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Linode has been the winner for over a decade
Updated September 13, 2021

Linode has been the winner for over a decade

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Linode

Linode handles our hosting for a variety of applications, including incubating web applications to be marketed and intranet utilities. In a pinch, it sometimes also serves as a temporary remote desktop for contractors.
  • Customer service has always been knowledgeable enough to help us make decisions.
  • Prices are reasonable and Linode has fought to stay competitive.
  • Servers have been exceptionally stable.
  • Disk space quotas are insufficient for significant work, and block storage is too expensive
  • While fine for us, leaving an average user to manage a Linux system is a recipe for frustration
  • It would be great if the parameters for each VPS could be purchased/modified separately; some projects warrant a large CPU and low bandwidth, others the opposite
  • If a user runs a relay of some sort (such as Tor), it tends to cause problems where the user is legally responsible for any traffic passing through, but all abuse claims are filtered through Linode, frustrating them and delaying results.
  • This may no longer be relevant to new customers, but Linode had the only VPS services available when we started out. The choices were literally renting hardware services for many times the cost or web hosts with little flexibility. So, Linode made the business possible.
  • Consistent pricing has made it trivial to plan releases, knowing exactly how much revenue is needed to keep the service running.
  • The ability to spin up a tiny Linux computer has made it possible to try all sorts of experiments on a tiny budget.
We have some experience with products like AWS and Azure. While they aren't an apples-to-apples comparison, ideally being put to different uses, Linode VPSs are far easier to understand, given that it's "just a computer." If used carefully, Linode can be somewhat cheaper, as well. Many years ago, we also evaluated many physical hosting facilities (most of which are no longer in business), and Linode provided better service at prices that were an order of magnitude lower.
We haven't needed Linode's support very often, and given the fringe ideas that we've experimented with, they haven't always had complete answers, but we've never had any support technician be anything but completely courteous and interested enough in our projects to learn almost as much as we did about the field to make sure they could eventually get us an answer.
Having dedicated servers off site and managed (at the virtual hardware level) by experts has caused our ownership costs to drop by an order of magnitude from the days when we needed to rent physical servers; in this space, Linode was a complete game-changer. We're watching the industry transform again now with serverless-style technologies, but for many projects, a simple VPS is more than competitive.
For most of our revenue streams, reliability isn't entirely critical because most of our customers are likely to work offline and return later. Despite that, Linode has probably caused us less than twenty minutes of downtime in over 15 years--most of that scheduled in advance. We have lost more time to upgraded libraries causing mismatches than any problems with infrastructure.

Do you think Linode delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Linode's feature set?

Yes

Did Linode live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Linode go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Linode again?

Yes

We find Linode perfect for prototyping, simple web hosting, and as a temporary computer for short-term projects. In those cases, I don't think there has been any hesitation in recommending it to others. If the project requires large data storage, high reliability in the face of disasters, or the ability to only run when requested, a VPS is the wrong product. Similarly, if someone is only hosting static resources, a VPS is a good base, but there are cheaper products that require less management.

Using Linode

3 - Development, deployment engineering, occasional other work