9 ms·

Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services

464 points by hanru 4y ago

rbut 4y ago
Akamai Node would have been a better name. Still retains the essence of the old name, and still indicates a small cheap VPS offering. "Connected Cloud" could mean anything.
skilled 4y ago
Linode was one of the OG providers back in 2000s. 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.
mynameisvlad 4y ago
RIP Linode. 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.
- schmichael 4y ago
  Same! It is still the only ad conversion I’ve ever been: I saw their ad on sourceforge.net, clicked, and bought a VPS. That was probably 20 years ago, and I can’t think of another time I’ve clicked an ad and bought anything.
- godzillabrennus 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    "Akamai Connected Cloud" is practically peak corporate brand. The only thing it's missing is "Powered by Akamai" The co-founder's fate doesn't exactly change Akamai's brand in my opinion, either. They've built themselves up as the Enterprise CDN which is the exact antithesis to the brand Linode cultivated.
    - dangus 4y ago
      I'll literally forget how to get there and login with a name like that.
      - ta988 4y ago
        I just hope you turned those servers off.
    - badcarbine 4y ago
      But it’s fun to say. Makes me feel like a samurai
  - tempest_ 4y ago
    That was 22 years ago. Plenty of time to establish a bland corporate brand, Google seems to be doing it just fine.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    The experience with them is very enterprisey and a few years ago very manual. When CloudFlare went all in on API management, Akamai required changing many things in the web panel. Their official terraform module only started in 2020! Their preferred onboarding is still extremely "talk to an expert" and "contact sales". I can't find a pricing page for their CDN. I'm not criticising their tech itself, but as far as brands go, they present as the extremely bland B2B, stay away if you're not a corp. (Also, they do airport adverts...)
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      This is exactly what I meant by a bland corporate brand. Their tech stack might be great, but their entire look and feel is "old school corporate you need to talk to sales and if you need to ask how much you can't afford it" vs Linode's "developer first, here's all the info you need go ahead and sign up" approach.
      - jeremyjh 4y ago
        Oh and the salesperson is going to look up your company info before deciding if they'll even call you back to give you a quote.
    - WirelessGigabit 4y ago
      Are you my colleague? I don't understand why part of our teams chose Akamai. The other ones who use Cloudflare just do API calls when they deploy. The Akamai team needs to send an email, then 2 meetings going back and forth, staging, approval, and then go-live.
      - bushbaba 4y ago
        Because Akamai still has better performance and price point than cloudflare.
  - diveandfight 4y ago
    The fact that the founders named the company based off a Hawaiian-English dictionary look-up strikes me as pretty bland-corporate, "The company was named after akamai, which means 'clever,' or more colloquially, 'cool' in Hawaiian, which Lewin had discovered in a Hawaiian-English dictionary after the suggestion of a colleague." [0] From what I've seen living here and hearing Hawaiian Creole English (aka pidgin), nobody uses akamai to refer to something that is cool... Always used in the smart/clever context. But then again, I wouldn't expect the founders to know that if they didn't have knowledge of local Hawaii culture. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies#History
    - hparadiz 4y ago
      Look up Aegis and see how many companies use the Greek word for shield. Sometimes a name is the last thing you actually want to be dealing with when starting a company.
      - deleted 4y ago
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    - deleted 4y ago
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  - 1123581321 4y ago
    Wow, I didn't realize that was him. He was on Flight 11 (struck North Tower) and his throat was cut. It's thought that he may have been trying to interfere with the initial disturbance as he had a combat background with the IDF.
  - recuter 4y ago
    He wasn't just killed, he was the first and possibly only person on AA11 to try and fight them off. Man went down swinging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lewin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lewin
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Not just killed in the 9-11 attacks. But a brave, courageous person who stood up against the terrorists on the flight.
- guluarte 4y ago
  RIP, it sounds so generic like IBM/Oracle cloud service
- dragontamer 4y ago
  Linode was my second VPS provider. My first was Slicehost. I remember the big Slicehost vs Linode wars.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  I remember using them when I first started getting into Linux. Lots of good memories getting Debian to work on my Thinkpad X40 and marveling at having a cheap shell account online all the time from Linode. It felt like the future.
djha-skin 4y ago
I'm a big fan of Jupiter broadcasting and so I tried to use their sponsor Linode once, but they needed my social security number so that was a no-go for me. Hopefully with the rebranding they'll change this requirement.
mmgutz 4y ago
Was put off by the pricing page, which used to be no nonsense. It now looks like a cryptic AWS/Azure calculator. Might be time to switch to DO.
xwdv 4y ago
Akamai must be feeling the pressure from Cloudflare.
