Is Linode good for production in 2019?

Been here 4 years now, nerver lost any data. They always fix security issues very fast.

I've been with both Linode and Digital Ocean and can hands-down say the company that offers the best support is Linode.

DO have a great platform, although some of their CPUs are aging a bit now. Linode (at least in London) have newer CPUs.

I can't wait for 2 developments to even the playing field (for now, at least):

• cloud firewalls
• true private networking (SDN, vLAN, VPC whatever you want to call it). If they can make this cross-datacentre, it'll be even better than DO's.

Is there anyone that has lost data with Linode or with their block storage?

Even if no-one has ever lost data with Linode, I'd still say the same thing: back up your data off-site and this will never be a question you need to ask of any provider. I personally use Backblaze B2 cloud storage (really cheap) and Restic to backup my Linodes off-site daily.

Worst-case scenario, if Linode's London DC dropped off-line completely and the Linode backups were inaccessible, it would take me a couple of hours to restore my backups from Backblaze onto any other cloud or VPS provider and switch my IPs to get back up and running.

Aside from the technical issues that @andysh points out, DO has a fairly large problem with hackers, 'bots and script kiddies…especially ones that like to troll for unsecured sshd and imapd logins (for intrusion and spamming respectively). DO seems either unwilling or incapable of policing this situation (despite their protestations to the contrary).

There seems to be few rules and no enforcement with regard to this kind of behavior.

I've had all of ServerStack's/DO's networks blacklisted for more than a year because of this (no traffic into or out of my Linode from/to a DO network). DO nets/nodes regularly appear on many publicly available/accessible BLs as well (SpamHaus, SpamCop, etc).

You can take this with as much salt as you like but this has been my experience.

-- sw

@andysh --

You write:

I can't wait for 2 developments to even the playing field (for now, at least):

• cloud firewalls
• true private networking (SDN, vLAN, VPC whatever you want to call it). If they can make this cross-datacentre, it'll be even better than DO's.

I'm waiting for first-class FreeBSD Linodes with the same level of support and service as Linux Linodes. DO offers FreeBSD droplets but (I believe) have backup services missing for them (which makes them second-class denizens of the DO ecosystem, IMHO).

The combination of ZFS and block storage makes it possible to build pretty powerful systems with virtual RAID arrays for storage. I built a small one of these as a proof-of-concept using a nanode, the script for installing FreeBSD on a Linode and 3 small block storage volumes. It wasn't a speed-daemon for sure but that wasn't the point (ZFS likes memory)…

-- sw

First-class FreeBSD support would be the absolute icing on the cake for me.

I did the same a few years back (circa 2014) on Linode, and the only drawback was the lack of support from the backup service. The monitoring system I was using at the time also lacked FreeBSD support so it was unfortunately a non-starter.

Since then I’ve really grown comfortable with Ubuntu having previously been used to Debian and FreeBSD. PPAs are probably the biggest selling point for me. Debian packages are always so far behind. (So are Ubuntu’s but PPAs make up for that.) FreeBSD ports always seemed to have the most up-to-date software too.

Ugh, I had to go there.

Looks like FreeBSD with ZFS is now supported on DigitalOcean, with working backups (I tested a snapshot and restore, which I assume is the same underlying tech as the backups.)

I knew FreeBSD was available on DO…about a year now I think. I didn’t know about the backups though. For their Linux products, backups are a lot less frequent than on Linode…weekly as opposed to daily.

However, DOs lack of rules or enforcement against bad behavior by their customers makes DO a non-starter for me. Like I said, I’ve had DO blacklisted for more than a year.

Linode? Linode? Linode?

;-)

— sw

There’s also vultur.com…similar pricing to Linode:

https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing

Approx same price as Linode for backups. Skylake CPUs…although this prob varies by data center.

Yeah I wouldn’t trust DO with any production workload.

I’m committed to Linode, especially with the developments they had planned for 2020. Just hope that COVID-19 hasn’t scuppered that too much…!

I’ve been watching Vultr for a couple of years. Never tried anything with them. My opinion is that they launch something in the US just so they can say they have it. I have adverts plastered all over my Facebook advertising Vultr’s 3.8GHz CPUs - but when you try to create an instance, they’re not available in London (I’m in the UK.)

You would think they’d be keen to target their ads accordingly to optimise their spend, but hey, it’s not my money!

Block storage and object storage is advertised on the website, but again only in NY/NJ. At least Linode are committed to bringing their services to other DCs - and they sensibly selected US and EU for the first 2 which are within reasonable distance for most customers, I suspect.

It would be nice to know the official view on FreeBSD. I guess with their name and heritage (LINode - Linux) it isn’t high on their agenda, but it would still be nice to know for definite.

@andysh --

You write:

Yeah I wouldn’t trust DO with any production workload.

When I first decided to extract myself from shared-hosting hell, I spun up a small droplet to play around with. Almost before I could login once, I started seeing DDoS attacks, port-scanning and ssh(1) brute force attacks…a lot of it from other DO droplets. I paid my $5-or-whatever and exited stage left. No thanks…

I’ve been watching Vultr for a couple of years. Never tried anything with them. My opinion is that they launch something in the US just so they can say they have it. I have adverts plastered all over my Facebook advertising Vultr’s 3.8GHz CPUs - but when you try to create an instance, they’re not available in London (I’m in the UK.)

They seem to be fairly highly-regarded in the FreeBSD community. I don't have any experience with them. I just know that they exist.

I don't use FB…FB is evil (I'm a lot older than you). If I did, I would block ads anyway ;-)

Block storage and object storage is advertised on the website, but again only in NY/NJ.

This seems to be a giant bait/switch. Last report I saw (4/2019) that block/object storage had been in "beta" since 2016 with no ETA outside NY/NJ in the foreseeable future.

It would be nice to know the official view on FreeBSD. I guess with their name and heritage (LINode - Linux) it isn’t high on their agenda, but it would still be nice to know for definite.

I conducted a few experiments with it -- mostly with ZRAID and custom kernels -- and reported my results back to them. I kept hearing about "something in the future" but nothing concrete. I did hear that they believe a FreeBSD Linode would have to be a first-class citizen in the Linode Universe before they'd make it available (backups, Lassie, API, etc). I imagine these are all first-class technical challenges. I can tell you that a number of the support folks are FreeBSD-savvy (at least they knew what I was talking about when I told them I "built a custom kernel").

Frankly, I'd rather wait and have it fully-baked than have a FreeBSD Linode be a second-class citizen for some (indeterminate) period of time (a la Vultr). That would just piss me off.

I'd also like to see a data center in Seattle…or maybe somewhere in Oregon (I live in Portland). I'd move my Linode from Fremont there in a heartbeat…wouldn't have to think twice about it.

-- sw

I use Linode for much smaller projects ( a mail server and a low-traffic Web "https://mini-militia.com" server). I’ve had no trouble with lost data or latency, and I’ve been using their service for over a year.