Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) Reviews

Linode is a service that hosts virtual machines for you.

It is important to me that Linode offers a small, but well-focused set of cloud computing services, and there are two reasons. I've got a lot of choices because you can do a lot of things with Linode, but the core of what they offer is the ability to host your own cloud.

The size of the applications that you can use is significant. For example, you can run some massive infrastructure through Linode if you need to. The focused set of services is important because if you compare with Amazon, for example, they have AWS cloud, and it has a lot of things that get really very confusing. I understand technology, but I'm a business person more than a technologist. So, for me, the fact that they're focused means that they are working on the latest technology.

They are also practical and don't just use a component because it's there. They've got specific paths, such as migration paths, and they understand what I call fundamental IT. They understand that very well and it's invaluable. For example, one time I had to contact support because someone on my end deleted something. I phoned them at two o'clock in the morning to open a support ticket and a human being answered the phone. They said, "Oh yeah, no, we can do that. All done." Ten minutes later, the problem was resolved and life was fine. Essentially, they understand the practicalities of IT the way it should be in terms of the fundamentals. This is something that a lot of people don't understand.

An example that I'm thinking of is where you have a large call center that is located somewhere else in the world and people don't speak English, which is always a problem. They've got scripts that they go through and based on what you describe, they try to tell you the problem or ask you more questions. You'll be forced to go through a poor process, whereas Linode doesn't do that. Linode is just human beings who are IT literate, for want of a better word, dealing with you at every step of the way. That's important.

To me, it's very important that they haven't lost their focus, even though their capabilities seem to have expanded quite a lot.

Another way that Linode has improved the way my organization functions is that I don't have to have the physical infrastructure, anywhere. This means that I can work from anywhere in the world with the same infrastructure. Whether I'm in the United Kingdom, whether I'm in South Africa, whether I'm in Costa Rica, makes no difference. This is a massive advantage.

Many people think that because it's the web, and it's all-pervasive, it is just "old hat". But to have infrastructure that you can access from anywhere is absolutely brilliant. So, that's one area.

I used to host all my own stuff but I've gotten to the point now where I think I've got one server in-house, and that is full of what I call pet projects. I don't even know if I've got backups of that.

On the topic of backups, human beings don't like doing them. Also, IT people set backups and never look at them again. At least at Linode, you choose their backups and you know you've got three backups a day that you could fall back on, in the worst case. It's brilliant for me from that point of view.

Because of the ease of use, I can offer it to more clients. It's a doorway for me to customers where maybe I would have had to have a much more technical staff. As it is now, I don't have to, and it's not a deal-breaker. The customer is not saying that I don't have a server expert because I do. It's Linode.

In terms of helping me to accelerate innovation, Linode has got a whole bunch of storage options now. They've got features where you can attach data in different ways, which is something that they have addressed in the past couple of years. You can have Amazon buckets, as well as other clever things. I don't know whether they were the first to support or offer things in this way, but they definitely made the accessibility to some of these more obscure storage options easier. If you want to attach to an S3 bucket, it's always been quite a challenge, whereas with Linode, you just put in your credentials and it'll attach to the bucket for you. From that point of view, I see them changing the underlying technology constantly because you see the upgrades as they come through. Without even having a strategy to remain on top of things, Linode has enabled that for me.

If I want to fire up anything that is attached to any of the common data types, it's not a difficult thing to do at all because that is what they're doing. For example, I've just seen something new on their site, which is called a cloud firewall. It's in beta testing. So, looking around, I can see that there's going to be a new service that they're going to add back on top of all of that. It means that if I've got a cloud firewall, I don't have to worry about other firewalls on my machines. I just stick them all behind one firewall. This means one setup, one cost, etc. That's innovation for you because, one, they're making life easier for me. I don't have to set up a whole bunch of things. Secondly, they make a new income stream for themselves, which is brilliant.

The ability to fire up a virtual machine, use it, and then kill it, is quite a valuable feature for me. They have a lot of startup scripts, I think they are called stack scripts, whereby you can install something at a click of a button. For instance, you can install a whole server at the click of a button. Linode gives the users a lot of control.

Another thing that I use quite a lot is their documentation. They have documentation on how to perform tasks and often, I use that to educate a client on how to do something or on how to maintain something, et cetera. This is because a lot of customers are used to simpler systems like an iPhone, where if you want an app then you just download it from a store, press a button and it installs, or press a button and it updates.

The truth of the matter is that with servers and things like that, whilst people like the push button idea, it's a lot more complex than that. With these stack scripts, the people at Linode have thought about all of the things that a new user would not think about. They do all of that stuff and then walk you through it, and that's where Linode's documentation is really good. They walk you through what you have to do to secure a server, what you have to do to run a patch, or whatever.

They've got all those sorts of knowledge bases of information, which I think is invaluable, especially for clients who are uneducated in these things.

It's extremely important to me that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers, for various reasons. One is that because we live in this global world, our customers are everywhere. Secondly, for people who need geo-redundancy, with for example a server in China and one elsewhere as a backup, it's great.

It's also nice because if they were just US-based, I wouldn't be able to use them because I would need to go through a whole process of trying to certify the data integrity in other regions. I'm sure that most people wouldn't bother with this because of all of the EU laws and the UK laws around data privacy.

The US's data privacy laws are far more relaxed than what they are on my side of the world. The fact that I can have a server in London means that I don't have to bother with all of that. My physical location of that server is in London and to me, it is really important.

When you compare Amazon, they claim to have infrastructure all over the place but I think that the bulk is centered in Germany. Even if it is in a few different places, everything gets backed up to the US, which is a problem for a lot of people.

Before they changed the dashboard, I found some of the more granular options easier to find. However, it was just a matter of getting used to the new interface.

I have been working with Linode for more than 10 years, since 2009.

I've got two use cases. The first one is that I use Linode to host my own personal servers that host programs and software. Some of the applications are things like firewalls, et cetera. Any offsite technology infrastructure that I need, I use Linode for.

My second use case is that when I provide my customers with solutions that are cloud-based, where it is customized software, websites, or something else that they want control over, I spin up a Linode for them and then hand it over to the customer. I'm constantly giving Linode new customers as I provide people with solutions. I normally spin the Linode up myself and then pass it on to the client. Once my relationship with that customer is over and my side is fulfilled, they continue a relationship with Linode as their infrastructure provider.

That said, the main objective is not to resell their product. What I'm doing is I'm including Linode as the hosting infrastructure in the solutions that I sell. This allows people to have a virtual machine in the cloud at a very reasonable price. For example, a lot of people use that for their bespoke websites, membership sites, or for hosting other services.

