[ak4g]

Thanks for the writeup. I've never used Linode, but I recognized lots of echoes of my own experience with AWS, with the big point being something that isn't always given the importance that I think it deserves - when you get to larger deployments, you are much better off being a comparatively small fish. We started on colocated hardware, set up some new services in AWS, and scaled them up; we pushed the components hard in various weird ways and actually tickled some bugs in the c4 instance class when they first came out, but before I was able to figure out repro steps my phone was ringing and there was an engineer on the other side, and that's just because they wanted to figure the problem out - we did not, and still don't, have a paid support plan. But by virtue of being likely to affect other users, if we'd managed to trigger it, it was worth solving for them. I've certainly never had anything like an experience where I was trying to get them to fix a problem; any issues simply have to be fixed, as they will invariably end up affecting (many) others.

More recently, as we outgrew our original colo hardware, we got set up on OVH dedicated servers, which was back-of-envelope cheaper. Between delays in getting hardware online and managing to trigger the DDOS mitigation in a couple different scenarios, with the debugging and frustration you can imagine that entailed, I don't know if that's turned out to be the case. But when you're dealing with AWS (and I imagine the same should be true of GCE & Azure), it's really simple - if you have to ask, you're nothing special. You're not going to exhaust the available hardware. You will never wait N weeks to get another rack operational.