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Linode gives me and my clients peace of mind
March 15, 2021

Linode gives me and my clients peace of mind

Marc Lewis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Linode

We are a consulting agency that provides custom software solutions for our clients that are predominantly web based. All of our customer facing services are deployed through Linode. This includes all of our project tracking systems, code repositories, client projects, and supporting systems. Linode allows us to use industry-standard platforms that allow us to focus on our client's needs instead of proprietary APIs.
  • Customer Service.
  • Documentation.
  • Competitive Pricing.
  • Transparency with any service issues.
  • Additional Cloud Storage Locations for faster access across datacenters.
  • Managed database services, either SQL or NoSQL.
  • NodeBalancers could be more robust/scalable.
  • A bit more consistency with their Kubernetes system with regard to node pools.
  • Predictable pricing is a major selling point - we know each month exactly what our charges will be for budgeting purposes.
  • Reliability in their network has been outstanding, making it an easy sell to our clients.
One of our clients was previously hosted on Rackspace, then Google Cloud Services. Their Rackspace services were very expensive and provided little in the way of migration or management. After re-engineering their deployment, we migrated them to Google Cloud Services (GCS) worked very well, but was also expensive. The biggest problem we encountered with GCS was their "Cloud Build" system for deployments. It would fail on us randomly due to the size of the code base and library dependencies. Each attempted deployment took between 30 and 60 minutes of "waiting" time. After the last failure, we explored other cloud providers for this client, including Linode, DigitalOcean, AWS and different GCS services.

After analyzing the options, we ended up going with a docker based deployment utilizing a Linode Kubernetes cluster, S3 Compatible Cloud Storage and MySQL databases behind a MaxScale MySQL proxy. All of this is on Linode and has been extremely reliable. The cost was also 30% lower than the client's previous GCS or Rackspace services.

Switching to industry standard technologies has saved this customer thousands of dollars per month, and Linode provides the ability to scale their services up for the foreseeable future.
It's rare that I've had to contact their support staff since their services have been extremely reliable. When I have had to contact their support, they have never failed to provide me with an acceptable answer to my inquiry. This includes some edge cases that weren't covered in any of their documentation -- the correct team was consulted and provided us with answers.

I also have not yet had a support ticket that wasn't responded to within an hour, even at night and on weekends.
Because of their fixed pricing, there are no surprises if there is a big surge in traffic or utilization of resources. This makes budgeting less of a worry for start-ups. Choosing Linode for startups also has the benefit of knowing that they can scale up to meet potentially huge growth month to month.

The support and services they provide have never had me feel resentful of their monthly bill, unlike certain other cloud based services or products have.
Business is now global, spanning every time zone. With Linode I haven't had to worry about disruptive maintenance or outages at Midnight on the East Coast. Maintenance is typically announced well in advance, and in the case of service outages, you are typically given the option of when to schedule your own maintenance. I've never encountered another provider that does that.

Since hosting our high-availability solutions (NodeBalancers, Kubernetes, etc) on Linode, I've been pretty confident that my phone won't be ringing off the hook in the middle of the night because of outages. This gives clients peace of mind as well.
Docker, Gitlab
Linode has been excellent for bringing up quick projects to show clients, as well as providing the necessary infrastructure for production deployments. It does require a bit more technical knowledge for going beyond their Stack Scripts or Marketplace deployments, but that is also where their benefits are. They do not lock you in to doing things a particular way or use any overly proprietary APIs or systems. For my clients, the ability to move from one cloud provider to another quickly and easily is important, though Linode hasn't given any reason to want to switch providers yet.