Our company makes some bespoke software for the music industry, for example, whereby they can manage contracts and things like that. When people purchase this, instead of giving them a physical machine in the office, I give them a Linode machine and my software is on that, which is how Linode gets bundled along with everything else.

I don't make any money on top of the Linode service. Rather, I just say to the customer, "You've got to pay Linode $20 or whatever it is a month to carry on using Linode." At that point, they say, "Absolutely," because they've got backups and all of the good stuff without any of the downsides, for literally a tenth, or in some cases a hundredth of the price compared to having to do it on their own site.

The overall stability is brilliant. I don't think I've ever had downtime that I wasn't in control of, for upgrades as an example. I don't think I've ever had an outage. 

There have been some DNS problems once or twice, but not a single one of my clients phoned me and said, "Hey, this is not working."

I use Linode daily. The machines serve all of my websites, some of my client's websites, some of my user applications, and some of my knowledge base stuff. I've got customers who've got critical data, such as their financial data stored on Linode. To me, Linode is like having your coffee in the morning or breathing. It is integral.

I think that if I had to do something massive, it would be easy. Scalability-wise, if you've got the money, the sky's the limit with them. I'm guessing that if you were to try and buy some of their massive offerings, GPUs, which are $4,000 a month, I'm guessing that'll take a little bit of time to set up, but I may be wrong because I've never done that.

Basically, if I look at the options that they have, you can move from anything from a tiny one-gig configuration to something that's got 125 gigabytes or 200 gigabytes of memory. That's ridiculous. There is more RAM than you've got hard-disk storage in some cases.

There are also a lot of articles that help people. If you want redundancy, for example, you're going to go and have a look and see, "Okay, that's how I do that.", and then you've learned something. That's the beauty of it, is that they're not like all these proprietary people, everything's under a hat and you don't know until you pay your money. They're quite open about everything.

I have customers who use Linode, but I am the only person in my organization who uses it at the moment. I have one other software developer who has access to it. At the moment I've got one machine on Linode, which I've just recently made slightly smaller. It runs about 40 or 50 websites and web applications for myself and for some of my clients.

Every time I get a new project, I fire up a new Linode. I use it for as long as I need it for the project and then I kill it again. So as soon as I get my next customer, I'll be adding another Linode to my account.

My current Linode that's running now, I recently down-scaled because a lot of customers have moved away, and also, we're trying to save money wherever we can. I didn't have to go to Linode and explain that I was suffering because COVID has taken away some of the customers. Rather, I went onto my dashboard, selected to make it smaller, and they warned me to ensure that I had taken care of three steps first. I went ahead and took care of the one that I hadn't done, and the other two were not applicable to me.

Once that was complete, I pressed the button and my Linode was half the cost in less than 10 minutes. I have got control of everything that I do. If at the end of next month things are back to normal, then I'll press the button and double my usage again. I expect that I'll be adding customers to it after that. In the meantime, I have the freedom to do what I want and I'm not captured by any sort of contract. I trust the people at Linode explicitly.

Linode has 24/7, no-tiered human customer support, and its flexibility and overall responsiveness are why I don't use the other major providers. They are very responsive and are quite happy to listen to what you have to say, rather than trying to rush you through the process. You get a very real and very human interface, even with their email systems and through their ticketing systems. All of that appears to be very considered and it appears to be unique to you. You're not just getting a knowledge base thrown at you and told, "Go and sort through that and figure out what's going on."

I also have some experience with Amazon AWS, and it is more complex than Linode. I know a little bit about the AWS pricing, where they bill according to time, at perhaps the millisecond level. I did use them in the early days but I got burned a few times where I suddenly had a bill of $1,000 when I didn't even realize that the machine was on. Amazon was quite unforgiving, at least in those days, about such things.

Linode, on the other hand, has a maximum cap that you can pay. If you use less, you pay less. I think that they're quite smart in that they worked out that cap quite well because you never really pay much less than that. It's a fixed price and whoever did those calculations has done them well.

I have no idea how much I have saved over the years by choosing Linode, but just from a management point of view, no one's time is spent having to double-check how much your bill's going to be all the time. I would estimate that would be one or two hours, of someone who knows what they're doing, a month having to do that. If you take a support person, earning, for example, $5,000 to $8,000 per month, if you consider what two hours of the month would cost, that's probably the cost of the savings. If you manage these things properly, obviously, you can keep the costs the same. Honestly, I haven't put much thought into it or wondered if anybody had better pricing because Linode does everything that I need, nicely.

Generally speaking, as I have been a customer of Linode for a long time, I don't have a lot of experience with other cloud providers. I don't even bother with them. But, I can tell you from seeing customers that have had other providers that I've got absolutely no problems with response time, in comparison.

I don't ever run anything that's mission-critical to the point where I need support in five minutes with someone. I don't have anything like that. None of my customers do because we build our systems so that there's redundancy. If something goes down, it's much like having a backup for your electricity. It doesn't really matter if it's down 5% or 2%, because you've got a backup.

That's the same with the way that we design solutions for our customers and for ourselves. If Linode does go down, normally, they're not down for long. When I say not for long, it's minutes. They communicate well and for the maintenance they do, they let you know months in advance. So, it's only your own fault if you suddenly find yourself caught in a situation where you're not prepared. Ultimately, they've got a very good balance and I think that they have got a very good future.

An example of this is that one of my machines needed to be moved to Tucson. It was a virtual machine that needed to be moved to some other hardware, which is a process that they said could take up to two hours. They said to me, if you do nothing, we're going to move it in April or whenever it was, but you can click here and move it at your convenience. I know when the US is not so busy because I'm half awake when they're still sleeping, so I pressed the button one morning and it took less than 20 minutes to move.

My machine was back up and running. Nobody knew, in terms of my users, that it had even happened. So, their response times and their options, because they allow you to manage so much yourself, are great. It's a very good balance between moving forward and balancing that with the needs of the customer.

Linode is a virtual machine, so I'm often setting them up for the first time. I have images that I set up to be Linode in a particular format, and I can run them by hitting a button that says Deploy New Linode. It asks me what size, where, I press a button and it deploys that machine that I had deployed two years ago, exactly the same way. It means that if you're doing repetitive stuff, you shouldn't have to be doing it from scratch every time. You can just make an image and deploy your Linode from it. They've really made it quite easy.

Setting up a Linode from scratch is child's play. It's literally easier than updating your iPhone. But, it's what you have to do after that you need to consider. Depending on your choice of what you want to do, such as installing Ubuntu or some other software, that's where the complexity comes in. However, that's not Linode's issue. That's an issue with whatever it is you're doing.

