Linode Reviews 200

Three words - absolutely terrible support.
I have been trying to create an account for a few days and I have been blocked each time with absolutely no reason. I connected my working debit card, I even connected my Paypal account - no change.
I wrote to their support to ask what's going on but ... as you'd expect, I got no reply back. I am 100% avoiding this service and their sh**ty support.

I noticed many of the 1-star reviews are due to repeated registration rejections. I had the same issue two years ago, but eventually, I registered using my business entity, and it was approved—even with the same credit card. Let's set aside the registration problem for a moment and address account terminations. For those experiencing this, it's crucial to maintain your apps or clients. Sometimes, a client might host illegal apps or websites, such as gambling sites, or their site might get hacked and turn into a scam or gambling platform. Linode will take action by blocking your server and banning your account in such cases.

I've been using Linode for two years, and the server performance has been outstanding. I host 10 WordPress websites and 5 custom apps, and they always perform perfectly.

Let's be objective—review the product itself. If your account got rejected, you haven’t experienced how good their product is yet. If your main issue is registration rejection, you might want to try Oracle Cloud. I've been trying to register there for the past two years, even using my business entity, but still got rejected—just saying!

My direct personal experience would award them 3 stars, but because they have a bad reputation of dealing with spammers, which may affect you indirectly, I will only give them 2.

They have a good uptime, intuitive user interface and an easy setup process. Customer service responds within a reasonable time frame.

However ...

I bought a machine for the purpose of running an email server. Unfortunately, it was provided with an IP that has previously been involved in spams and is therefore registered in a lot of spam blacklists, often making it impossible to send mail to some users. When I pointed this out to their customer service, they said that I need to buy another machine and hope that the next IP is better. So it is basically a gamble if it will work or not.

Some blacklists seem to even be suspicious of any mail server hosted with Linode, because they are accused of being too slow when reacting to spammers abusing their services.

Linode got a mail from Netcraft, regarding a customer on our site, a site who was considered to be a phising site.

Unfortunately we where on vacation traveling without access to mail.
We where giving 24 hours before a lockdown.
They shut the system down, and we couldn't access anything.

We got it up again by rebooting in safe mode as told, in which we can't do anything.

The mail from Netcraft was a false positive, confirmed from Netcraft.
Linode didnt do anything before shutting us down but a mail warning.

We had several issues with Linode ip subnet blacklisted

We're now moving everything away, no excuse, no I'm sorry, not taking care of the customer.

One of the worst providers so far, do not use it, they suspended my account for no reason without giving me my credits back and removed my server along with its data because "I violated TOS" and the account is suspended without any explanation to why, I lost important data that I unfortunately entrusted to linode, I had reached out to customer support and like everyone have experienced. they ghosted me for a month, such a disappointment, their customer service along with pricing is horrible. there are many 100x better alternatives out there.

"Absolutely terrible customer service. I've been trying to create an account for days now and keep getting blocked for no reason. Despite multiple attempts from different locations and devices, I've been unable to resolve this issue. Linode seems more interested in blocking legitimate customers than providing a service. Avoid this company at all costs."

They are very slow for VPN. I tried them on OpenVPN and wireguard. I found them terribly slow while my internet speed was between 20-50Mbps broadband.

Been using Linode for over a decade and they've really gone downhill.

Like the many other reviewers, when I tried to recently create a new account it was immediately flagged and suspended due to "suspected fraud", even after they took my payment information. How does that make sense?

They also silently block outgoing email traffic for new accounts, so if you want to host a website which uses a contact form or something equally basic, you're out of luck.

Finally prices have risen, unacceptably so. Linode used to be great because you could spin up an affordable server without really thinking about budgets - now you'll struggle to find a usable spec for under $30/month.

Are you reading these reviews and listening to this feedback, Linode? Because the way you're going, your competitors (Digital Ocean, AWS, etc.) are looking mightily attractive in comparison.

They have lost their mind, desire to provide service and etiquette.
Tried signing up, got denied. They send vague response to that something to do with proxy or VPN. But proxy, VPN, temp emails etc were never used.
So they essentially declined signup with normal behavioural pattern (landed on there website form their own Google ad) used personal gmail and valid cc.

Then they told me on twitter to send their support team an email with the details. I did and-
I received no reply, from them. They essentially ghosted me.

Linode(Akamai) appears to offer good services, but it is hard to make use of those services if you can't get passed the "denied activation due to activity or patterns associated with fraudulent behavior" automation.

This leads me to suspect that Linode is "Red Lining", that is excluding some from signing up who give valid details(*, **, ***), based on zip code or some other immutable human characteristic, that does not constitute fraud, but is instead based on subjective group and/or class based characteristics based on location.

Red Lining is illegal by the way! It doesn't matter that you use a blackbox AI to do it, it is still discriminatory.

*Signed up using my legal name, high quality credit card payment, correct billing address from a paid GWS email address and GitHub OAuth token, without the use of anonymizing VPN or obfuscation.

**It is entirely possible that their signup automation is so inherently flawed that they haven't kept up with technology(credit card fraud preventive validations). Shortly after my (multiple) failures with signing up with Linode, I signed up with a paid plan though a competitor and was promped by my high quality credit card to verify through their third party UI. This didn't happen with Linode, but it is likely that my credit card's payment validation API requested this verification step, for which Linode(apparently) does not support.

***Linode appears not to have good support for KYC, which is really a requirement if you are in this business, even to verify with TP required ID and a verification step. Likely this is just a case of a failure to support newer tech, which maybe for my purposes is better that they failed to approve me. Maybe I should raise my rating(joking).

I dont want to say it but they scamed me

so i was using linode and lastly i cancelled account due to fund problems but i reconsidered as i still has funds so try to re sign up again and again still rejected as fraud wth how does i fraud on you company i contacted them waited and wait nope no answer so

I don't recommend it at all i use them for 1-2 month and they doing this on me why dude

(I'm Non United States user idk why)

I have servers at Linode even before it was sold to Akamai. My experience of more than 6 years with Linode is excellent. Sure, the support isn't great, but who needs to open a support ticket when everything works fine?

What I manage is the performance of the servers. I have a VPS with a dedicated CPU and it's great. SLA 99.99999% and very fast server response.

Linode provides top-notch DNS to the world and rich documentation for customers to study. That is all!

Utter rip off. Worse than AWS if that is possible. Suddenly I get charged $50 FOR NOTHING.

Instant account cancelation when trying to create a new account.
Do NOT waste your time with this unprofessional company.

Canceled my account due to budget reasons and I try to remake my account i fill everything out and then they cancelled my account setup and for that reason I'd saggiest you just run your own home labs without using linode

I'd love to not have to rent Amazon web services, but Linode just hates money and new customers. Literally impossible to create an account there.
The 'blindfolded shotgun' method on cancelling sign ups is not a standardized security measure, if you didn't know, Linode.

they are gatekeeping their all services

you can waste time on filling all forms in register step, but you will be instantly rejected for no reason

You can sign up, but you will rejected.

While linode is a alright host, it has its issues and a lot of them. They used to offer MongoDB Hosting, however stopped after no update to the community. Costs have also risen, while other competitors have lower costs. Support is also very slow, and it takes days for support to finally reach out.