- pxtail 4y ago
  Interesting way to reduce that pressure - I suspect that intention is to acquire some "dev friendly" company and try to replicate what CF is doing when it comes to capturing developers mindshare, exposing knowledge of availabile and offered services etc. Instead of working to make Akamai brand services more accessible and not perceived as stinky corporate concrete slab they decided to just buy something with good reputation among developers. General strategy is somewhat good because otherwise (I think) they will be very slowly moved into obsolescence by CF but the execution..
deleted 4y ago
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dgut 4y ago
Goodbye, good old trusted Linode :(
- onphonenow 4y ago
  Not sure it was trusted - I think they had root level control plane breaches in their stack?
  - arp242 4y ago
    That was over ten years ago. AFAIK there's never been a pattern of problems.
    - onphonenow 4y ago
      My memory was there were multiple and at least one badly handled - but it’s been awhile
  - jorts 4y ago
    Yes they did about 8 years ago.
chirau 4y ago
Yeah. I signed in earlier today and was shocked to see the orange Akamai logo.
badwolf 4y ago
Pour one out for our departed homies. RIP Linode.
UseStrict 4y ago
End of an era, I hosted personal work on Linode for years before moving to GCP.
winrid 4y ago
Odd decision. People know Linode and the logo.
- glasshug 4y ago
  Possibly more people know Akamai?
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    A completely different crowd associates Akamai with anything positive, IME.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Depends on which people. More developers know Linode. But more business people have seen Akamai adverts at the airports.
    - ing33k 4y ago
      I would bet that all developers sort of know Akamai as a CDN ( the one that small companies cannot afford )
VectorLock 4y ago
Were they acquires or were they always Akamai? 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.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  Acquired in 2022.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Acquired quite recently, in the past year ish.
MBCook 4y ago
That’s a mouthful of a name.
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
What’s a good alternative for Linode these days? I just want a vps where I can install Debian, be root, and have a web and email server. A 4gb Linode has been enough for my needs for years.
- glerk 4y ago
  Until they start crippling Linode or increase their prices, I'll keep using it. Doesn't look like anything has changed yet except for the logo.
  - coffeefirst 4y ago
    Yep. I've been running all my personal stuff on Linode for 11 years. Does this bode well? No. Am I going to migrate over a swapped logo? Also no.
- artellectual 4y ago
  How about digitalocean? or vultr?
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    DigitalOcean has been a good companion to Linode. It seems like many of the offerings are either on par or better, though some prices are a little higher.
- ge96 4y ago
  OVH
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    I started migrating from Linode to OVH a while back (Probably a year and a half or so ago). Parked the migration for a while, and started in earnest again a couple of months ago. All told, my experiences with OVH have been fairly positive. There's a quirk here and there that annoys me, but the same is true for every cloud provider to some extent. Still, on balance, I'd have no problem recommending OVH. 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.
rablackburn 4y ago
I’m curious to the reasoning behind a decision like this. 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?
- tailspin2019 4y ago
  I anecdotally agree. For some reason I find Akamai’s brand in general very uninspiring and this particular rebrand is the typical low effort corporate affair… they’ve literally swapped the logo and kept all the Linode green elsewhere as well as various mentions of Linode everywhere that haven’t been updated and now look out of place.
  - Manfred 4y ago
    You would be surprised how deep branding tentacles reach. Sometimes up to constants in protocols that need a migration cycle to change. If you want to transition without stopping all active development and operations, you have to do it gradually.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I don't particularly see Linode as a valuable brand, more one to avoid.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  It also makes no sense to me, if you want an offering with a different name, just add it to the UI and call the same backend to provision the resources. I bet the majority of customers will never know or care that the other one is the same thing with a different name.
- mardix 4y ago
  Checkout Hetzner. You will love their infrastructure. You will love their price.
adenozine 4y ago
I’ve run some medium/large scale side projects with Linode in the past and like many others, I was absolutely blown away by the high quality and professional support I received. 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.
riffic 4y ago
rebrands are never a good sign.
pvg 4y ago
Popped up yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34786762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34786762
RowanH 4y ago
Ask HN: I was just about to sign up to their Managed service offering (basically they monitor the VPS's and if a monitored URL goes down they do initial trouble shooting for the basics to bring things back online before they contact you). I've rarely seen this offered elsewhere. Any other hosting co's HN knows about that does this (and had good experiences with?) ? Vultr doesn't from what I can see. I prefer my servers a little less than crispy so OVH isn't on the menu. [ I had my first network interruption on my VPS in years this weekend... so just a touch nervous and looking at other options ]
- bombcar 4y ago
  Rack space (used?) to offer something like this and it was somewhat worthwhile if what you were doing was bog-standard. 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.