The actual acquisition of a machine takes just minutes. I've got six questions to answer and when I press that button that says create, it takes approximately a minute and then you've got a machine that has an operating system installed. It's a basic operating system, whatever you choose, and a root password. It is at this point when the complications start because that's when you then have to do all the stuff that you do to set up a machine, but that's not a Linode function. That's a user function.

For what I do, if I start from scratch, without my pre-installed stuff, it could take me anything from 15 minutes for a basic system to about four hours for a complicated one. But, that's after the Linode set up. For example, setting up a Laravel dev environment probably takes me about three minutes, because I just pop an image and I say, "Deploy this image," and it just goes and does it. If you take a look at their marketplace, they've got apps that you can use to set up various machines.

In the marketplace, there are apps available to help you set up a cloud server, an open VPN, Jenkins, LAMP, or anything. You just say, "This is what I want," and that script runs for you. Another example is Minecraft; if you want the Java edition of Minecraft, you can go and set that up and it'll take you five minutes. Any customer can do this and you don't have to be a tech guru.

It is tough to determine what my return on investment is. I think there's a cost benefit more than a return on investment. When you look at an organization in terms of infrastructure setup, I've had a much lower cost than I would have, had I used the traditional bare metal or hardwired approach.

Compared to a traditional method with a server, plus someone running it, and all of the administration that comes with it, my cost savings are literally a hundredfold or a thousandfold. Moreover, without Linode, I probably wouldn't have been able to offer some of the services to some of the markets that I have in the past because of the pricing.

The monthly cost depends on your requirements.

The pricing is absolutely spot on. I think whoever thought about how their pricing should work and how their sizing should work, clearly understands the use case of their customers. I'm a tiny customer of theirs, but, I'm loyal to them because they constantly deliver and they do things that make sense.

I'm not paying any more now than I was paying in 2009. As a matter of fact, I think I'm probably paying less now than I was then, yet I've probably got 20 or 30 or 40 times larger resources available to me. Every time they upgrade their infrastructure, they don't say, "Oh, we've got new equipment, now we're going to charge you more." Instead, they say that they will carry on charging you the same or less, yet, we have better stuff for you. That is just a good business model, which has stood them in good stead.

Because I am such a happy customer, it is difficult to point to an area that is in need of improvement. I've not had a use case, and none of my customers have said, "Oh, we would have loved to have used Linode, but they don't do X." What they do is more than adequate for what I need. In my view, you'd have to go a long way to find something. I don't use the API, although I've seen a lot of documentation on it. I'm guessing that the API is an area where people would want different accessibilities, but I don't know enough about that to be able to comment.

They changed the dashboard quite a while back, but there was a while when you could switch between the classic and new one. The classic one had some different granularity, which was nice, but I've now found that with the new one. It had looked like some of that granularity had gone away, but it's just in other places. Ultimately, it was just a matter of getting used to what it looked like.

I think the new interface is more modern-looking and probably a little more user-friendly. However, when you've used something for a long time and then it changes, you think, "Oh, what's going on?" But I've not found myself sitting and wondering what is happening in different parts of the solution. I would say that now, it's fine.

Quite a while ago, they moved away from one particular underlying technology that is used for the virtualization of machines. There are two types of virtualization, and they moved from one to the other. I'm not sure of the details but there was a massive improvement as a result. I could tell because I only moved some of my machines at the time, and left some of them on the first platform. There was a noticeable difference and it was big. Whatever they did in terms of the backend of their virtualization, when they moved from one of the main ones to a better one, that was a good move.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Linode is that you can be human and still provide a good service. I don't know anybody in the company and I don't particularly follow any of their leaders, they're not even on my radar. That said, every single interaction I've had with Linode has always had all of my core values in there. Integrity is an important one.

I find that often with tech companies, they lose humanness for the sake of efficiency, or other reasons. Banks have also lost it. A lot of people have lost that human touch and whilst I don't think Linode in any way have ever said, "Oh, we're the company with a human touch.", I can tell you that they definitely, you can feel the love and the fact that people know what they're doing and they care about what they're doing.

My advice for anybody who is thinking about using Linode is to know what you want, and if you don't know what you want, ask Linode because they'll know what you want. Often with these sorts of things, you tend to do your research first and then go to a vendor and ask them, based on your research, what you want. I would be very comfortable suggesting to any customer of mine that they ask Linode.

I am confident that they are not going to try and figure out how much you can afford and then nail you with that. They'll give you the options. They're very transparent. That way, you end up buying what you need as opposed to buying what someone's trying to sell you or what someone thinks you need.

In summary, Linode is a good product and I love them.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Its user-friendly interface and convenient administrator panel allow me to quickly and easily manage my services.

Linode offers cost-effective pricing, and it enables me to swiftly deploy my services. Its simplicity makes it a more straightforward choice compared to AWS, which can be more complex and costly.

There is room for improvement regarding customer support.

I have been working with it for two years.

It offers good stability capabilities.

It is a scalable solution.

I am not satisfied with their customer support services. They should improve the effectiveness of it by enhancing the response time.

The initial setup was easy and quick.

Over the past two years, I installed a total of seven machine instances on Linode. It has been easy to manage them.

It is quite affordable, which makes it a great choice.

It is superior to other services offered in Taiwan. It can operate swiftly and allows us to back up and restore the system conveniently. Right now, we are facing VM interruption, so I would rate it eight out of ten.

We're a hosting service, as well as a software development and website design company. We use Linode for virtual servers to host the websites that we design and maintain.

The relatively small but well-focused set of services is adequate for our use. We install our own software and run our own servers, so they're providing the base system for us.

It is important that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers. We don't utilize overseas currently, but that's definitely a plus in the event that we have a client that needs a local server overseas.

Implementing Linode has helped us to accelerate innovation. We moved from having servers in a colo where they were our servers and we maintain the hardware, to virtual servers with Linode five years ago. The ability to move between servers in the event that there's some hardware issue, and the ability to rely on them to maintain their hardware, was a real plus. It took a load off of us having to be concerned about the hardware the systems are running on. Plus, the connection that they provide is high bandwidth and has considerably more than we were being offered by the previous provider.

What we find most valuable about Linode is its service. The fact that you can get a person on the phone has just been fantastic. I've gotten to where I just won't use a company that doesn't provide somebody on the phone. There are some issues, especially when you're dealing with something as timely as an issue with a server, where communicating in any other fashion is just not adequate. You need to get somebody on the phone when you have a down issue, and they're very good. You don't necessarily always get the person that knows the most about the issue when you first call in, but they're pretty good about getting it to somebody who can help you.

It would be wonderful to have the person that is most familiar with an issue when you call up available on the phone immediately, but I understand that can't always be the case. There are too many different kinds of issues and you need a hierarchy for people to handle concerns.

