Looking to get feedback about Linode support

Hi,
My experience with Linode support has been quite good, in terms of the quality of responses received, professionalism, and how polite they are. Those things are very good.

Over the period I've been with Linode, since I opened my account in late 2009 up to now, I have noticed that one thing with support tickets has become worse than what it once was. Response time. Linode used to respond to my support tickets in no more than ten minutes. Now, response times can be up to a day. Despite that, they are still just as helpful as they've always been, just as polite, and provide the excellent quality of support they've always had. I only wish response times were lower.

With that said, there are some contributing factors that may be the reason for Linode's slower response times. They have more customized plans, more data centers, more services that they didn't have when I first used Linode, etc. All this means that support response times would be slower, however, they have indicated that if you need support quickly, you are able to call them at their phone number. I've never made use of this option myself, so I don't know how well that would work.

I hope my feedback has been helpful, and good luck!

Blake

Linode sends me more tickets than I send them, typically. I get notifications whenever there is a host issue and they need to do emergency maintenance or when there is a security vulnerability that will require a reboot of my Linode.

That said, it seems over the long term, Linode support might be slowing down a bit. It used to be back when I joined in the 2010 era, a ticket might get replied to in less than 5 minutes. The most recent occasion (8 months ago) when I had to enter a ticket because a Linode was down, I did not get a reply from support for 40 minutes. In this case, there was a larger scale outage at their datacenter, so I expect they had a massive influx of tickets and perhaps that response time is atypical. Other than this one instance, it has been literally years since I've put in a service-impacting ticket to support. I had one ticket a couple years ago that didn't get replied to for some hours, but it was billing related, so not a big problem.

Overall, I'd say Linode support is excellent. I'm coming up on 10 years with them, and it only keeps getting better. Resource upgrades, block storage, more instance options, backups, KVM, new server hardware. The list goes on.

I was with Linode for a period of about 2 years in 2015-2017, left them for another provider and recently came back again.

I echo the other responses, support response time used to be very quick (less than an hour.)

Just the other day I raised one ticket which was replied to within minutes (amazing), and another took nearly 12 hours, and a further 7-8 hours for a follow up reply.

So I think it all depends on when your ticket hits the support team and how complex a request it is.

Linode are however one of the few providers I’ve come across that offer phone support (24 hrs).

Probably the only technical support team I've ever worked with where I know I'll never be condescended to. I swear there's some kind of patronizing epidemic across support teams, but you won't find that here. Just helpful people who will work with you on whatever your problem is, whether it's a tech problem or not. (For example, I work for a public service organization, and we need some really specific documentation for our records, even for small expenses. Linode support helped me get what I need, even though it was weird and niche. Other places would just say "we don't do that.")

I'm a bit late to comment on this. I've been with Linode since 2010. In that time, I've increased the size of my plans to a higher billing level once. But the upgrades that Linode have given me in that time have taken me from I think 1GB of memory to 6GB (a grandfathered plan) which support has offered me advice on how not to loose several times. I do miss my 10% annual discount though.

I agree with the others, support has been great. Response times have gotten a bit longer in the past couple of years but I've so rarely had to contact them for anything serious it honestly doesn't matter. I've also received a months credit without asking on two separate occasions in the last six months. During a (rare) large outage in Newark, my Linode kept rebooting into recovery until a manual disk check was performed. This was the first time I had to boot into the rescue image since I joined Linode. I updated my support ticket to point out that my file system had taken some sort of hit during the outage and there was potentially a bigger issue at play. No harm, but it was inconvenient. I was one of I think six Linode's that didn't come back after the outage was rectified. They were in the process of notifying me when I opened my support ticket. The second credit came when I opened a support ticket to, believe it or not, ask that they consider charging in local currencies because the fees charged by Canadian credit card companies when converting to USD are ridiculous (not Linode's problem at all). We had a good back and forth about different options for non-US accounts, they added my request to the pile, and gave me a free month. I'm sure I've had other unexpected credits here and there too for no real good reason other than the support agent was in a good mood (I guess). So I'd have to say support is outstanding.

I've only had one bad support experience since 2010 and it was bad. I was lucky I didn't get shutdown. Linode received a phishing complaint about an IP address that I had purchased the week previous. They opened a support ticket and included the original complaint. I pointed out the phishing complaint was for a time just before I owned the IP address and that the specific Linode hostnames mentioned by the complainant weren't mine but the support guy was frankly ignorant in his response and basically told me the issue was mine to fix in a not so professional way. I am telling you about this because the phone support came in handy. I made a phone call and the issue was resolved in about two minutes, about the time it took the phone agent to read through the support ticket. He even apologized profusely for the other agents lack of tact and the whole misunderstanding.

In contast, I briefly used GoDaddy to register a domain on the cheap ($1) and there was a billing issue or something stupid, that was a support nightmare. I did get through to someone on the phone but I basically had to go through the equivalent of 'is your computer plugged in' to get the issue straightened out.

I'm ecstastic that Linode is moving to Canada just a hop or two away from me, sadly that likely means I'm going to have to start paying taxes on my Linode in addition to the USD conversion fees :-(

Over the years I've gone looking to see if there was anything better out there and I've never found anything I'd risk switching to. We're currently looking at expanding our services significantly and I can't think of a better place than Linode to do it.

I'm late to party here but I want to relate a very recent support experience. I submitted a support ticket requesting an upgrade/enhancement to the virtual boot environment provided to Linode VMs. It was an issue that currently affects only a tiny minority of Linode users, so I was concerned that it might be triaged down to a slow reaction. Quite the contrary! Support responded quickly, Linode engineers made the requested change, and the issue was fully addressed in less than a week. I've never had a bad experience over years of using Linode.