missing something here?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.linode.com/managed/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linode.com/managed/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.linode.com/2013/05/29/introducing-linode-managed/comment-page-1/#comment-444627" rel="nofollow">https://blog.linode.com/2013/05/29/introducing-linode-manage...</a>
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!<p>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.<p>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.