I've had some difficulties with some of their IP addresses being banned by certain mail servers. I think it's based on the size of their network that they manage and the fact that they have different users within C-blocks of IPs that might be spam sources affecting anybody else that's on that same network. It's a difficult problem to address, but it does affect us occasionally, and having your email rejected is not something any of us like dealing with.

Typically, we try to reach out to the party that is blocking the IP address. On occasion, it takes contacting Linode and having them also reach out and request that the IP be unblocked. So far, that's been adequate.

I have been working with Linode for nine years.

Linode provides the servers for all of our clients, and the stability and availability are extremely good. I think in the five years that I've been with them, there was just one issue where there was a DoS attack. It's been quite some time but from what I recall, it took at most an hour to resolve the problem.

The rest of the time, there have been a few occasions where somebody on the same virtual host as us has been overusing the CPU and we've needed to move the virtual host to another physical server, and that's always been handled promptly. Most of the time, it has been really good.

Resizing Linodes is easy to do. I've not hit the boundaries of the capabilities of their system or even come close to it. There is plenty of bandwidth, plenty of CPU, plenty of memory available, and plenty of disk space. I've had no problems.

Nobody in the company really works with Linode on a regular basis.  Most management tasks can be handled online.   There's probably over the past five years been 10 or 15 occasions where somebody needed to do something over the phone.

There have been two of us that have dealt with Linode, including myself and a programmer that I have working for me. At this point, we don't have a plan to increase our usage.

The company has been operating for more than 20 years and prior to Linode, we did not use a similar product. Rather, we were using a colo facility with our own hardware.

The initial setup is extremely easy to manage. It doesn't require anything complicated. It's all online through their interface. You add Linode, delete Linode, pick where you want the Linode to reside, size it, or resize it. It's quite easy.

You can add Linode in a couple of minutes.

Our network layout hasn't changed in years. It's a setup that we've had in place over time and it's not like we're strategizing changes to it all the time.

The pricing model is simple. They don't make things complicated, which is important. We've had to deal with Oracle's crazy pricing, which is based on how many CPUs you're running.

When we consider everything including support, response time, uptime, and price, it makes all the difference to me that you can call and get somebody on the phone, pretty much immediately. Dealing in chat and email is just not adequate when you have an issue.

Using Linode has saved us some money compared to other cloud providers, although it is not our primary concern. Availability of support is much more important than pricing.

We looked at other solutions including, for example, Amazon, as well as other virtual server providers. We had some feedback from some of the people we reached out to in making the decision that had provided some good feedback on Linode, so we thought we'd give that a try.

We set up a couple of servers, then I moved some sites over and had a good experience with them. So, we migrated the whole setup.

One of the significant differences between Linode and the other products is the support. We also found their pricing quite competitive, which is another reason that we opted for Linode.

My advice for anybody who is looking for this type of service is to seriously consider Linode.

In summary, this is a good service and something that we benefit from every day. Really, in my experience, they've done a fantastic job and there really hasn't been anybody dropping the ball over there.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We're a software company that uses a 1980s American product called Appgen, as an application generator. We've got accounting, finance materials, and information packages running under Appgen and we have a number of hospitals in Victoria, Australia using that for their finances. They tend to run on SCO Unix or UnixWare, but our own version of it, which we use for developing is SUSE Linux.

We've got an in-house virtual machine running there, but I was concerned about backup. My original reason for choosing Linode was it was an affordable Linux cloud node system that could run both Fedora and SUSE Linux.

I just chose on those grounds initially and we didn't do much else with it. But in fact, one of the services that we provide is called Medicare Online, for the Australian government health billing service. In this system, doctors and hospitals bill patients and then claim the expenses back from the government. That's been running the product's security system. Moving on to the web services, I thought when we started developing them, we'll try using Linode.

I think it's very affordable and although my initial intention was just to use it as a backup, I'm mirroring our machine with it. When we go ahead and develop the web services interface, we'll use Linode to do it.

The company got a lot more out of Linode than I expected. I thought that I was just buying a cloud-based backup, but I'm getting much more than that. I'm getting a really good Linux with technical support.

Essentially, the fact that we're developing web services interfaces and it is all fully supported, is 

Given our business model, it is very important that Linode offers a focused set of cloud computing services because it means that we can then mirror our software in the cloud. When we do want to do things like developing web service interfaces then the environment is available. We chose SUSE Linux but we could have chosen Fedora. They offer quite a number of Linux solutions.

Initially and at this point, the fact that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers is not important to us. However, our software is becoming obsolete and when they finally stop using it, we'll offer an archive, online inquiry for them. At that point, it will be an important feature.

We have accessed it using SSH on a number of different platforms and it works every time.

When it comes to marketing and exposure, Linode needs improvement because I just randomly found them by looking for Linux solutions. If we're in a position where we were trying to persuade our users to put their archive inquiries on to Linode, then perhaps their low profile might be a problem.

We have been using Linode for approximately four years.

Stability-wise, it is very good. It has never shown any sign of anything wrong and has never run out of space. We had one runaway process which was our fault and they reported it to us.

For the environment that we are in, it's scalable. However, I haven't really tested it or pushed it hard enough to be sure about the scalability.

Initially, we didn't have Apache running on Linode. I thought that it was a bit of a Hail Mary, but I asked for their assistance because I was having a bit of trouble loading it. To my surprise, considering the cost of the service, the assistance is not only prompt, but they're very good, very professional.

By contrast, we use Google for our email services, and they're nowhere near as good when you want technical support.

As far as I can tell, their support is available 365, 24/7. The one time I asked for support, I got it very quickly and correctly.

Positive

I don't know enough about major cloud providers apart from Google Drive. But if you're someone that is working with Linux, it's very good. You can choose which Linux you want and it's a fully implemented version of it, but I haven't tested it against other providers.

The exception might be that Gmail handles the email and I think Linode is far more satisfactory, and much less expensive too.

Using the instructions they gave us, we were given a choice in various things of Linux that we wanted to load and we chose SUSE because we knew that our software would work on that. 

It was fairly straightforward. Without really knowing much about it, it was up and running in half a day. It worked the way it was meant to work, relatively easily.

I deployed it myself and I am the primary administrator.

Linode's pricing model is very simple. When we started with the service, the cost was approximately €5 per month.

Considering the support response, uptime, and price, I find that the price to performance ratio is excellent.

I didn't really look at other options before choosing Linode. I was looking for a cloud-based backup service of our Linux system and it was called Linode, and it seemed to do all that and it worked for us.

Given that it only cost €5 per month, it wasn't a big risk so I decided to try the service. After that, I didn't feel the need to try anything else.

Generally speaking, I have not found any faults using Linode. For what we wanted, they provided a complete solution. We're running older versions of SUSE Linux, and when I wanted to download it and start using features, it was all available.

