If that's not what you're talking about, I apologize, but I've been using Linode for years (often with very compute-intensive projects) and I haven't seen what you're talking about.

I agree with harpastum. I think you're confusing automatic email notifications based on your own settings with Linode support. I feel like you have to seriously abuse their infrastructure to get them to contact you.

Disclaimer: has been a happy Linode customer for over 4 years now.

I was not confusing automated emails with direct contact from Linode support. I fully understand and can appreciate the need to be a "nice neighbor" in a shared environment but what baffles me is:

1) Linode doesn't have the capability to actually enforce any sort of quota or limit. It's 2014, there's been numerous advancements in the area of virtualized servers in the past decade. cgroups is a very easy way that works across xen, kvm and lxc.

2) Linode doesn't publish these arbitrary limits nor give guidance on which node size comes with what acceptable usage levels.

It's their job to limit resources on your node, not your job to self-limit. Asking you to limit resources because it's "affecting other customers' performance" is not only outrageous, but also unfair with the other customers being impacted.

This reminds me of the late 90's [1], when web hosting meant sharing the same box with hundreds of other customers, and very limited tools to enforce limits. When you had a resource hog, the only option was really to get them to reduce usage, or move them to a separate box (which wasn't as easy as today).

[1] ps: I know this well; used to have a web hosting company at the time. We had to frequently move customers around, and in some cases to terminate their contracts - e.g., porn sites. But this was a good 10 years before Xen become commonplace.

1) I don't know enough to talk about resource limiting that Linode might do. There might be a reason they don't want to or can't use it with their infrastructure.

2) I agree, they could publish some guidelines for resource usage, but this is hardly baffling. I'd guess most of the customers just don't hit this problem, so there's no need to list all of the limitations.

Anything I have that uses that level of disk i/o I don't run in a VPS which would explain why I've never noticed before.

Hell, I've gotten DDoS'd for like 2 Gbps and they were like "Oh, ya, its fine."

So, can you explain more about what happened?

I can agree that DO isn't suited for production apps, but Linode isn't either. They're both VPS playgrounds.

I never had problems with DO that weren't resolved promptly.

Just a note, Linode is very US-centric anyway... (and that one London location doesn't make it international very much)