This is a coincidence. I had a funny experience with Linode just today!
I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago.
"Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all."
So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for a month at a stretch.
They deleted my linode. It´s completely gone.
I feel a little sick ... it was just for personal use (for now), and I have all of the git repos on my local machine as well, but I´m not yet to the point where everything I do on the server is in a repo somewhere. Poof, hundreds of hours of server mangling, gone forever.
Literally, if you forget to check your email, they delete it in 20 days. If your bank card expires while you´re out of touch ... for some strange reason ... anyway, instead of warehousing your data for even a few months, they kill you.
I like linode. I just feel sick right now.
On the one hand, I´m an idiot.
On the other hand, 20 days?!?!?! When you know how precious a customers´data is in this context, and it´s purely a question of temporary storage, why?!?
I need a drink. Oh, yeah, Go Linode!
edit: okay, I´m over it now. Leaving the original, melodramatic writing because, darn it linode, someone from Slicehost posted that Slicehost did it differently, and my reaction is relevant to your business.
I lost my credit card and got a new one, so the charges from slicehost were bouncing because they had my old number. They sent me several e-mails about it but I wasn't checking the e-mail account they were sending it to, so this went on for about 2-3 months past due. Eventually I logged onto the e-mail account and found out about it -- I hadn't even noticed anything was wrong because they kept my VM running. I just logged on, payed the $60 or whatever it was in back payments and that was it.
(I don't know whether this is their normal policy or not, so don't use this post as an excuse to try it.)
I had a similar experience with slicehost. I canceled cc and thought they would delete but they didn't and I paid it back and they kept me as a customer for years afterwords.
Heh, I stopped looking at this thread almost immediately after "getting over" the initial sting.
But I have to say, I still feel that this kind of behavior would be a sane policy.
No one´s saying you should hold onto data forever. But having a dedicated pool of dead storage that´s capable of storing the data for a few months of non-payment, or even longer -- that seems like a very good idea.
The running VMs are so many, many times more expensive than a block of dead storage of equivalent size. Probably orders of magnitude more expensive.
Then when you consider the business benefit to having the softer-and-fuzzier policy ... well, there´s always the "avoid 'high maintenance' customers" theory.
It's unfortunate, but I don't think linode was in the wrong here. probably more than half of my customers who cancel do so by not paying any more. If you want a 'free two months' at the end of your contract, well, they are going to have to start charging more up front.
Maybe another option would be to charge the customer an (optinal) up-front deposit and say "when we shut you down, we'll upload this to S3 with the following credentials" or something. That'd be some programming work, but it'd result in better outcomes. hmm.
I don't think it is unreasonable for them to shut off access to the data after x days. What I don't agree with is the deletion after y days where x << y does not hold.
Or implement the deletion policy like a LRU cache would. Have a fixed size storage for customers who haven't paid and just delete the image of the oldest customer in storage when the disk fills up. Send emails to the oldest 10 customers in that disk that if they don't respond, their data will be deleted.
yes, I like having some time between shutting it off and deleting the data as something of a last-ditch contact effort... It's just if that time is long, the expense needs to be paid for some how.
For the record: The Planet will cut your server, wipe it, and reassign after 5 days of non-payment. That's standard operating procedure at every server host I've ever used. I'm honestly surprised that Linode gives you 20 days; that's very generous in my experience.
They didn't give him 20 days. He checked it after 20 days. Who knows the grace period for an expired card? I think that deleting the data is a bit harsh for a late payment. How many accounts really get to that point of late payment to where it would be costly for the company to just shut off access to the data until the plan is paid for. A customer oriented policy would be having a grace period of 3 months where the data is still there but they don't delete it. That's good customer service in the exceptional case of late payment/expired card.
I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience- I know how frustrating it can be to have unexpected loss, particularly here, where it feels like it could have been prevented.
I'm not associated with Linode; I don't even host anything there, but I can see things from their perspective on this.
With a service like this, you'll sometimes see people who never cancel a service, they just stop paying for it. Maybe their card expires and they decide not to renew, maybe their business closed, or any number of other things.