We are not using Linode to the full extent of its capabilities, mainly because we're just using it to back up our in-house Linux. I estimate that we are using only 5% of what it can do. Certainly, for what we're trying to do, which is to copy our backups every night and reinstall them on the mirrored machine, it does it very easily and very quickly.

I'm not sure that Linode supports Unix as distinctly as Linux. Certainly, I haven't tested that, but if it supported SCO Unix solutions as well as Linux, that would make it easier for us. It may well come up in the next year that we want to migrate customers that are running Unix, not Linux.

My advice for anybody who is considering this service is that if their software runs under Linux and they are a Linux solution provider then I would recommend it without hesitation. It supports all of the main flavors of Linux.

Starting to use this product, I didn't have to learn anything because I followed the instructions, chose my version of Linux to install, and everything worked the first time. My only snag was trying to install web services in Apache and I had to ask them for help, but the help came very quickly and was correct.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our use cases involve their virtual server (VPS) solutions, which we have used since we first started with them. They also have a wonderful DNS service, and we use that as well.

For most of their existence, VPS is more or less what they have been providing.

We're happy that it works, and we're happy that we have never had to contact them. They have been proactively managing hardware issues and network issues for us. These are all nice things and these are reasons we're keeping using Linode and not going elsewhere.

That said, we're moving part of our business from Linode to one of the local companies because of regulations in privacy laws. In Turkey, we have to serve local, Turkish customers using a local provider because by regulation, we're not allowed to move certain kinds of data out of the country. This means that we're obliged to use one of the local companies, but otherwise, for our global services, we intend to keep using Linode.

Considering the features we use, I would not say that we're an extensive user. For example, we don't use volumes, object storage, or Kubernetes. We do have a number of servers and we're using the DNS service exclusively. We don't have any other DNS servers.

The cloud management panel is nice.

It's very easy to create new servers.

The VPS and DNS servers work smoothly and we're happy with what we have.

It is important that Linode offers worldwide coverage through multiple data centers, although for us, if they covered only Europe and the U.S., we would be fine with it.

They don't provide managed databases so when we need one, we have to build and install a server and manage the database by ourselves. This is an important feature for us that should be added. Currently, the object storage and volumes features are insufficient for our needs. We need an actual database.

They have recently started to provide cloud firewall service on some of their data centers but it's not widely available yet. This is something that would be nice to have, although it's not very important.

Having a load-balancer feature would be nice, and I have been reading that this is something that they have been working on for the past few years. It's surprising that they're very slow when it comes to implementing certain features.

They don't have role-based access control, which is problematic for us. Imagine a case where you have multiple departments and you have a number of servers and you want to give limited access to some departments or some people. You just can't do that. Another example is that when you have an additional user account on your panel, that user will have access to everything. They will be able to reboot servers, modify DNS records, or do dangerous things that you don't need them to or want them to. Role-based access control is something that Amazon provides, Google provides, and Azure provides, and it's unfortunate that it is not available as a feature.

I have been using Linode for approximately 16 years, close to the entire time that they have existed.

Linode has been very reliable for us. We have had no downtime in the past year and during the past ten years, I think that we have had less than 20 minutes of downtime in total. Stability-wise, it is awesome.

Linode is not very easy to scale.

The Kubernetes cluster feature is nice and I suppose that it is easy to manage, but we don't use it.

In the case we need some performance, we have API access and we can create servers on-demand, but Linode's cloud doesn't really compare to Amazon's offerings. They don't have anything comparable to Amazon's Lambda. It's a function as a service. It's a new paradigm, basically. It's called serverless computing. Linode doesn't provide this or anything close to this. It's a leap forward in the industry, and it's another thing that is missing from Linode. It could be a problem for some people but not for us.

In terms of scalability, we're happy with what we have because we usually scale slowly. It's not like we're going to have a few million more customers on our doorstep in less than an hour. It's going to go up slowly for us, so we can anticipate and plan against it and we can create new servers or scale-out infrastructure by keeping track of it and doing much of the work manually.

Ultimately, Linode does not help us scale up. We do most of the work manually. If, however, they provided a managed database, we could scale more easily, which would be nice.

Linode provides 24/7, 365, no-tiered human customer support, but it is not important to us at all. We're mostly self-sufficient. Also, in case something goes wrong, I understand that they have a team that tracks downtimes, outages, and other problems. They usually respond to problems before we need to talk to someone.

The support is proactive in this regard and so far during the whole time, the 16 years we've worked with them, we never had to talk to a human being, not even once.

Depending on the project, we still use servers by other providers. For example, we have a small number of servers on Rackspace and DigitalOcean. We have a number of servers on Google Cloud, as well.

In our previous projects, we used Amazon a lot. We don't use them anymore, however, because we don't need to.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

You start by creating a user account, then you enter a credit card number and you create a server and you're good to go. For anyone in their target customer base, they would find it very easy to become a customer or create a user.

The last time I did this, it took three or four minutes. 

The pricing is nice for us. It is a little cheaper than Google or Amazon, more or less on par with the other competitors.

The pricing model is very straightforward and it suits us. It may not suit everyone, but it suits us. The pricing model is easy to understand.

At this point, the pricing is not very important for us. We would be happy to pay between 20% and 50% more if there were a number of features available. Unfortunately, they're not available and have not been so for a very long time.

We don't use Amazon or Google or Microsoft Azure, but if we decided to use them, Linode would have saved us a significant amount of money. We're probably paying 30% of what we would have paid to Amazon or Google.

The other providers do have additional features but we choose to stay with Linode because it's slightly cheaper. Also, we are used to Linode. When we first started doing business, everyone was building their own database servers and we got used to this model. We don't want to change providers for this alone but if Linode provided this feature, we would definitely use it.

We don't use these Kubernetes or Docker deployments and we have no intention to use them. They are recent features, available for perhaps the past three or four years, and we don't plan to use them.

My advice for others who are looking into Linode is that if they only need DNS and VPS and maybe self-managed Kubernetes, Linode is one of the best because it's so reliable. To me, it's like a bridge. You buy it, and you don't think about it for years. For us, that was the experience.

We're technically capable of managing our own hardware, so Linode is just taking away the burden of managing hardware by ourselves. This leaves us to manage our own service and software. If people are basically looking for VPS solutions and Kubernetes, they're like a bridge. Linode is so reliable that you won't need to talk to any customer service agent, and they are one of the best globally.

In summary, Linode needs to expand its portfolio of features. It's pretty basic currently, and while it's nice to be basic, some people like us need more features. We actually need them and if we had the incentive to move to somewhere else, we would consider it. We currently don't have an incentive, because our business is not growing explosively. However, if we had to grow quickly and have a huge number of users, of course, we would have to think about managed databases and load-balancers and firewalls and role-based access control, and the other features that are missing on Linode. We would have to migrate to somewhere else. Currently, we don't have that problem.

