[meritt]

http://i.imgur.com/UCPWdBq.png

I was not confusing automated emails with direct contact from Linode support. I fully understand and can appreciate the need to be a "nice neighbor" in a shared environment but what baffles me is:

1) Linode doesn't have the capability to actually enforce any sort of quota or limit. It's 2014, there's been numerous advancements in the area of virtualized servers in the past decade. cgroups is a very easy way that works across xen, kvm and lxc.

2) Linode doesn't publish these arbitrary limits nor give guidance on which node size comes with what acceptable usage levels.

[guiambros]

This is ridiculous. Would suggest you move out of Linode right away.

It's their job to limit resources on your node, not your job to self-limit. Asking you to limit resources because it's "affecting other customers' performance" is not only outrageous, but also unfair with the other customers being impacted.

This reminds me of the late 90's [1], when web hosting meant sharing the same box with hundreds of other customers, and very limited tools to enforce limits. When you had a resource hog, the only option was really to get them to reduce usage, or move them to a separate box (which wasn't as easy as today).

[1] ps: I know this well; used to have a web hosting company at the time. We had to frequently move customers around, and in some cases to terminate their contracts - e.g., porn sites. But this was a good 10 years before Xen become commonplace.

[meritt]

Yup. That's the conclusion we reached and also why I suggested approaching Linode with caution. They're attempting to compete with the "cloud" providers but running their business the same as they did a decade ago.

[Ronsenshi]

Thanks for the answer.

1) I don't know enough to talk about resource limiting that Linode might do. There might be a reason they don't want to or can't use it with their infrastructure.

2) I agree, they could publish some guidelines for resource usage, but this is hardly baffling. I'd guess most of the customers just don't hit this problem, so there's no need to list all of the limitations.

[opendais]

Thanks for explaining. :)

Anything I have that uses that level of disk i/o I don't run in a VPS which would explain why I've never noticed before.