If I were in their position, I'd certainly reach out to you- I'd warn you it was ending soon, and I'd remind you to renew. For one, it'd be the decent thing to do, and for another I'd want to get the renewel revenue! As the expression goes, 'It's easier to keep a customer than gain a new one.'
That said, if the time came and you hadn't renewed, I'd have a decision to make.
I want to keep you as a customer, but from my perspective, I have no indication you want to stay as a client- You haven't sent me any email about it, and you're not paying me anymore.
I'd probably archive off the data for a while, and shut it down.
My mental thought process would be akin to "I'll turn it off, and keep the files around for a few weeks. If he's using the site, then he'll notice when it gets shut down, and pay to stay with us. If not, Good luck in the future!"
From my perspective, it looks like that's exactly what Linode did. They gave you 20 days; That's nearly 3 weeks of the server being off, without you even writing them an email to say "Hey, Noticed it's off and I'm not paying you, could you please give me a few more weeks?"
I understand it's very frustrating for you, but I really can't blame Linode at all.
The other thing I'd touch on briefly is that you really should have backups.
I don't want to harp on it, because I know it must feel like kicking you when you're down, but servers fail..
What if Linode's datacenter caught fire? What if they were bought out by a company who wanted to convert them all to Windows servers? ;) Who knows. Things happen. Having the service turned off for nonpayment is among the smallest of problems.
If you were running a nightly backup job at this point, you'd be very frustrated that you had to copy everything back, but you'd have not lost anything.
In any event, I'm sorry that things didn't work out, and hope that your experiences with Linode (Or whomever you use to replace them) are more positve going forward.
How long should they keep a backup of every user's virtual machines, after they stop paying? 20 days is reasonable, a month would have been better (If only since it's more predictable) but they really didn't do anything unreasonable.
Keep in mind, even if it's only $2/month (After redundant backus, etc), if you have had 10,000 customers, that really adds up! Keeping files forever "Just in case" isn't a sustainable business strategy.
How many of the customers stop paying? Probably not many. How much disk space are these customers using? Probably not much. How much disk space do they have sitting on their servers unused? Probably a whole lot.
Credit Cards expire every 2 years. I would guess that a very large percentage of them don't preemptively re-verify their credit card until a billing fails.
There's no reason a merchant has to stop billing a customer after an otherwise perfectly good card expires. Having your billing process fail on that is pretty dumb.
I doubt it. Most people who would be good customers for them would realize the complaint was far fetched. They don't need customers who whine about things that far off the gamut.
People have suggested that 37signals would suffer from their attitudes towards implementing new features or crap like Gantt charts in BaseCamp, but I don't see them suffering for it, despite the ongoing rants and raves by "high maintenance" potential customers.
For me at least the problem is the attitude toward customer data. I would definitely try to be a good customer but there are all kinds of reasons why I might miss a payment. Even if the chance of that happening is 1% it would still be a reason to reconsider competitors even though Linodes specs are better.
Actually, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a hosting company to store some data for free. Not in the sense that I'm entitled to it as a customer, but in the sense that it might be in their best interests: if the data is deleted, that's a pretty good guarantee that the client won't reactivate; if the data is saved and it's trivial to reactivate, some percentage of customers will do so.
It really depends on the number of people they get doing this. If there are loads of accounts that are just left to rot, then it might not be worth it doing this. If there are lots of cases like the original poster, then it might be.
They could have shut off the host, but kept the image file. I just can't see 16GB of storage space worth that much to a hosting company. It's likely that most of that space is empty space anyway. $110 for 2TB on newegg -- that would store 120 customers who may have accidentally have expired credit cards. It's not that expensive for Linode and the word-of-mouth value is probably worth so much more.
I've been mocked for my opinion on this before, but ... well, why the hell not?
Storage is no longer expensive, and we're talking about not large amounts of data per instance, in an archival situation -- where disk bandwidth isn't an issue and compression is totally doable.
So, why not store a copy of deactivated images for 3 months? If anybody's confused about how to do it, they might ask Backblaze....
I've actually had customers who've gotten mad at me for storing data after they cancelled.