We have been a happy customer, most of the time.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I was using it primarily for virtual private servers. But recently they came out with the Kubernetes platform and most of what I do at my day job is Kubernetes engineering. I'm very familiar with it. I had wanted to switch all my personal projects over to Kubernetes, and it was really great when Linode finally came out with it. Now I'm using Linode for Kubernetes clusters. I still do hold some VPSs, but most of my stuff is on Kubernetes now. I don't use Linode at my day job. We use Azure for the same thing there, but I choose to use Linode for all my personal projects.

I like it because it gives me scalability but, that's true of Kubernetes in general. But I do really like that it is consistent with all the stuff that I regularly do in my day job with Azure, using Kubernetes. It's nice that I can easily transfer that over to Linode using their Kubernetes.

Linode Kubernetes Engine is pretty great when it comes to the amount of Terraforming and manual integrations. Kubernetes does a great job of staying running and looking after itself. I find with VPSs that, every once in a while, something will go down and I will have to restart it manually. With Kubernetes, that tends to happen a lot less. I also find maintenance to be a lot easier.

When it comes to the Linode Kubernetes Engine and the amount of automation it provides, it's awesome, it's a game-changer. If a process randomly dies, it could take me a while to notice that it has died, if I haven't set up monitoring. With Kubernetes, it will just restart itself using Heartbeats.

In addition, the visibility that the Linode Kubernetes Engine provides is awesome. It's better than some of the other cloud providers', such as  Azure which is one I work with specifically. I find the Linode version to be a lot more user-friendly. It feels like the Linode interface is designed by someone who actually uses the product, whereas with Azure, it doesn't necessarily feel like that. It feels like some things are user-hostile.

Another feature that is quite helpful for setting up servers is the StackScripts. I've used it to set up game servers, previously. They have a library of instantiation scripts that will set up an environment for you on a VPS, from scratch, with one click. There's a pretty large library too, so that's quite handy.

And the fact that Linode offers a relatively small, but well-focused set of cloud computing services is the reason to go with Linode. What they do, they do well, and they're slowly adding stuff. They were a little bit late to the game on Kubernetes, but their Kubernetes is incredibly solid, in my experience so far. It feels very stable and well thought out.

It's also important that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers. I'm based around Toronto and they have a data center right in Toronto. It works very well for me. With other solutions, I often have to pick data centers in Chicago or the like.

One thing that I'd really like to see is auto-scaling node pools for their Kubernetes. I don't think that they have that. That's a huge one and would be very helpful. Specifically, what I would like is auto-scaling node pools that would scale down to zero nodes, which is tricky. That's very important for certain use cases. Azure does provide that functionality, although only recently, and it was quite buggy when Azure unreleased it.

I have been using Linode for about five years.

Linode is super-solid. I haven't really had any downtime in years. I may have had one drive failure, but that was a case where they just restarted it. They then sent me an email saying, "Hey, we had a drive failure. We've re-imaged, we've reloaded it from a backup and you're good to go now."

I haven't used Linode at scale, but I don't see any issues in being able to scale it, especially with Kubernetes. In addition, although I don't use them all that much, the NodeBalancers seem to be a well-thought-out solution for scaling.

If I could convert my whole company over to Linode, I would in a heartbeat. That's obviously a tough sell. Personally, I might use it slightly more in the future, but not on a significant scale. If I were to ever go off and start my own company though, I would totally use Linode.

Their support is great. It's probably the best support in the industry. I've barely had to deal with them because all their stuff is solid, but when I have interacted with them it has usually been them reaching out to me to let me know about an issue, rather than me reaching out to them. Usually it's them saying, "Hey, there was an issue, but it's fixed. We just wanted to let you know." That's pretty great.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I was on Linode before I was a professional developer. I was on Google Cloud compute before I was on Linode, and I found the Google Cloud stuff to be incredibly complicated. Then I came to Linode and everything just started to make sense. The simplicity allowed me to build a lot of experience around server-hosting without getting bogged down at the door.

To some extent I have seen a return on my investment with Linode. The project that I have it's called Beerbase.ca, and it's a site that aggregates prices from the Ontario Beer Store. Here in Ontario, we have one company that handles all beer sales. My site crawls The Beer Store website daily, gets all the different prices, and then populates the database. Beerbase.ca displays them.

I haven't monetized the site, but the value that I get from it, is as a personal project, is that whenever I'm applying for jobs, it says a lot when I say, "Hey, this is my project that I've been running for years." People really like it. They think it's funny and it's gotten me in the door at just about every company that I've worked at. It has been the thing that has set me apart. The ROI there is huge, although it's intangible.

You could say that Linode has helped to accelerate innovation in beer pricing. I wouldn't say we're saving the world, but it's a fun, interesting project.

The biggest benefit of Linode is the pricing. It's the best deal in the business. When I look at the server bills from Azure compared to Linode, if I were to host a similar amount of stuff on Linode, it would just be a better deal, and it always has been. 

Another great aspect with Linode—and I don't know if they give this to everyone—is that they will often have discount codes, where you get $20 of free credit. That's the equivalent of four months of a Nanode (or nano node) which is the smallest server. That's incredible for getting something set up, and that is what initially got me onto Linode. Someone who I really respect was doing a sponsorship with Linode, but that person said he was using Linode even before he was sponsored by them. I thought, "Okay, I'll go give this a try. What do I have to lose? It's four months for free." But I never turned back. And even now, where I'm on Kubernetes and it would be trivial to switch providers, I have no intention of doing so.

I would recommend that people look at the Linode Kubernetes Engine because it allows you to better utilize all of the compute that you're paying for. With VPSs, you have to do a balancing game of having enough without paying for too much. But with Kubernetes, you can have all of your projects on one cluster and just add nodes as needed. That even improves the already good pricing from Linode.

Their pricing model is also very simple compared to Azure. I don't understand why Azure doesn't price things the way that Linode does. With Linode, it's very simple to get an idea of what something is going to cost you. By comparison, I regularly have to do estimates of pricing on Azure, and that is an exercise in futility. It's very complicated the way that Azure prices out their stuff.

That simplicity is very important to me because all of my personal projects are hosted on Linode. It does a very good job of giving you what you need quickly and getting out of the way; of not complicating things. It lets you just work on your thing so you can get it going quickly. With other cloud providers, there are all these configurations and "gotchas".

I save at least $100 a month with Linode. I don't host a lot there, but the Kubernetes clusters that I'd be looking at on Azure would be significantly more.

