Frantkly , I do worry about the credibility of folks who only have one post in the forums and that post is a glowing review of a company.

On the other hand, my experience with the customer service at Slicehost has been so favorable, it is easy to see how others might post in reply to my mini-review.

A long time ago there was this debate between Cisco and Wellfleet (later acquired by Bay Networks, as I recall). Wellfleets routers featured a faster performing backplane but had to be rebooted to change the configuration. Cisco routers, on the other hand, was a bit slower on the backplane, but you could change the configuration without rebooting the machine.

At the time, I explained to a USAF General in charge of communications that during the heat of battle, you don't want to have to reboot your router to add a filtering rule or change some other configuration.

That was around 1994. The USAF followed my advice (which they paid good money for !) and dropped Wellfleet in favor of Cisco and the rest is history. Few people know that one of Cisco's biggest and most influential customers, the USAF, got their foot in the door based on my work building network control centers and getting rid of the Wellfleets in favor of Cisco.

The theme of my short walk back in time above is to point out that speed, backplane performance, etc. are all great; but they are not the most important features to consider in most circumstances. Customer service is also very important as well.

In the digital age, I expect my VPS to be provisioned within 30 minutes, even with a fraud flag based on a primitive rule and I expect emails to be answered within that same time frame as well. A company should have employees with email on the mobiles answering queries, chatting, and more.

Wire speed is not enough. Linode needs to learn this lesson, I think.

Customer service "speed" is more important than "wire speed" for more people.