Ever since the one time Linode disappointed us, I have been wondering if it is worth moving everything to a different provider. For example, ARP Networks provides FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux VPS solutions at a somewhat comparable price/performance points. (Although, I must say, seeing eight cores on my htop screen has not gotten old yet.
I do have a soft spot in my heart for FreeBSD. I deployed my first web experiments on FreeBSD running on a silly old Compaq mini-tower with 16 Mb memory and with a Pentium 100 CPU. FreeBSD’s ports were wonderful when everything worked properly, but it took some time to wait for everything to compile. Since I found ArchLinux, I have stuck with Linux. I have it on my old laptop, on my Linode, on my Mac running in a VirtualBox etc.
I just could not convince myself to incur the fixed cost of switching to another provider if I wasn’t going to do something else special like start using FreeBSD.
In the mean time, Linode provided more information about the incident, replaced Lish-via-SSH with Lish gateways, and introduced two-step authentication for Linode manager. I am assuming they took other precautions behind the scenes as well.
For a client with modest needs, I provisioned a Digital Ocean Droplet (as they call them) and I am using ArchLinux with it. I like their API and can see some good uses for it for other projects.
In the mean time, I have decided to remove the cautionary statements I had placed in my previous posts in praise of Linode, and put in a pointer to this article.
I am going to continue using Linode’s excellent services, and might consider even additions/upgrades in the near future if no new problems arise in the mean time.