I've used Linode for about twelve years now for hosting personal email and websites, and about nine years for hosting email,
...
Mere
website, and file backup (SVN) for a business that's had between one and three people. There's various businesses I've used to support my small business, but Linode has been one of my favorites for two reasons: (1) they only change in *good* ways; and (2) the tech support is always knowledgeable.
On point (1), a lot of other businesses (payment processors, co-working spaces, etc.) seem to change over time in bad ways. They go out of business, pivot their business model to something more profitable than what I was using them for, increase their rates, the service quality drops . . . it's always something. With Linode, it's just been . . . stability. The only "we're making changes" notifications I get are ones to tell me they've added disk space, memory, the ability to add block storage, or some other nice thing. I always just feel like they are trying to be a better service for existing customers, rather than trying to squeeze more dollars out of them.
On point (2), as an example (and the thing that motivated me to write this review out of gratitude), I recently and suddenly was finding that all of my work emails sent to G suite users were going into their spam folder. Not mailing list bulk emails, but even replies. I read every solution on Stack Exchange I could find, made some changes, but no dice. This is kind of an emergency, because it's hard to operate a business that way. Google just has a form that you can fill out and the response is "we'll look into it, any changes may take two weeks to propogate". Two weeks! I contacted Linode tech support, who looked over my DNS config and noticed it was probably the lack of IPv6 PTR record -- I had IPv4 PTR set up, but hadn't thought of IPv6. Setting up the IPv6 PTR didn't work immediately, but turning off IPv6 for my mailserver did, and all better (presumably the IPv6 PTR record will propagate eventually and I can turn it back on). So that's the sort of top-tier tech support one wants to have.
In ten years of hosting the only downtime or Linode-side tech issue I was aware of was a half-hour DDoS outage a few years ago. The online server-management tools have all been fine and easy enough to use.
Don't ever change, Linode. (Except for the free upgrades).
Mindre
