This weekend I planned to set up two OpenX servers to serve some rotating images to the forums. First, I signed up with
SliceHost. Working outside of the US,
SliceHost naturally required some additional information. They emailed me with 15 minutes of signing up asking for more information to confirm.
Being an impatient sort of person in the digital age, I wanted to get this up and running during the holiday weekend and found the
SliceHost Chat Room. I was able to chat with a great guy who privately emailed me a series of questions while we were chatting about some technical details. Within a few minutes, I was set up and ready to go.
After logging my new slice with SliceHost, I was able to configure Apache2, PHP, MySQL and OpenX within a hour and was serving images from SliceHost within two hours.
The next day, I decided to try the same thing with
Linode after reading an article that raved about Linode performance.
I immediate got two emails telling me I had been invoiced and my credit card had been billed, for example:
Quote:
Payment Date: November 30, 2009
Payment Card: xxxx Exp: 01/xx
This is your receipt of payment against your credit card in the
amount of $20.62.
Thank you.
Please note that charges will appear as "Linode.com" on your
credit card's statement.
However, I then got no activation information and no follow up email.
I sent an email to Linode billing and another to the main support email. Two hours later, I never received any email responses back from either of my queries. Nothing in the spam box, anyway, I already had two billing related emails.
For
SliceHost, I got all my support work completed and a new OpenX server up and running withing two hours on a holiday after Thanksgiving, a Sunday. With Linode, two hours passed on a business Monday and no email response. Radio silence. I thought the Linode office was hit by an attack or an earthquake.
Also, I tried to login to the Linode Forums to ask about my account, but that was not possible because my account was not activated! Isn't this story very interesting?!
Then, I decided to call Linode. That was a mistake.
Instead of a very helpful chat experience like with with the great guys at
SliceHost, I got a support guy who sounded like a robot reading a support script. I tried to explain to him my experience Sunday with SliceHost, and how within two hours I had an OpenX server up and running, but with Linode, two hours later I can't even get an email back on the activation!
The support guy at Linode basically told me he did not want to listen to my experience at SliceHost. I said "fine" because I am going to write a review and email the link to their support team and billing to let them know how terrible their support is.
In a nutshell, I don't care if there are a stack of performance reviews that say Linode serves stardust at the speed of light. Their customer support is terrible. I just want my money back!
On the other hand, the support at SliceHost is amazing! If you have any issues, billing or technical questions, you can chat with them and they are really helpful. They do email too! :-)
I recommend
SliceHost, obviously.
As for Linode, I can't even login to cancel my account and get my money back within the 7 day period! I guess I'll have to beg them to refund my money and talk to another support robot or they will bill my credit card every month.
VPS Mini Review... Over and Out !
---------- Post updated at 21:46 ---------- Previous update was at 20:23 ----------
Followup:
After posting this review I received a long distance phone call from one of the Linode system developers who activated my account, 4 and 1/2 hours after the initial sign up. He kindly and sincerely apologized for the bad service I experienced and asked me to try their VPS service.
