Linode Blog

Here's an attempt at an explanation/translation:

HTP ("Hack The Planet") is a group that likes to break into things. Another (unnamed) group of people impersonated a third group of people ("ac1db1tch3z") and tried to cause trouble for HTP.

The impersonators located HTP by examining one of HTP's botnets (a collection of compromised computers that are used to launch things like denial of service attacks). Botnets have to receive instructions (e.g., targets to attack) from somewhere, so it's likely that the impersonators followed the path taken by commands to the botnet, and found the network(s) that HTP uses to organize themselves.

HTP realized this, and wanted to get back at the impersonators. They found out that the impersonators used an IRC channel (chat room) hosted on a network called SwiftIRC. If HTP could break into SwiftIRC (which is hosted on Linode), they could cause all sorts of trouble for the impersonators. So HTP decided to break into Linode, so they could break into SwiftIRC, so they could break into the group of impersonators.

To break into Linode, HTP broke into their domain name registar (name.com). They planned to secretly take control of linode.com, and replace it with a version of linode.com would look and feel and work correctly, but had one additional feature -- it would collect the login information that people typed in. HTP probably hoped to gain the login for SwiftIRC directly, or collect the logins for Linode admins and obtain SwiftIRC's login…

Great start to a comparison review.

I've used all the service providers available and these opinions include my historical experience with them (I've used all providers for many years, my account with DO is since 2013). Most of my service uses were focused in those service provider's North America locations, Asia locations, and Oceania locations. Note I did do a short comparison between DigitalOcean and Vultr back in 2014 here: https://vpsboard.com/threads/digitalocean-vs-vultr-the-asian-face-off.3688/

Most service providers here are fairly decent.

From my experience, OVH's KVM VPSes weren't worth the time, but their VMWare VMs were absolutely top notch.

Linode has had two major security events over the last few years, one of which was in early 2016 which included release of credit card information. However, they also offer paypal payments now and are fairly top notch in terms of performance. (They've taken approaches to fix their problems from 2016 with this blog post here: https://blog.linode.com/2016/02/19/security-investigation-retrospective/ ).

DigitalOcean is fairly reliable. Their Singapore location early on had regular packet loss events, but they've been shaping up pretty nicely over time.

Vultr has been a major problem for me. Vultr for a while (on their storage instances in Japan) had terrible I/O which took a solid two hours just to install Ubuntu 14.04. When contacted support, they stated they "stopped a noisy neighbor and to retry" but no real…

"With the way that Linode recently handled the hack which exposed customer CC's and data[1], I would find it hard to have any peace of mind with them."

I hear this repeated over and over but did you just read the headline and draw your own conclusion? From all the articles I read, the hacker maybe got some worthless encrypted cc data. I don't think anyone lost sleep over this and kudos to Linode for encrypting user data. Also the breach had nothing to do with the individual VPS accounts.

Around that same time Amazon had the most epic multi-day outage in history and their storage servers were leaking user data. By comparison, the Linode hack wasn't a big deal, IMO.

PS: As far as Linode holding back information, were you a Linode cusotomer last year or are you just repeating rumors? Your Slashdot article was posted April 15th. Linode announced the "security incident" on the 12th https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/12/security-notice-linode-manager-password-reset/ also https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/ I did not get the impression they were holding back information.

If you find yourself impacted by these changes in your home lab (and chances are you will; taking ballooning out of Free is nothing but petty), keep in mind that you can follow the lead of the major hosting companies and jump ship to KVM via oVirt or some homebrew. KVM is better in a number of ways anyway, one of them being a lack of control by Citrix, not to mention when Linode switched they got ~30% more perf out of Linodes.

Xen has been dying for a while. EC2 is heading off it, and they've held out the longest. This change is evidence that Citrix would like to accelerate that trend by killing off the home lab users that stuck it out (read: me). Looks like I have a new Christmas project.

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/01/7-ways-we-harden-our-KVM-hypervisor-at-Google-Cloud-security-in-plaintext.html

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_based_hypervisor_to_make_its_cloud_go_faster/

https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-some-kvm/

https://www.digitalocean.com/help/technical/general/ (Cmd+F KVM)

Right now, we've seen pretty constant pricing from "cloud" providers like Amazon and Slicehost. While they probably had razor thin margins a few years ago, they're probably decent now. As technology improves, they'll probably have to reduce pricing to remain competitive. In fact, Linode (who has been around for 5 years, considerably longer than Slicehost) has seen constant upgrades.

Linode has gone from, on their base plan:
64MB 2003
80MB 2005
100MB 2006
128MB Jan 2007
256MB Mar 2007
300MB Sep 2007
360MB Dec 2007

Similar increases in transfer and disk space have been seen over this time period (http://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/).

I expect that Amazon and Slicehost will start offering more as pricing comes down. With virtualization being offered by more and more firms, they'll have to follow market pricing and as disks and RAM get cheaper and cheaper, what is offered will go up. Margins are probably decent now as he notes in his posts. As such, anytime storage or RAM falls by half, we should see a discount in the cost to us.

They weren't down for the entire two weeks, but various datacenters went up and down for hours, then quieted down for a few days, then was back again, then another hit; stretching across two weeks.

One thing that took them so long was that their upstream ISPs at some of the datacenters were themselves unable to handle the DDOS, so they had to switch ISPs, which took a while.

I don't see Google/AWS as easy to attack; but I'm not sure why similar tier players like DigitalOcean aren't being hit -- or maybe they're just less transparent about things, or are actually a smaller target (didn't think they were?).

edit: here's a postmortem from linode of the christmas attack - https://blog.linode.com/2016/01/29/christmas-ddos-retrospective/