Hetzner Cloud’s price is ~40% of Linode’s new price[0], OVHcloud ~50–60%[1], and Vultr ~80%[2]. Of the big-name VPS providers, I think only DigitalOcean is more expensive now[3], and so they will be the same after this change.
A “bold new approach to the cloud”[4], indeed.
[0] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
[1] https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/compare/
[2] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
[3] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
[4] https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/a-bold-new-approach-to-th...
https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing
So I am really not sure how they are looking at their "peers"
- DO intentionally does not let you easily download your disk images for backup or DR easily - which Linode and others do without issue to increase lock in. No need to reply with linux commands on how to do it. :)
- DO has a catastrophic flaw in their infrastructure where they will fail to charge a valid credit cards on file and proceed to delete all servers and backups automatically, and irrevocably.
They should not be trusted with anything in production that can't be mirrored to another cloud.
Appreciate some of the other links.
End of an era for me - I've been with Linode for over a decade due to their pricing and positive customer support experiences. And, truth is I haven't used their support for 4-5+ years so... easy decision.
Silver lining here - Hetzner's US datacenters couldn't have opened at a better time!
Bro it's only been 2 weeks
Stop being surprised. You’re being lied to. You know it, I know it, everybody knows.
They always change things for the worse in the second fiscal year. And unless they bought the company at a discount they always will. The old owners cashed out. They took the money out of the company, and that money needs to be replaced from somewhere. Which means customers and employees are getting bad news.
Admittedly not a Linode customer. DigitalOcean did me a solid about 5 years ago (support gave me a credit voucher to cover a month when I couldn't afford to renew in time to keep things online) and I've had no reason to look elsewhere. Fingers crossed their recent corner cutting doesn't ruin things.
Edit: other comments imply they’ve been improving the provided specs, so my comment might not be relevant.
Linode's development has slowed to a crawl since this acquisition unless you start considering "Network updates to connect existing core sites to the Akamai backbone" and the likes as development.
Also, most of the time, reverting the increases would take renegotiating things with support. Recently, it changed into requiring destroying my machines and creating new ones from scratch, what besides an improvement, is still as hard as migrating to another provider.
Anyway, I was not entirely dissatisfied with them, but this one is a sleazy behavior.
This is strange, I've been a customer for a long time and never noticed that.
My personal strategy to mitigate cost spikes is to have accounts with numerous VPS providers as that does not cost anything and to re-balance my nodes based on uptime, performance and cost. I found that an unexpected benefit to this method makes it easier to mitigate VPS region outages and forces me to use better automation practices even with my silly hobby sites.
We need a new independent VPS provider.
I think you're being a bit dramatic.
In the United States, people regularly spend more than $10,000 per year on hobbies.
Anecdotally, I'm a hobbyist and I've had to use higher price tiers throughout my entire time with Linode. The low-end VPS instances are insanely limited if you're looking to accomplish any sort of real work.
I am considering trying to exclusively use Oracle Cloud's "always free" tier. They literally give away small VMs for hobbyists and I've had one around for a few years now. Reliability isn't as good as Linode (what do you expect for free?) but as a small timer/hobbyist I don't really care.
(as an aside, driving hobbyists away from your product to Oracle of all things is quite funny to me)
I called it in the name-rebranding thread here.
I've been noodling around on how I'm going to move, but it looks like I should really work harder on getting that done.
Hosting providers typically make _some_ profit marking these up somewhat at deployment time, to pay for all of the surrounding infrastructure like real estate, power, racks, networking, personnel, etc. But their cash cows are customers who buy a certain plan at a certain price and then stay on those plans for years and years. Even if there are newer, cheaper plans that would work just fine, it may not be worth the time and cost of migrating. ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it.")
I once worked at a hosting provider and noted that we had a handful of truly aged VPS hosts that kept losing RAID disks and the occasional power supply. They were running a newer version of cPanel but almost everything was close to a decade old. I noted that we could replace all of these with one beefier box that would take up 1/10th the space and power but the exact words of the owner were, "Why would we replace those? They paid for themselves in the first year and are almost pure profit at this point. We won't decommission those until they die completely or customers stop paying for them."
