I could even see a viable strategy where they rename the existing Linode but create a new Linode, ala Lightsail just to keep the name. They were running sponsorships using the Linode name on various media sites throughout last year, and I think even this year. The whole point of doing sponsorships is brand awareness. This just deletes it.
They offer a managed Apache Kafka. Which is called...
...Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka...
Or RHOSAK for short. So terrible in all ways.
As recently as 2 days ago (the day before this was announced): https://youtu.be/b-WFetQjifc?t=51s
Because they know they're up against the AWS, GCP and Azure's of this world....
So it's probably a touch of the "nobody got fired for buying IBM", i.e. they consider "Akamai" to have more clout on a proposal sheet than "Linode".
Of course nobody sensible reads anything into a brand name, but if you're trying to impress the customer's C-suite ....
Akamai is not. I bet i you asked 10 random people what Akamai was they would never guess it, probably think it was new drug pfizer came out with or something
Large company a name has a go through several committees in different depts, then to legal, then to some exec committee, and through all of that creative dies, slowly and painfully
Maybe the same person works in the B2B space. There was the B2B platform Insite that was bought out by Episerver a few years ago (who bought Optimizely and then took on the name) and rebranded to Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud by Insite, where they quickly lost "by Insite". Then in the last few months they've decided to rebrand the product again to Optimizely Configured Commerce to separate it from their other eCommerce platform which they are calling Optimizely Customized Commerce.
The downside with this approach is that you lose any brand awareness of Linode. Perhaps that's not a terrible thing if their market share was minimal. You could have gone with "Akamai Linode Cloud Computing Services" or "Linode Cloud Computing Services by Akamai". But Linode seems a bit redundant in that name to my eyes.
Wasted money I guess?
Haven't we gotten pretty used to Amazon Web Services?
What we've gotten used to is "AWS". However "ACC" sounds more like a condition to avoid, rather than a service to use.
Precisely.
Sounds like you just identified a tranche of customers Akamai doesn’t care about. As everyone else in the comments is pointing out Akamai doesn’t want your $1000/mo. It’s a waste of their time. They want customers who are eager to talk private pricing plans and $1M commits. And I expect the linked infra/team will now be providing services that those $MM customers want.
They recently announced they were shutting down their cloud hosting and gave just 45 days notice to move sites.
Funny part was that the way they gave their customers notice was flawed and most customers didn’t receive any email from them.
I wish a sense of deflation was the only issue I’d had!
Linode is a good service among a lot of equally good competitors (digitalOcean, ec2/lightsail, ovh, hetzner, vulter) in the space, but it's not as much a house name as Heroku or Github - it's not a trailbrazer, the cheapest, the most advanced or the first of it's kind. It's a good solid choice among other solid choices.
On the other hand Akami is, in many circles, known as the best (as a CDN at least - it is regarded by many as the most expansive, most stable and most feature rich), it is recognized by many as first (as a cdn) and is very much a house name.
On the contrary, Akamai is incredibly well known.
When I think Linode, I think developer, small consultancy, etc. When I think Akamai, I think enterprise. Completely different brands.
It just seems like such a bizarre business decision to me for Akamai to throw a strong brand like that away just because they want to slap their name on the product instead.
All in all, I’m pretty sure this will turn out to have been a mistake.
They kept the name, but killed the product.
Anyway they're probably rebranding because Linode doesn't tell you what it is and they're selling to corporate.
They don't want "What is a Linode and why are we paying so much for it" every invoice, haha
RIP Linode.
This acquisition was about selling a product to existing Akamai customers so branding it as an Akamai offering allows them to present this as an enterprise ready solution that their customers can trust immediately.
Akamai did $3.6B in trailing twelve month revenue, and even backing out $200MM (being generous here for Linode) that is $3.4B of revenue.
The bigger play for them is to mark up this as a high gross margin offering to their existing CDN customers where they need a bit of compute power to pair with their CDN offering.
Limelight Networks (throw back alert) was doing the same thing back in the day and they approached us (DigitalOcean) in 2012 looking to potentially partner with us so that we can use our software to build an internal white labelled cloud for them that they could resell to their customers.
This is seen as more of a brand extension through product acquisition under the Akamai umbrella rather than something like Microsoft buying Github where that is a service that is known globally by pretty much every developer and what they wanted was the brand and developer clout.
