Michael Stuckey, Head of Support Development at Infomedia, describes why Infomedia decided to partner with Linode. “Our longevity as a company is due to our commitment to innovation, both in terms of design and underlying technology, so we need a hosting partner that supports that and enables us to move quickly,” he said. “We’ve had to part ways with numerous hosting companies that just couldn’t keep up with our pace. The relationship always starts well, but then we encounter growing pains and discover we cannot move as quickly as we would like.”
Daniel Weaver, Web Developer and System Administrator at Infomedia, added: “At the end of the day, Infomedia is the one responsible to our clients for performance and reliability, so we’re seeking cloud providers that can give us more scalability, more control, more access, and less downtime. The other providers we’ve been with have always claimed 99.9% uptime, and never delivered on that promise.”
Infomedia tested the waters with Linode by hosting its development server and a handful of larger clients on Linode for a couple of years. “When we’ve done server migrations in the past, it was a tremendous amount of work, and the process has not been without flaws, so we had concerns, especially about downtime,” admitted Stuckey. “We’ve also had subdomains slip through the cracks in the past, and we didn’t want to have things fall off again.”
Pleased with Linode’s customer service and reliable performance, Infomedia decided to expand the relationship, migrating 150 customer websites with help from Linode Professional Services.
“As it turns out, this migration with Linode was different from any other migration that we’ve ever done,” continued Weaver. “I attribute that to the fact that we had a Linode cloud consultant involved in the process with us from day one. Although we chose to stay involved in the process, we certainly could have taken a completely hands-off approach if we had wanted to. Linode made this migration easy, and the job was completed smoothly in 90 days, start to finish.”
In addition to managing the migration, Linode has provided additional value to Infomedia through its relationship-based service approach.
“Linode offers something truly unique these days: a real person who answers the phone!” said Stuckey. “With Linode, you can have a conversation with real people who are generous enough to give you the keys to the kingdom if that’s what you want, but the Linode team is also there with a personable, no-arrogance service approach to help when you need it. I also love that they don’t pretend to have answers when they don’t. They are humble enough to admit when they don’t know, and then they promptly figure it out.”
Another significant value-add is Linode’s price. “When we started looking at the numbers, we quickly realized that we could save so much money in the long run by going with Linode,” said Stuckey. And even in the short term, it was a no-brainer from a price-performance perspective. For instance, Infomedia could get two dedicated servers up and running for less than the cost of one dedicated server with other service providers.
“When we looked at the amount of support that Linode gives, the response time, the uptime, the price, it left us asking, ‘Could this be real?'” said Stuckey. “We’re very pleased to say that it is and that we’re extremely happy to have Linode as a hosting provider for Infomedia.”
