4 Savvy Tips That Help You Get the Most From Linode Customer Support
Every cloud-services provider comes packed full of features for you to get your hands on — including customer support. When you need it, responsive, helpful support is invaluable, and can make or break a provider.
The tech support team of a company is a pool of dedicated employees ready to help you get what you need, fast and efficiently. They can help you solve simple issues, learn nuances in the platform’s website and manager, assist in account related issues, and much more.
At Linode, we pride ourselves on our customer support. Our team of professionals is ready to help our customers 24/7/365. No matter the time, we’re available by ticket, email, and phone. Our response times via ticket and email rank with the best in the industry, and we always have phone support available for immediate assistance.
Knowing how to utilize available support options can be just as important as the support team’s availability. With knowledge on how the support works, you can cut the volley of back-and-forth tickets in half, spend less time on the phone, and get the help you need quickly and easily.
The following tips should help you get the most when contacting Linode customer support.
Authenticate Your Account
In order for us to share any account details and provide assistance, you must first be authenticated to be in control of the account. There are three primary ways of achieving this:
- Open a ticket from within the Linode Manager. This is the quickest and easiest way to let us know you’re in control of the account, since you are opening the response from within the Linode Manager while logged in. Please note that if you’re using a restricted account, we will only be able to assist you with details of the account that you have access to.
- While contacting support via phone or email outside of the Linode Manager, we can use your billing details to confirm ownership of the account. For this, you will need to provide unique identifying information about your account. I recommend having information such as billing information, invoice numbers, and contact information readily available.
- If you have access to the Linode Manager but prefer phone support anyway, after calling our support you can ask to have them authenticate you via ticket. While you are on the phone with a support representative, you can open up a ticket from within your Linode Manager stating that you’re on the phone with Linode (mentioning the support employee’s name). This way, we know that you actively have access to the Linode Manager while speaking to us.
Please note that additional details will be needed beyond what is stated above for accounts with two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. If you are locked out of your account and unable to provide the additional authentication, our support team can remove the 2FA from your account on request, although this step will require more information than what I’ve mentioned above. Please contact our support team if you are ever in this situation and they will help walk you through the process.
Use Linode Docs
If your issue is related to a process on the Linode website or a popular piece of software on your Linode, chances are our Guides & Tutorials can supply you the answer you need.
Visit the Linode Guides & Tutorials website here: https://linode.com/docs
Visiting our Troubleshooting section in our library is a great way to start: https://linode.com/docs/troubleshooting. While it’s tough for our support staff to help with services on your Linode without hands-on access to your server, we have documents prepared to assist with web server and database issues, memory and networking, and more. If these documents turn out to not be relevant to your issue, feel free to contact our support department and they can help point you in the right direction.
Rely on Advanced Support?
Linode offers two additional methods of support that you can add to your account. While every customer receives free 24/7/365 ticket, phone, and email support — we offer Managed and Professional Services.
Managed is a service that assists with incident response. Monitors will be set up to check if various servers are running on your server. If they were ever to go down, our team will be notified right away, and we will have the tools to log into your server and fix these problems to your prior specifications. This way, you can rest easy knowing that we’ll keep your site running 24 hours a day, even during the night while you are asleep. Managed is charged on a per Linode basis on your account, and you can find out more about it here: https://www.linode.com/managed
Professional Services is a team that handles single jobs for users on request. These jobs can range from single request, to a full server migration to Linode. Our team is able to set up highly available solutions, and prepare your infrastructure to your specifications. You may request a quote from our team, and work with them in helping shape the exact infrastructure you want. You can learn more about Professional Services here: https://www.linode.com/professional-services
Linode Customer Support Limitations
Depending on the issue with your server, there may be times where our support team is unable to assist with your problem. Our team does not have direct access to your server, so they will be unable to go in on their own to run commands and troubleshoot hands on. Our team will often provide you with commands to run, and ask that you paste the results of those commands back into the ticket. This information will assist our team in determining the problem.
Our support team is here to ensure that what we provide for you works to the best of our ability. We’ll make sure your Linode and host hardware is performing to their best of our ability, and that your connection online is quick and stable. When it comes to what you wish to do on your server, whether it be deploying various services or code you’ve written — maintenance here would rely on the customer. We’ll try to assist you if you run into any roadblocks, and we can really only assist when it comes to any of our supported distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS.
Above all else, we’re here to help you and make sure that your experience with Linode is great. Being your own server administrator can be tough at times. We’re here to help make it as easy and enjoyable as possible.