  - RowanH 4y ago
    Yeah I remember from back in the day. The Linode offering (assuming it works) gives some degree of confidence if a key person or two are out of action, you still can get back online if it's something not app related. And it's almost always the stupid stuff or an Apache reboot to get back online. For the money is worth that initial peace of mind. In that awkward in-between phase of starting to grow and not quite there yet for another set of back-end hands :)
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I was actually thinking of how this story reminded me that Rackspace's cloud product started off as the acquisition of Slicehost.
- nwilkens 4y ago
  At MNX, we manage your infrastructure at your existing provider or ours (mnx.io) and provide 24x7 monitoring and response. Our customers usually have 10+ servers, and pricing starts at ~$2500/month.
jay-barronville 4y ago
The Linode brand is so well known by developers. Why in the world would Akamai risk the brand any further than they already have like this?
- twblalock 4y ago
  Is it really well known? I've only ever heard of Linode because they sponsored some Youtube videos. I've never heard it mentioned in a professional setting as a developer. On the contrary, Akamai is incredibly well known.
  - jay-barronville 4y ago
    I can’t tell you why you haven’t heard of Linode much, but yes, the Linode brand absolutely is 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.
    - echelon 4y ago
      They're not the only ones. I consider myself up to date, and I had no idea Linode was in the VPS business. If I had to guess their mission, it sounds like Tailscale. [1] I've used Digital Ocean and all the big cloud providers. Vercel, Netlify, Heroku. Haven't touched Akamai, but I certainly know of it. [1] https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/ https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/
      - super256 4y ago
        Linode is better comparable to Vultr, UpCloud and DO, rather than the serverless stuff at Netlify and Vercel. :)
      - johnnylambada 4y ago
kamyl 4y ago
RIP Linode. It was the 2nd (after Slicehost) "cloud service" I was introduced to back then in 2009 I believe, when my, back then CTO, insisted that "cloud" is the way to go and some job skills (sysadmin) will eventually fade and turn irrelevant. 3 years later same CTO complained that I made other teams within that startup look bad by using Hetzner and OVH duo instead of Amazon's then still relatively new AWS - bills were telling the story way better than I could!
- aknosis 4y ago
  Slicehost was my favorite no frills hosting provider. I had to migrate to them from Servepath after it was shutdown in 2008?
- neom 4y ago
  Fun fact, Jason Seats who founded slicehost was massively important in helping us get DigitalOcean going.
- radiojasper 4y ago
  Slicehost on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840718
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Basically the same here. I used Slicehost until they were acquired by Rackspace... and for a while afterwards, truth be told. Inertia is a real thing, let me tell you. 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.
pbnjay 4y ago
They have my interest piqued with “Aggressive new cloud egress pricing” Fingers crossed but so often these don’t pan out
LanternLight83 4y ago
As an outsider, this feels absurd. Linode had so much good-will and brand recognition built up through their sponsorships and reps.
- accrual 4y ago
  Just yesterday I watched an MJD video on YouTube (mostly retro PC and OS videos) and he always mentions being sponsored by Linode. Since I like MJD, I was inclined to like Linode by association. Bummer it's going away.
  - oars 4y ago
    So now you'll be inclined to like Akamai by association, what's the actual difference? 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?
    - wallmountedtv 4y ago
      I have a strong suspicion that the sponsorships will be going away now. Akamai killed the enthusiast-run Linode to instead create executive-run cloud computing services. That is what the difference is, and why these news are so worrisome for enthusiasts.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  I get it for the Linode guys. Sell now- server hosting is an arms race against giants. I don’t wanna compete against AWS! I use AWS! Maybe I shouldn’t be? Maybe I should run my software on organic Linux-farmers open source electronic fields that run on hydroelectric power. They can get fiber and backup power too.
  - _blu 4y ago
    Stop using AWS! Linode was great for me up untill they got bought and now they have been doing abrupt "maintenance" work and stuff that Linode never did. But AWS is killing the world and so does companies like Akamai. We need to use pure VPS services and keep moving and not take any shit. I'm sick of it. VPS services should be state-run/owned to end this nonsense.
dangus 4y ago
I won't even say RIP because I've already moved on to greener pastures. 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.
nickhalfasleep 4y ago
I’ve had an account and small mail server on Linode for almost 19 years, and it has done all I need. * 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.
Shank 4y ago
I'm sure they spent a lot of time thinking about this, but why not just call it something "Linode by Akamai" or "Akamai Linode"? Neither "Akamai’s cloud computing services" or "Akamai Connected Cloud" sound like viable names. Is the goal just to get people to say "I use Akamai"? 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.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >Neither "Akamai’s cloud computing services" or "Akamai Connected Cloud" sound like viable names. Haven't we gotten pretty used to Amazon Web Services?
