Linode: great value, competitive cost, and essential if you need complete control, but want to get up and running quick
January 26, 2021

Linode: great value, competitive cost, and essential if you need complete control, but want to get up and running quick

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

Overall Satisfaction with Linode

We use Linode across the organization to support multiple sites, in conjunction with a physical host provider that we use for our legacy sites. We also use Linode when we need to get something up and running quickly, like when we need to test upgrades before deploying to production. With a few clicks we can get a staging server up and running and began testing.

The admin panel is quite easy to use (we use Plesk on our physical host provider), and the documentation is excellent. Billing is also clear, with no hidden fees. They also have an analytics panel to view your bandwidth usage.

If there is one major issue I found, it's that when I clone a production site to set up a staging site, I noticed MariaDB always gets corrupted. This is an easy fix by backing up the /var/lib/MySQL directory and then uninstalling and re-installing MariaDB, but it's an annoyance. I haven't gotten to the bottom of why this continues to happen.

Pros

  • Easy to use.
  • Quick.
  • Clear billing and usage stats.

Cons

  • Cloning production sites (always causes MariaDB corruption, requiring a re-install).
  • It allows us to upgrade our WordPress install quickly by bringing up a staging site for testing and then quickly destroying it once we're done. Much harder to do on our physical host.
  • Cost is a lot clearer and cheaper than our physical host.
  • We can deploy test servers easily, and since the cost is pro-rated, it always ends up being cheaper than using our physical host.
We use DigitalOcean for one of our sites. Unfortunately, the admin panel is not nearly as advanced and easy to use as Linode, and whenever we restore from backup, we have to run fsck, because there's always hard drive corruption, which we don't have to deal with on Linode. We've been slowly migrating away from DigitalOcean to Linode.
Whenever we've had issues, I've always opened a ticket and the response has been pretty quick (15 minutes, at most). However, there was a hardware issue with the server we were on and Linode had to take it down for maintenance. It took around 6 hours to fully repair, but we suffered downtime for around 10 minutes.
If you need to get a site up and running quickly, without wanting to deal with the hassle of setting up Linux from scratch, then Linode is the way to go.

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