Here there was no real interest from Akamai in the brand, but simply in a robust enough product that they could resell into their existing customer base.
Imagine the next generation of VPS in 10-15 years - will they really care about the name "Linode" or "Akamai" as long as it's a great product?
Unfortunately, I suspect this is something that happens quite often for Linode, which is that, their most successful clients will eventually graduate off of them.
This may reposition their business in such a way that their most successful clients stay with them.
Part of what Akamai bought was the Linode brand name. Anecdotally as a user Linode’s brand seems to have a fair bit of value and positive reputation. Havent they just written off a non-trivial amount of value from what they just acquired?
Or is it as simple as they really want brand consistency?
I was uncertain I would keep using them after the acquisition, but oddly (and despite no technical changes) this has convinced me I need to leave. The only associations I have with the Akamai brand are "enterprise" and "overpriced."
Say you receive a fraudulent DMCA takedown request. Or someone doesn't like what you're hosting there (like the recent core-js situation where they receive a lot of hate) and somehow sends a complain/report to Hetzner.
Would Hetzner shutdown the VPS first and ask questions later? Or would they approach me first?
I'm taking this chance to move from Linde to a different provider, so I'm interested in how they handle situations like this.
Internally a number of the engineers are scratching our heads at this one.
After Slicehost/Rackspace, my next VPS provider was Linode. To be fair, I do also use Amazon for some stuff, but mostly just transient instances, and limited use of some of their more specialized services like SNS.
I experimented with Hetzner and OVH, and wound up deciding to migrate my stuff to OVH. So far so good, but as mentioned in another thread, while I'm fairly happy with OVH, there are a few little "gotcha's" here and there.
I still remember having to work 20 hours _on fucking Christmas Day_ because they had no meaningful DDoS protection in place.
Thankfully I had been working for the past 3 months on a DR strategy and the 20 hours of work was an extended switch-flipping operation because I was prepared. That was the last day we were a Linode customer.
We had an SSH-only machine (that ran backups), but because someone was spraying traffic at the non-operational port 80/443, they kept on disconnecting the network and requiring manual intervention from their support team to reinstate networking.
When we asked them to please stop disconnecting our database backup machine from the network, their answer was "put Cloudflare in front of it". They didn't have the technical knowledge to understand why this was a stupid recommendation.
We solved this by moving everything off Digital Ocean. Like Linode, a perfectly reasonable day-1 solution, and not bad for ancillary services, but not something I'd run production systems on long term.
I can only assume this is an attempt at targeting enterprise; tons of engineers know Linode (and given how long they've been around, there's probably plenty of enterprise CTOs around now with fond memories of the project they spun up in college on Linode), but it wouldn't be my first (or fifth) thought for a large cloud deployment.
I guess Akamai wants to change that, and is happy to just toss the old brand in the dumpster to do it.
I've used Linode a few times over the years for various small projects, and never had anything but positive experiences. I'm not sure I would have had cause to turn to them again, but...there's basically zero chance of me turning to Akamai cloud computing, so for me, I think this is the end of the road with them.
As long as they don't change the nature of the service, they might not be wrong - people are unlikely to switch providers over just a name change, and people looking into Linode probably won't care that it's now called something else.
Conversely, lower information decision makers might be drawn into an ecosystem that is advertising a degree of consistency through unified branding.
* run reliably * static IP that other mail servers trust * staff who are willing to reach out to other larger mail providers if a linode ip range it is in got blocked.
So not surprising they'd throw away so much brand recognition.
Adding new good things is a bonus.
I can understand changing the name. Among other reasons, I wouldn't want to be doing B2B sales and trying to explain to the customer what "Linode" is.
The name "Linode" has an old-school charm, from a particular period and demographic, but I'd guess that's not how they're making most of their money nowadays.
And, hey, ACC (Akamai Connected Cloud) comes alphabetically before AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Linode was solid for me over the years, I noticed DigitalOcean might be a big threat to it early on, now might be the time for me to finally migrate there.
Yes, I like linode and run most of my business on it.
They changed the name.
I'm not switching until they "kill" the product. If the uptime remains good, the service remains good, why switch??
I'm a bit sad Linode is gone, but for what it's worth, thanks Linode.
It feels like Linode was small enough to care, which was a key differentiator with other cloud offerings. Now, that advantage is gone with a major name like Akamai. On the other hand, it might be easier to convince people to consider Linode's platform as an alternative to other more expensive clouds.