I tried Google Cloud, but I didn't really like it all that much. It was expensive and also quite complicated. I find Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud to all be a little bit over-complicated. Linode definitely feels like the best solution for someone who doesn't want to spend a lot of time dealing with their cloud provider. Sometimes it makes sense to go with Azure, especially if they're going to give you a ton of free credits to get you on their platform, in the startup stage. 

Linode's API is great, much better than the other providers' APIs. It's more convenient to use. I haven't used Linode's CLI, but I'm very happy to hear that they provide one.

For anyone who just wants a simple server host that does everything that the big companies do, but one where they actually care that their stuff is easy and convenient to use, and one whose pricing is good, Linode is definitely the way to go.

My advice to others who are considering using Linode would depend on what industry or what field they're in. I'm primarily a systems engineer and I end up being a cross between DevOps and a regular backend engineer. For anyone who is on that career path, it's invaluable to do a project and learn to use the tools before you're in the actual industry. It gives you a huge head start. Linode is definitely the best way to go about it because it teaches you the fundamentals and it's a lot more intuitive than the other providers. It will help you out when learning it. From there, when you start at a company, no matter what provider they're using, the fundamentals that you learned using Linode will definitely pay off. 

Don't hesitate to try it and check out the Kubernetes, because that is very in-demand right now.

I run a small company as well as my own personal website. I am using their cloud servers for managing websites and the web applications that I develop applications. So, I use Linode both for development and hosting public applications on my website. I also use their object storage to store things, like backups and files, which I want to keep for safekeeping, but not on my personal laptops. 

I have benefited from their flexibility, the object storage particularly. I know that I have almost unlimited capacity there. I don't have to provision loads of storage, keep buying loads of hard drives, etc. It is just there and usable.

The fact that you can do any Linux distribution is great. You can try out any Linux distribution, even some of the more obscure ones, and they are always keeping them up-to-date. As soon as a new distribution comes out, it is on the platform pretty much the same day, which I find really helpful.

The biggest room for improvement would be the object storage, bringing that to more data centres. At the moment, it's only in three of their many data centres.

They are already working on the firewalls and VLANs, which need improvement, and are now in beta. I am on the beta program for the firewalls, but I can't use it yet because they are only in Mumbai and Australia, and I am not in those data centres. This is the one thing that I have been waiting for almost since the day that I joined them, so it is nice that they are doing that. The VLANs will be an improvement as well, and I am keen and waiting for that. 

Another improvement would be on the server side, e.g., if they could support non-Linux OSs, like FreeBSD or even Windows. I heard a rumor that they might be looking at doing this. I understand that they have been focused on Linux their entire lifetime, so this would be a big change for them.

I found out about Linode in 2015. I used them for a couple of years, then I moved to another provider back in the UK. I came back to Linode in April 2019. So, I have been back with them for a couple of years, but I have always kept up with them within that time, helping out on the community and things like that.

It is very stable. I have never had a problem with the system because they are in different data centres, which makes it a bit more stable. For example, if there is a problem in Atlanta, that is not going to affect me in the UK. In terms of their global network, I have never had a problem. So, I find them really stable and reliable.

It has server maintenance. They give you the virtual server and manage the hardware in the machines for you, but it is up to the customers to manage the patches, the operating system, and install the applications. This is no real maintenance needed other than managing the service yourself. Obviously, they manage the object storage, make sure there is always enough space, and that the network is performing well.

I don't see scalability being an issue. I don't use the full scalability yet, but I know that there is room to grow. The Linode plans that they have allow you to go up to really high amounts of RAM and CPU, so they must have a lot of capacity. On the object storage side, there is virtually unlimited capacity to use from our perspective. So, they are really scalable. They have built a good platform to take them forward. They do focus on a small, few features within the platform, giving them that advantage over other competitors, like AWS, who has just a massive sprawling infrastructure. Instead, Linode focuses on building their platform out to make it great.

I am using a dedicated CPU node for my production environment, website, and some other applications. Then, I have another smaller instance for development. I also have object storage and quite a bit of data. I have about 20 gigs worth of data on domains that I am using as well, so pretty much all my domains are on it in terms of DNS management. Therefore, the only thing that I am not using is Kubernetes, and I am just not at that stage yet where I need it. However, as far as the servers are concerned, I will be using those when the firewalls come in. When the VLANs come in, I will be using that as well. I would like to think that I am using quite a bit of their platform.

Their support team is just fantastic and phenomenal. They are always helpful and always there. They are one of the only cloud providers who give phone support, and even outside of the US. I know if I have got a problem that I can just pick the phone up and call them. The support team is probably the number one selling point for me. 

• I had a ticket the other day where they responded within about 20 minutes. 
• I have had them respond when it has been the middle of the night in the UK. So, they are very responsive and friendly. They know what they are talking about. 
• I have had cases where I have had tickets that have been resolved within the first update from the support team. 

They are brilliant compared to other providers. 

I was with DigitalOcean a few years ago, and I just didn't find their support team very helpful. I got the impression they were reading from a script. Whereas, the Linode support team understands, cares, and wants to help you get to a solution.

There is a company called Memset in the UK, who is now a part of the iomart Group, and I used them for a few years. I have used Azure and AWS as well.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It is just setting the server up, then you will have your server within a few minutes. They give you the IP address and all the network information. I don't think it could be any simpler. Even in terms of creating a new block volume for servers, it gives you all the config instructions on how to add them and use them. I don't think there is any room for improvement there. It is already pretty great.

The only bit that is a bit manual is adding the IPv6 address ranges. That is still a manual thing, where you have to ask the support team to allocate you a new range. That is only a minor thing. However, you get an IPv6 address with the server anyway, so it is not too much of an issue.

Pricing-wise, I find it simple in that they give you a monthly fee, but they also charge it hourly. So, if you are using the service for a small part of the month, then you are only paying for that small amount instead of a whole month, like with other providers. It is a flat monthly fee if you use the service for the entire month. It just makes things so simple. Because they are focusing on Linux, you don't have to worry about licensing costs of Windows and things like that. So, the price that they give you is the price that you need to pay each month. I just find it so simple compared to the likes of AWS and Azure. It is nice, easy, and predictable. I know exactly what I am going to be paying each month and what resources I get for that price.

They offer a Managed plan, which isn't of interest to me at the moment. I do all the maintenance myself. However, I know that is there if I need it. 

In my day-to-day job, I work with both Azure and AWS, which are just so complicated. There are so many different services. If you want to do one thing, then it is like, "Yeah, we have a service for that, but it's going to cost you," and if you want to do something else, "There is another service, and that is going to cost you." Whereas, Linode, which is my main virtual server, is $20 a month ($25 with backups) and that is all I will pay regardless of how much I use it. That is a massive thing for them - the fact that you know exactly what you are getting. You are not bamboozled with all the different service names, etc. I find that really good.

