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Linode Cancellation

37 points by 16s ↗ HN
I wanted to share my cancellation experience with Linode here on Hackernews so others may avoid being invoiced after they've canceled their Linode account. I've been a Linode customer for a year now. I've been very pleased with the service, but I wanted to spend less per month, so I moved a site off of Linode and canceled the account on Oct 30, 2011. Made DNS changes and all so nothing was going to Linode any longer.

When you cancel a Linode account, you do so through their web interface (The Linode Manager). After cancellation, it logs you out right away and you cannot log back in. It displays a message that your account has been closed. However, no other confirmation is provided... no emails or anything to prove the account has indeed been canceled. So today, November 1, 2011 Linode invoiced me for November 1 through November 30th. I went to the Linode Manager and found that my old account had somehow been reactivated. I have no idea why my original cancellation was not honored. So, I canceled the account again and emailed support@linode.com.

Linode support said that I had not canceled in Oct and that there was a 5 dollar fee to cancel the account now. Even though it was clear that I had no traffic to the Linode vps since Oct 30 (DNS change) and that I canceled again today right away after being invoiced again. If you do business with Linode and you cancel your account, email support@linode.com and confirm it with them in writing or your account may somehow be reactivated and you'll be invoiced again and then asked to pay a fee to cancel a service you are not using.

19 comments

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16s
I should add that this is the only negative experience I've ever had with Linode (in a year of use). Their technical services have been outstanding.
madaxe
You've been lucky - we host in their London DC and their networking keeps on vanishing, often for 20+ minutes. Moving to EC2 at the end of this month.
moomerman
I've also been using them for years, managing 20+ servers across nearly all of their datacenters and the service has been fantastic, their support is exceptional.

I understand that its usually the payment service provider that charges for refunds, but in this case if you've been a customer for a year I would expect them to absorb that cost.

davidhansen
Their technical services have been outstanding.

Clearly, you don't have any instances running in their Fremont datacenter. Hurricane Electric is like an unreliable, abusive alcoholic, and Linode is like a doting battered wife who stays with him because "someday he'll change".

joshmanders
That sucks, I've never actually canceled my account with them, but I have deleted my nodes and got refunded the remaining money with no problems. Maybe it's a bug on their end? Did you delete the node before canceling your account?

Sucks big time, but I have never had, nor heard of too much problems with Linode. They're a pretty solid company.

ghc
Can you imagine what would happen if linode failed on deleting nodes? Nobody would trust them with their business. I suspect that the cancellation process is much more untested.
joshmanders
I don't know if I'd NOT trust them because of a node didn't delete for me. I'd just email support and let them know instead of the whole "zomg, my node didn't delete! I'm leaving this crappy host!"
ghc
I think you're not considering that some businesses regularly use the API to spin up new nodes and then shut them down to handle shifting load. I wouldn't know if a node didn't delete until I got billed for it.
joshmanders
That's true. I do everything from the manager. Maybe write a checker that makes sure the node is actually deleted, and if not try deleting it again, or even notifies you it failed to delete?
ghc
I would like to note that I have, in the past, done the same. However, in my case, I did receive a confirmation email. I think you discovered a bug in their system. It's unfortunate that they decided to penalize you for it.
16s
That's interesting. I've canceled twice now (Oct 30 and Nov 1) and neither time have I received a cancellation confirmation email.
elliottcarlson
Just a slight clarification after a quick web search since I was curious - the $5 fee seems to be a refund service fee and not a cancellation fee - so since you were billed for the month, they were charging you $5 to issue the refund, not to necessarily process the cancellation.
jcromartie
$5 to refund erroneous charges? That sounds borderline criminal. BTW I like Linode. This just sounds like a bit of confusion that could be cleared up by going "up the chain".
wccrawford
Which is just as crappy. Charging a fee to correct their mistake? Horrifying!
elliottcarlson
Don't get me wrong - I was not defending them - I was just curious if they were actually charging a real cancellation fee (which would be far more outrageous) than a refund fee. If they are at fault they should waive that imho - but just in general it's good to know that the refund clause exists. If you want to cancel, cancel on the last day of service to prevent the fee.
st3fan
Why do you need to cancel the full account? Can't you simply turn off the services that you no longer want to use?
chrisgo
My experience with Linode has been great and they even refunded me some money (I paid for a month for a bunch of servers, canceled after a couple of days) which I was NOT expecting. Linode is VPS, not cloud so I was expecting that the monthly payment is the monthly payment. They ended up prorating all my unused credits and I had 2-3 months that I didn't have to pay anything (spun up a lot of extra servers). So this may just be a bug on their system but I didn't have to call or email anybody to get this process.
joshmanders
That's how the system works. Buy a node for 1 month, and delete the node 2 weeks in? Prorated and credited on your account. Pretty good deal.
16s
Linode saw this post and called me. They apologized. There was a glitch in the cancellation system. I did cancel on the 30th (and they verified that), but due to the glitch, the cancellation didn't show up. So they made it right and are refunding the money (the monthly charge and the 5 dollar fee).

Kudos to Linode. They did the right thing. My entire experience with them (now that this has been corrected) has been very positive. I would recommend them to others and will use them again someday.

I would edit my original post to reflect this change, but it's no longer editable.