This is my main fear: morphing into some AWSgoogleCloudflare behemoth with a bazillion knobs and complex unpredictable pricing plans. I choose Linode specifically to avoid that time sink. Thankfully there are other's that are supposed to be similar to Linode in this respect, but I've grown to like Linode over the years, and their UI has become pretty refined, but that may be subjective.
DigitalOcean offers solid uptime, a more professional operation, and typically better performance than Linode in benchmarks (https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/screener). It has confusing marketing, but a good account dashboard and good docco/service. They're more in line with Linode, and will probably be the big winners if Linode/Akamai continue losing steam.
I wouldn't go with OVH, and I would use caution with cheaper providers, unless you're comfortable with the risk of hiring people who would willingly build wooden data centres with no fire safely. There is such a thing as "too cheap". (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-fire-rep...)
I recall seeing headlines here about the fires, but I didn't know their construction was this bad.
DigitalOcean seems about on-par; OVH and Hetzner are cheaper but seem less reliable, etc. Much depends on your exact needs of course.
Who will know what Akamai will do in the future, but you can say "who knows what $anything will do in the future?" too. It's been a year and nothing has radically changed as near as I can tell. A naming rebrand is rather superficial.
If you had a 4GB/2-CPU Linode for $30, you could get an 8GB/2-CPU from Hetzner for €21.85 (~$23.45). If you were using Linode's shared-CPU nodes, that $20 4GB VPS would be €7.55 on Hetzner (~$8.10) or even €5.35 in their European data centers (~$5.74, their European data centers offer both Intel or AMD processors so you can get a 4GB/2-CPU intel box there, but in the US they're only offering their AMD servers which include 3-CPU so it's a tad more expensive due to fewer options).
The downsides to Lightsail are highlighted in their article: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/light...
I depreciated like $15/month of Vultr VPSes last weekend by switching to their offerings. It's not the fastest but damn, it makes me wish it wasn't an apology for their crimes against FOSSmanity.
If anybody cares to know, the single biggest annoyance I have with them is this: you can't launch a VPS that comes up with an ssh key pre-configured for passwordless ssh access, at least not the first time around. Unless they've changed it recently anyway, the option to specify an ssh key only appears in the menu for re-installing an existing VPS. For a brand new one, your options are:
1. Turn around and immediately re-install it, so they add the key for you
2. Receive the password for the newly created instance in an email, and use it to login, upload the key, and configure passwordless ssh.
I wound up writing a script to do the latter, so all I do is wait for the email to come, paste the password and IP into my script, and fire it off and it copies the key, and makes a few other small tweaks, then does sudo dnf -y upgrade, and then a sudo reboot.
Once all that finishes I use Ansible to do everything else. By and large it all just works and is fine, but not being able to have the VPS come up with the ssh key already configured initially still bugs me a bit.
Instead of throwing away the brand, I just wish they retained the Linode name as a sub brand targeted at developers something like OVH and kimsufi (if that even makes sense).
To get an idea of what their intentions and goals behind this move are, we'll have to wait and see how the existing Linode customers will be treated w.r.t the product pricing & direction.
Incidentally, I just looked at the stock price from back then and it was higher than it is now. Post dotcom bubble the stock never reached those highs again.
Ultimately it became a ball of mud/perl and fell behind contemporaries as CDN as a concept was commoditised. Their decline in market cap is directly attributable to this trend.
Meanwhile the 2 main newcomers used aggressive strategies to eat their lunch. On the web side CloudFlare offered free TLS termination and eventually basic CDN features for free. Something Akamai never acquired was the many-account scalability to do because their platform is so high touch.
Fastly attacked their entrenched video and media business, primarily with very efficient systems, compelling pricing and Varnish compatibility rather than ball of perl w/bespoke settings etc.
These days Akamai is the dinosaur and CloudFlare is pretty much the new incumbent, at least in terms of market share.
Compute at the edge is the new thing in town and Cloudflare and Fastly both have fairly high quality solutions while Akamai again falls behind.
First VPS provider I used. Although I haven't used it in a while, it's still sad to see the brand go away and be replaced with such a bland corporate one.
My first was Slicehost. I remember the big Slicehost vs Linode wars.
At least they put "love" and "developers" in the same sentence. I think they still love me.
(https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/a-bold-new-approach-to-th...)
