It requires you to pay for service until the end of July first. And then you may get the credit (if you were fast enough). Seems like a so-so deal to me.
I signed up with linode when they did a similar promotion about a year and a half ago, and it clearly said that I was in before the promotion ended and would be getting the bonus before I actually paid for it. I assume it will be the same way this time.
"The black ‘giveaway’ box on the signup page carries through the entire signup process – and will refresh to show how many Giveaway Bucks are remaining – so you’ll be able to tell BEFORE you complete the signup how close to the wire you are. If you don’t make the cut and don’t want the service and cancel we’ll refund your money. We’re not out to screw anyone."
I'm just hesitant after reading the comments here.
I'm a huge linode fan and I feel guilty for my reaction to this giveaway ... which just happens to be ... "meh". I guess they've gotten to a point where giving out free RAM increases is not a sustainable endeavor :\
I'm still amazed how quick people are to forget what happened with Linode.
Massive security issue (i.e. Bitcoin incident) where hackers got root access to any Linode VPS at the click of a button. Loyal customers were the last to hear about it (through their website no less) and absolutely no proper explanation was or has been given as to what happened, what was done about it and whether it will happen again.
You look at how Cloudflare handled their issue and it's night and day. Linode are one of the least transparent providers going around IMHO.
I forgot just how opaque linodes acknowledgement of the issue was. Basicly just a head nod saying "yes, there was an issue." with no follow up or anything. Makes me really appreciate the heroku outage post. Makes me kind of sad to realize just what we'll put up with when things are out of sight. An issue analogous to this at a normal colo would be a HUGE deal.
I always thought highly of linode and their service, been using them for production and recommending others to do so.
And then the bitcoin incident happened, after that they just can't be trusted with any client data.
3 weeks ago, backups stopped for no obvious reason, I noticed after a few days and raised a ticket.
It was escalated to the "backup team"; who've proceeded to achieve nothing in almost 2 weeks towards fixing my backup issue. "They're working on it" does not inspire me with any hope.
So now I can't trust the backups, the support team, or really any part of the platform to perform as advertised or be fixed in a reasonable timeframe if it fails.
I'm a Linode customer. More than year (14 months) without any problem, super support, good documentation and friendly community - it's MUCH more important than one hack incident.
I've complained about this via their support channels a few different times. They're in the middle of a what seems like a very big security fixing phase right now relating to "something provided by one of their vendors". When I asked about it I was basically told to go away.
They really offer a very good service over all, but their transparency is atrocious.
They actually recently released information about this - there were multiple vulnerabilities in xen.civwould assume they were trying to keep the information quiet until the issue was fully resolved.
If you read the specific vulnerabilities that were released you'd see an embargo was in place. According to Xen.org, Linode is on the predisclosure list. Seems they got the information, fixed the issue, and were able to announce it once the Xen guys did.
Not in NYC or Chicago, but BuyVM is my go-to VPS. Super fast, nerdy support (know what you're doing and you're fine) and great services. Try their ping tests and see if that works for you. I'm in NYC and use it for most of my projects (so does my husband, who has 3x my geek cred).
Seriously I was paying 5x as much with another provider and getting shit performance in comparison.
2010's brought a massive RAM increase: http://blog.linode.com/2010/06/16/linode-turns-7-big-ram-inc...
2011's bumped disk space up 25%: http://blog.linode.com/2011/06/16/linode-turns-8-disk-space-...