Personally, I use Uptimerobot[3] to monitor my nodes and post any issues into a Slack channel. This lets me know if it's a problem with my VPS or Linode (or any of the other providers I use).
[1]https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter
It's basically the same with the status updates, I have to "poll" for status updates rather than to be notified. They have this mobile app (which is pretty useless as it currently sits) which would be a great platform to receive push notifications on, even if it was to let you know that there is a change on the status page.
There's certainly some missed opportunities here, but then again, I assume they're pretty busy at the moment...
No VPS provider ever has sent out emails. The only hosting company I ever left was DigitalOcean, because they kept having really silly problems and at the time NY1 was the only datacenter with private networking, which is ridiculously silly to think that your infrastructure communicates over the internet. And the private networking was "experimental" for the longest time, and very limited.
I don't think Linode did anything wrong. And moving to another host, I garuntee you that they will not do this either. Chances are if you move hosts you may feed the shitty business who performed this DDoS.
By making customers aware of the downtime they will have more customers ask for credit. If you suffer 1-2days of downtime and your customer doesn't notice to ask for credit; you win.
It's terrible; but unfortunately cost savings is drilled in from every darned angle.
They should have done a mail out.
They were able to mitigate the attacks quickly, but their bandwidth was saturated.
My comment was with regards to their inability to communicate with customers about on-going attacks and what was being done to mitigate them. There has been (after nearing 2 weeks of DDoS) just one statement on the status page by a network engineer. No company statement, no information on the measures taken, no e-mails, no support tickets. Nada. We have customers in the Middle East that are geo-blocked from accessing nodes in London. We had to find this ourselves. [1]
Furthermore their billing system didn't account for all the downtime. Looking at our latest statement, all instances have been at 100% uptime.
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/linode_back_at_last_...
I've had pretty good communication with Linode and I've always had really good customer service. I don't think Linode is nearly as verbose about their internal business affairs and going-ons as the startup world seems to be, but I think competition has driven many companies to do the same, and the rapid evolution in this market makes it a reasonable effort to constantly keep the public in the loop.
As far as my experience, they've never with held information that I needed to know. But I understand why people are suspicious, and I think this suspicion is paranoia. These attacks are clearly espionage, and if they knew who was doing it, they'd have taken legal action by now.
Twitter is not that relevant to be honest. I assume many customers are not active on Twitter either. I do not see why it is so important to have activity on the account when there is a dedicated page for informing customers of what is going on.
Also, if you look at the medium post, the tweets are mostly sorry/thank you/everything should be fine soon. No actual information on what is going on. How could you put relevant technical details in a tweet? How does a short, uninformative tweet help you more?
edit: also, there is up-to-date technical discussions taking place on the irc channel #linode on oftc
> How does a short uninformative tweet help you more?
The point I've been trying to get across is that a lot of people just want to have their frustrations acknowledged. An honest, real reply from a human (not a bot like lots of airlines use) can make people feel heard and do a lot to restore goodwill.
They can also link to the status page in replies for more technical details.
Not sure whatever happened to the post about "Less negativity" a few months back.
The Main Twitter account still hasn't announced the Atlanta DoS. https://twitter.com/linode?lang=en
I understand the severity of the issue is different to Slacks', but there should be a bunch of people on the Twitter account replying to people and saving customers. A lot of their customers are angry about lack of communication as much as they are about the downtime.