I wouldn't even touch AWS or Azure for my own work. I have only used them through my day-to-day company for my own personal hosting of my business. They would just be three or four times the price of Linode.

There is no other company that I have found which can match the responsiveness and helpfulness of the Linode support team. 

The availability of their hardware: Linode uses newer AMD processors. A lot of other clouds are only just catching up with that, but they have been using them for a couple of years. 

The quality of the hardware is a big thing. Linode offers everything in one place. They offer domains, servers, and object storage, and now they are bringing in firewalls. I can get all that from one provider. Whereas, with other hosting companies, you get the service from one company, but they don't do DNS. You need to get the DNS as well as the object storage from somewhere else. So, there is no reason why I would go anywhere else.

Quite simply, go for it. I don't think you will be disappointed. Linode offers everything in one go. The support team is on-hand, even if you are not a paying customer yet. If you are just on a free trial or the inclusive credit that Linode offers, you will still get exactly the same support as if you were a paying customer.

It is definitely important that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centres. I am not taking full advantage of that at the moment. However, I plan to as my business gets bigger, putting service closer to customers wherever they are in the world. It is definitely a plus point that they are worldwide.

I have looked into the Linode Kubernetes Engine. However, at the moment, the virtual servers are a better fit for me. I am just not at that scale where I need the containers.

I absolutely can see that they will help us to grow and progress.

I would rate Linode as 10 out of 10. There are things for improvement, but they are working on them. I think they are only going to get better than what they are now. For me, they are the leading provider for the typical, everyday hosting needs.

I have two use cases. I work mostly by developing e-commerce sites for companies and the first use case is to develop the infrastructure, the hosting solution for those e-commerce platforms. This is done mostly in Magento, WordPress, Drupal, and other open-source platforms.

We also have our own solution, which we host in Linode. It is a software as a service platform that connects Mercado Libre with Zendesk, which are two separate companies, and we join them through middleware.

Linode offers a relatively small but well-focused set of cloud services, which is important to us because while they only offer the basics, they do it very clearly and very easily. They have simple pricing, good support, and good guides to help you. Most small companies like ours don't use most of the features that other cloud computing providers offer, so having a simpler set of features makes it easier for us to handle.

Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers, although it is not very important for our use case because we work mostly in Latin America. There is not much coverage here, so we use the USA data centers. We don't have any customers in other parts of the world, such as in Africa, Asia, or Europe, so coverage elsewhere is not really important.

Having a reliable partner like Linode has helped us to rapidly grow our infrastructure, and they were able to focus when we have had any kind of problem.

This product has absolutely helped us to accelerate innovation, for example, when we had to migrate the architecture of our SaaS solution. It was really easy to deploy new hosts and make the necessary changes to our infrastructure so that they could communicate between themselves and the outside. Whenever we had a problem, we were able to contact Linode and they helped us. For example, there were some technical specifications that we were missing. We also used the guides that they provided to secure the servers and to communicate with them. I believe it was done quite quickly, in fact, because of the help that they provide.

The simplicity by which you can handle your inventory is one of the things I like the most. You can easily create new hosts, destroy existing hosts, or do migrations.

I like the statistics that they provide, such as usage.

They have a good solution for accessing the servers if you accidentally get locked out.

The support they provide if you have any type of problem is great.

It would be nice if they had more data centers in Latin America.

Although not for our use case, I believe others would benefit from having support in other languages. For example, in this region, there are people who speak Spanish and Portuguese. This is the same for the guides, where having translated versions would be helpful.

I have been using Linode for approximately six years.

We use Linode on a daily basis, or at least very often.

The stability is quite good, although it's not perfect. We have had perhaps two problems in the six years that we have been using it. In these cases, the whole data center was down for a short time. I don't remember how long, but it was perhaps an hour or two. For us, its stability is acceptable.

For our very small company, it's completely elastic. I don't expect that we have much growth ahead but I think it will be completely flexible. At this point, I have tested having more than a few servers at a time.

At this time, it's only me who is working with Linode.

The fact that Linode offers 24/7/365 no-tiered, human support is very important to us because our services run 24/7, and like most technology, problems can arise at any time. If you have the type of problem where you believe that there's something wrong with an upper level of the infrastructure, it would be very difficult if you couldn't access support on their end, for example during a weekend or at night. For situations where you have a critical event going on, 24/7 assistance is obviously very important.

I have used other cloud platforms in the past, although I have never contacted support for them. The services that I have used are GoDaddy, DigitalOcean, LatinCloud (previously known as EL Server), and Amazon a few times.

I switched to Linode for simplicity and pricing. Also, I believe in open-source software, which is what I primarily use, and I believe that Linode is aligned with that vision, as well.

Now that I have been using it, I am very happy and don't see any reason to change.

I believe that Linode has saved us money compared to other cloud providers, but I haven't studied the figures to see how much this might be.

The initial setup is straightforward. It was just a few clicks to get started.

The first time we had to create an account, we filled out a form and put in our information. It included our name, email address, password, and so forth. Then, to deploy Linode takes another two or three clicks. It couldn't be easier.

Of course, then you have to configure it, but the actual deployment is as easy as it gets and it takes only a couple of minutes to complete. For configuration, the length of time it takes depends on what it is that you want to do. However, for a basic setup, it might take 15 minutes. You can also save templates for cases where you want to use the same type of configuration. Often, you can configure very quickly with no time for configuration, because the saved configuration can be deployed.

There is support for deployment using the API, although we have never done it that way. I expect that using the API would only mean that it takes a few seconds to deploy.

We have seen ROI because this is a cost for us, and compared to other solutions, it minimizes the cost and generates a positive income.

The pricing model is simple and that's important to us because, for example, Amazon is really complex and you have to spend a lot of time to understand how much you are going to spend on a certain solution. It's great for us to be able to simply add a few numbers and know how much we expect to spend.

There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees to include things like extra public IPs and backup services. I believe that additional public IPs cost $1 each. As I recall, everything is documented on their pricing page and there are no hidden fees.

My advice for anybody who is considering Linode is to try it out. It worked for us and I think it would work very well for any users that do have the technical knowledge to take care of the system administration. If you're technical and looking for a stable solution then you should try it because it's easy to use. They do offer a managed solution as well, although it's not as easy as utilizing a web hosting company.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Linode is the importance when it comes to thinking about all of the points of failure. In particular, which ones you control and which ones you don't, and whether you have to rely on a partner, like them. We did experience downtime on a couple of occasions and it was really bad for us, so pay specific attention to that and be aware of the risks.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.