It’s funny how things work out. If you’re reading this, you’re on my new server. The great host swap of 2010 is complete. God it was a pain, but, sadly, it was necessary. Things have been solid for a long time here, but I guess everyone has their bad days. My old host just had a few too many for me to deal with.
My former host was Linode. For the most part, things were incredibly stable. Barring recent events, I never had any major issues that weren’t somehow my fault. I signed up with them in June of 2009 because I noticed their packages offered more bang for the buck than Slicehost (my first host for this blog). They had a lot of positive reviews, and their control panel software was pretty sweet. My geek side fell in love with Linode, and I was a happy customer for a long time. Recently, though… things haven’t been so great.
Hurricane Electric? Woohoo!
One of the great benefits of Linode is that they have multiple data centers. You can pick between five of them at the time of this writing. One of my key concerns was IPv6 connectivity (which Linode does not yet provide natively), and I knew that Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker service had a POP in Fremont. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Linode actually co-located within Hurricane Electric’s Fremont facility, so the latency over my IPv6 tunnel was extremely low. I mean the times were sub-millisecond. Color me happy.
Hurricane Electric’s Lack of Redundancy
At first I was amazingly happy with my service. Again, it was a year and a half of pretty solid performance. I’d have a couple blips here and there in my network connectivity, but Linode was always on top of things and had issues resolved usually within a few minutes. The problems started, however, toward the end of last month. The Fremont facility suffered some major issues. You can see more about them on Linode’s status page, but suffice it to say that I was a bit upset after these two incidents within days of each other.
What Hurricane Electric decided to leave out of the RFO was the fact that customer equipment was damaged due to their faulty systems. What they describe as a 3-second power issue (the first outage) actually destroyed customer equipment. Thank god Linode was prepared for this. My VPS was down for hours, but Linode had hot standby systems in place. I hate to think how long I’d have been down if Linode wasn’t as prepared. I really don’t understand how a top-tier ISP like Hurricane Electric can suffer so much damage and downtime because of a simple lightning storm. To me, this is complete and total failure on their part. I didn’t blame Linode at all.
Next comes downtime number two within 3 days of the previous one. They had another “incident” which caused a 1-second power failure due to the fact that they were still running on their N + 1 redundant UPS which failed. Again, Linode was quick to respond. Tell me something Hurricane Electric… if the power was only interrupted for 1 second, why did you not enhance the degraded UPS? I understand you were waiting for parts, but you should have been better prepared in the meantime. Again, I can’t fathom how a company of your position and stature could be in this situation.
Sticking It Out
So to be completely fair, the first two downtimes weren’t Linode’s fault. I realize that. I completely blame the incompetence of Hurricane Electric for those issues. After those two incidents, I decided to stick it out with Linode. Let’s face it: migrating servers is a pain in the ass, and I really didn’t want to do it. Not only that, but I felt like it wasn’t fair to blame Linode for something that was completely out of their control.
So stick it out, I did. I was obviously very angry at this point, but I convinced myself that 1.5 years of solid service was enough to offset a few hours of downtime that wasn’t their fault. But then the third issue happened, and this time, it was Linode’s fault. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Linode posted about some network maintenance they needed to perform on December 12. I figured this wouldn’t be a big deal. Any decent ISP has redundancy built in at every point possible, so even if they were replacing several core switches, there shouldn’t have been any need for downtime. There was, however, substantial downtime. I couldn’t take it anymore. Between Hurricane Electric and Linode, it seemed like my server was doomed. I decided to make a move.
Rackspace Cloud
So here we are, rolling on the Rackspace Cloud. I must say that I’ve been very impressed so far. It hasn’t all been candy and roses, though. I did have an issue with the webserver that is hosting this site right now. It was very unresponsive and slow. Here’s the difference though: Rackspace support is amazing. I clicked the little “Live Chat” button in my dashboard, and instantly I was connected with a fellow named Ethan. Ethan stuck with me while we tried a few things, and then eventually he decided that it would be a good idea to move my server to another host. Once my server was moved, the problems went away, and everything just worked. Rackspace support is stellar, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Wrapping It Up (TLDR)
I couldn’t take the downtime with Linode. I know Rackspace Cloud is just rebranded Slicehost, but that’s fine with me. Rackspace support is stellar, and I don’t mind paying just a few extra dollars per month to have a company like Rackspace behind me. I’m looking at launching my small startup venture soon, and I need reliability from my host. Thanks for all the fish, Linode. It was good while it lasted, but I’m a happy Rackspace customer now. Woot!
Hi! My name is Scott. Welcome to my place on the web. I currently work in St. Louis, Missouri as a Java EE developer. I also do a lot of work with ASP.NET and Node.js in my spare time.