The $5 linode instance is both way cheaper in real terms and way more powerful than the $5 linode instance 10 years ago.
1 modern vCPU, 1GB of modern RAM, 25GB modern SSD would be enough to host a large website 10-20 years ago. Now, its basically useless because of software bloat.
Do you really want to wait until they announce a "hit the ejector seat button" change and you only have 30 days to make the move?
Looks like this is going to cost me an additional $1440/year for... nothing. Anyone have a recommended alternative to Linope?
The main alternatives in the budget cloud space are Digital Ocean, Vultr, OvH etc - they're all similarly priced for the equivalent servers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they all start increasing their prices to match - DO especially as they recently laid off a load of employees.
My favorite hoster for years has been Vultr.com
Other alternatives would be UpCloud and DigitalOcean, I guess.
For many of us we "trade" a low price for doing our own admin.
With this new rate increase I can now get a comparable server from a 'managed' company and not have to do any admin.
Of course, some people really need root/sudo privileges but those of us with simple needs really don't require root and we will get no value received from Akamai by paying $96 more a year ($40 x .20 = $8 x 12 = $96) than we do now. For that money we should get SOMETHING… and we are not.
I don't know what others will do but I'll keep my $5 'test' server but will give up my $40 Linode and move to a managed VPS host. With the 20% increase the small savings in price between the un-managed and managed does not make enough difference to stay. I'll go to a managed server company and let 'them' deal with admin chores!
It is a simple comparison between cost and value received.
My guess is that Akamai is taking the position that "Just like when a bank has a client with direct deposit and recurring payments, it is such a pain for them to change banks that they just stay no matter what the fees are."
Basically it is also a "pain" to move to a new server company… so Akamai figures that most people will just "suck it up" and pay the extra money… getting nothing in return.
Not me. If you raise your price by 20% you better give me something in return… or I leave your service or find a substitute product.
YMMV.
Does it matter hugely which of the above I change to? I want them to bill me automatically and boot the server after outages, basically set and forget for admin.
"Effective 04/01/2023 the price of compute services will change by decreasing transfer fees and updating shared and dedicated plan rates. Read more."
this is a stellar example of the dark pattern of passive user-hostile language.
Linode VPSes can talk to each other in the same data center via private IPs, and if they're in different locations you can of course setup a VPN with whatever software you want, so... what do you mean?
There have been good reasons to flee Linode for a while now:
- Since their third or fifth or who-knows-which breach and subsequent fumble: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 - Since the announcement that they were acquired by Akamai: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30352772 - Since they became "Akamai Cloud": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34799273
Linode hasn't had a competitive advantage for at least a few years, and many would argue that their handling of repeated security incidents has made them a worse option than lots of competitors.
If you're still on Linode, do yourself a favor and make the time to find a new VPS provider.
Word on HN is that it's getting bought by Microsoft. If that's true it makes sense that DO would go away entirely.
Where are you getting these news?
Akamai recently acquired Linode, and it was definitely perceived as a foreboding piece of news... and now here they go raising the prices.
Linode was awesome and different when you could chat with them on IRC to resolve problems and they sponsored a lot of FOSS stuff over the years. It is sad to see them go but the reality is Akamai are a very different company with very different aims who server a different type of customer.
My node is pretty cheap, it will go from $23/month to $28 or so. Between this and the disappearance of yearly plans (which had a discount over paying monthly) my Linode bill has increased quite a bit over time.
Now I can expect another 20%?
I don't understand why there is a cost for IPs other than trying to prevent people from "wasting" them.
Since the cloud is ultimately someone else's computer, I'd love to learn what setups and providers (other than DigitalOcean) folks are using, including cloud agnostic, or hybrid cloud setups, as ridiculous as it might seem for personal or SMB projects.
Dedicated servers are not the top of mind for me at this time - spent enough time with them and I know what's available to me. Although, one could run their own hypervisor like Proxmox on it to have their own personal Linode pretty easily.
I guess I might as well update my methods too and automate some of this while I'm at it.
In fact our mission is to reduce the cost of cloud and the complexity.