The concern, of course, is one of privacy. If the feds come knocking with a warrant, if I have the data, I'll give it to them. If I overwrote it, then I can't.
Maybe it would be worthwhile to distinguish between customers who had actively cancelled their accounts and those who had passively stopped paying? With the former, there is the expectation that you will not retain their data. As the originator of this thread shows, when customers' credit cards expire, there is sometimes the opposite expectation.
There´s an easy backup option now. A year ago, when I first signed up, the only things I could see were the options to use some of my storage space to make a backup image -- which you have to think of at the get-go, and make your image half or less the size of your storage.
I think all my monit and nginx stuff -- the per-project stuff -- is fine, as I keep in in the project repo. It´s just ... other stuff. Lots and lots of other stuff.
Just so you are aware that storage solution is a bad idea as it is being kept on the same machine and the only real problem it solves is simple and extremely limited version control.
In addition to what wwortiz said, you do not have to create an image using less than half your allotted storage from the get go. So long as you can ultimately get it down to under half the size by deleting files, etc, later, you can downsize the image. In other words, get an 8gb image down to 4gb of actual data and you can resize the thing down to 4gb from the linode CP.
I'm not sure if you are more upset at the loss of the particular server setup or of the data. It sounds like the former. In that case take this as an opportunity to create an infrastructure for your servers where you can easily bring up new servers as you need them. Instead of logging into a new box and installing and configuring software, write a deployment script. That way you can migrate to/from Linode quickly.
My friendly neighborhood sysadmin says that Puppet is a good one. I've been using Fabric for some of these tasks. Also, just a shell script would do it depending on how sophisticated you want to get. I suggest getting a cheap VPS (search lowendbox.com, no affiliation) and practicing there. Or just set up a "fake" server using VirtualBox or some such.
A reasonable thing to do would be for them to call if your credit card expires to see if you accidentally let it slip without updating the info. If it was any other situation (e.g. the card was declined but still valid date-wise), I think how they handled it would be perfect.
They answered my questions like they deleted my linode: as fast as possible. :(
I had no idea my bank card was going to expire while I was down here; I´m kicking myself.
The only thing that bugs me is that their support emails said that they DO warehouse some linodes, if there´s "some indication" the person will pay.
Wah? Gah! It´s an expiration. For personal accounts, there has got to be data out there that shows that expirations are sometimes a surprise to the CC holder, like when they happen on vacation.
Meh. I´ve got my repos. I´ll probably even set up at linode again.
I see they´re advertising their backup service on their home page. Hmm.
And why not?? This would be the biggest reason I wouldn't go with Linode. Their Linode 512 instance only consumes 16GB of disk space, why couldn't they just compress the data and store it just in case the customer returns? 16GB is not a lot of money these days... a 1TB hard drive is around $60 and they could store 60 customers on one of these drives. The drive doesn't even need to be running for archival purposes.
I´ve been in South America for a few months, and I found out that my bank card (visa) expired a little over a month ago.
"Hmm," I thought. "I sure hope that my linode is all right. But it´s been less than two months. They will turn it off, but that is all."
So I checked my email. Part of the joy of my style of travelling is not checking email for a month at a stretch.
They deleted my linode. It´s completely gone.
I feel a little sick ... it was just for personal use (for now), and I have all of the git repos on my local machine as well, but I´m not yet to the point where everything I do on the server is in a repo somewhere. Poof, hundreds of hours of server mangling, gone forever.
Literally, if you forget to check your email, they delete it in 20 days. If your bank card expires while you´re out of touch ... for some strange reason ... anyway, instead of warehousing your data for even a few months, they kill you.
I like linode. I just feel sick right now.
On the one hand, I´m an idiot.
On the other hand, 20 days?!?!?! When you know how precious a customers´data is in this context, and it´s purely a question of temporary storage, why?!?
I need a drink. Oh, yeah, Go Linode!
edit: okay, I´m over it now. Leaving the original, melodramatic writing because, darn it linode, someone from Slicehost posted that Slicehost did it differently, and my reaction is relevant to your business.