If they wanted to, they could automate OpenStack clusters, give people admin over a fully featured open source private cloud, and charge per hour. A few providers (mostly in Europe) have done it and it's an amazing experience. But I guess nobody thinks there's a market for an AWS/GCP/Azure competitor, and charging for a month at a time is more stable money.
I always thought they seemed pretty much equivalent for both price and features (though Linode did take an age to implement cloud firewalls).
I’ve personally hosted about 30 servers with them for about 15 years, did look at DO a few times but it didn’t seem worthwhile to migrate everything over (and I preferred that Linode were privately owned vs the VC backed DO).
DO has managed website hosting, Linode doesn't (they just explain to you how to create a website, which is still you managing it)
DO gives you VPCs out of the box, but Linode basically doesn't, requiring clunky and limited custom networking configuration. VPCs are table stakes at this point.
DO has been offering K8s for years, while for Linode it's been sort of an experiment. (Even Linode's pricing for K8s was hidden for a while)
DO has had managed databases for a long time, Linode only recently
DO has provided object storage for a long time, Linode only recently
DO has the most amazing documentation and community forums of any cloud service provider. Linode has a fraction of the guides and very limited docs. They dump you into this doc wasteland which doesn't explain things.
DO products are intuitive, simple and easy, and just work. Linode on the other hand feels like it was designed by somebody's little cousin in 2003 (even after the redesigns, somehow the UX got worse). Doing basic things like configuring your VM's networking has a horrible UX, with stuff just not working at all with no explanation why (last time I used it).
For the people who never touch their VMs and never use new features, of course Linode seems fine. For people who want a better experience, DO blows them out of the water completely. And you don't get VMs constantly having maintenance windows with DO, or entire data centers constantly losing connectivity.
[ I had my first network interruption on my VPS in years this weekend... so just a touch nervous and looking at other options ]
I found that if you were even a bit off the beaten path they didn’t do much more than reboot and check if the disks had filled up.
In that awkward in-between phase of starting to grow and not quite there yet for another set of back-end hands :)
One might reasonably question the wisdom of such a decision and its potential impact on the perception of the brand by consumers.
I'm taking this chance to move my VPSs to an Europe-based provider, and if possible I would prefer to choose based on how good their support is when something happens.
I'm also open to different providers if anyone has a suggestion, preferably based in Europe.
I've caused two issues that was my fault and Hetzner was willing to help out while OVH told me tough luck.
I accidentally picked the wrong option in OVH Cloud and picked the one month up-front option and quickly destroyed the VPS after, it was barely on for 1 minute but that was enough to demand 60 euros for me. Sure, my fault but it should've been obvious that it wasn't intentional.
Fingers crossed but so often these don’t pan out
Looking for a new backup home.
Under no circumstances Digital Ocean, they delete all your servers and data with a valid and chargeable credit card on file.
Adding new data centers sure ain't new. It might be bold, but only if the company is wary of its future growth.
Akamai is basically buying exposure with this logo change. Linode is resold as managed service quite a lot, including Cloudways which was acquired by DigitalOcean.
As long as they don't change any of the services, there isn't anything to worry about.
Long version: Linode has been a good provider for many years. We farewell them and are sad to see them having the same fate as Heroku after Salesforce acquisition.
I've been a long time Linode customer and generally unimpressed by them but have let my VPS soldier on because I've been too lazy to pull the plug on it. Everything I do now is in AWS. Might be time to finally give it the axe and close my account.
Just tried to signup for a "free account" to check it out. Painful 4 step onboarding: social sign in, phone verification via SMS, billing method verification, mailing address (that didnt like a trailing space in zipcode)
Final screen was a "we'll get back to you" with no other info.
30 minutes later
"Hello,
A recently created account with this email address was canceled by our automated systems. This was due to activity or patterns associated with fraudulent behavior. Additional attempts to sign up may also be rejected.
Linode"
From a noreply@
Only remotely sketch thing about my signup is i was doing it on a train while traveling far from home (no VPN)
Guess they don't want me to reevaluate then
If they can keep that aspect of it together, I’m sure they’ll be fine. I think the name change is a bad choice, but time will tell.
I didn't move on because of the acquisition, that never directly bothered me in any imminent way. Instead, I've moved on for price.
Hetzner Cloud is less than half the price for the shared 4 vCPU 8 GB RAM system that I needed.