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Not in the least. What we've gotten used to is "AWS". However "ACC" sounds more like a condition to avoid, rather than a service to use.
    - alpaca128 4y ago
      I think that only needs some time to get used to. ACC is less awkward to pronounce than AWS at least.
  - cfuendev 4y ago
    We hate AWS
- whalesalad 4y ago
  Akanode
  - tnzk 4y ago
    Linomai also sounds not too bad
bfrog 4y ago
Corporate speak takes over a beloved brand, news at 11
synergy20 4y ago
At least been with Linode for the last 15 years, I'm used to the brand, you change it, I may just leave. 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.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  I've been with DO for 8 years. Still happy with them.
- voiper1 4y ago
  I don't get what the big deal is about the name. 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??
  - Veen 4y ago
    The name change indicates Akamai’s intentions for the Linode platform. Linode is a well-established brand with developers, smaller agencies, small businesses, hobbyists,and so on. Akamai is an enterprise brand that serves large businesses. They have never had an interest in serving the sort of people who know about and like Linode. Dropping the Linode brand is evidence they continue to have no interest in that market segment. It now seems more likely that Akamai wanted a ready-made cloud platform to sell to their enterprise customers. That’s why Linode users are worried about the name change; it indicates they are no longer the market their preferred platform cares about.
raisin_churn 4y ago
Well, that's it for me. I've been nervous since the acquisition, but that post has all the telltale signs of imminent brand doom. I've had a few small services running on Linode for years I'll be pulling the plug on/moving to other providers.
mardix 4y ago
Goodbye Linode. They should have at least left the name. We know business is business, but business is business, therefor Goodbye Linode. Goodbye!
winrid 4y ago
Doesn't surprise me, though. I talked to some E-staff a while ago and they said the CEO wanted a data lake. I asked what for, and they said he didn't know yet. They just wanted it. So not surprising they'd throw away so much brand recognition.
- dgb23 4y ago
  Sounds like one of those Dilbert comic strips.
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
I'm hoping this means they will finally build a cloud product that can compete, but if the same management is there, probably not. What a sad product lineup and UX. DO, Hetzner, etc have much better products. But nerds love pushing buttons and looking at stats, so somehow Linode's limited functionality and constant maintenance-induced downtime don't seem to faze them. Brands are so weird. 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.
- dan1234 4y ago
  What products does DO offer that Linode doesn’t? 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).
  - throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
    DO has had both an app platform and serverless functions for a while, and Linode has neither (they have edge computing which is similar but different to serverless) 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.
j45 4y ago
I forgot Linode was bought by Akamai. Sad since Linode provided quality vps’ when few did. 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.
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low_tech_punk 4y ago
Waiting for Cloudflare to buy it and restore its name.
haik90 4y ago
Linode was my first VPS provider in 2004 or 2005, it had a special part in my heart. I'm a bit sad Linode is gone, but for what it's worth, thanks Linode.
antoineMoPa 4y ago
I wonder how employees feel about that change and how they feel since the acquisition. A key determinant in whether I stay with Akamai or not is if I know there are competent developers behind the cloud that care and would use the service. Other determinants: simplicity, performance in the UI and pricing that makes sense for an individual developer. 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.
- tomxor 4y ago
  > Other determinants: simplicity, performance in the UI and pricing that makes sense for an individual developer. 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.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    I agree, I think the people saying it's irrelevant haven't used them in years, they had one of the best set of controls I've seen.
  - paganel 4y ago
    Also, the few times over the years (more than 10) when I had to get hold of their customer service they were pretty good. Last time around I contacted them on a Sunday afternoon and they got back to me later that evening, no AI automatic response, no other bs like that.
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neilv 4y ago
I hope they will keep what is good about Linode. 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.
IAmGraydon 4y ago
I’ve been a Linode customer for well over a decade and am sad to see them go. They always felt like a part of the older hacker culture that hadn’t been destroyed by corporations yet, and we all know where this is leading. Guess it’s time to explore alternatives.
zwilliamson 4y ago
Linode was my bread and butter for a while. They had cheap prices and decent support. And just enough bootstrap automation to get the job done (system online and ready for my Ansible or Puppet to mold it).
asim 4y ago
Sad day for Linode. Great standalone niche hosting platform. I get that these things happen. I was part of a Google acquisition that eventually got shutdown/rebranded. From an acquirer standpoint it makes sense. For existing users they probably now feel deflated as the whole reason they went to Linode was to avoid incumbents.
- donavanm 4y ago
  > the whole reason [existing users] went to Linode was to avoid incumbents. 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.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I used them for years in the thousands of dollars per month range. They were perfectly happy with that arrangement.
  - scandox 4y ago
    That is the reverse of my experience with Akamai. Doing business with them in the thousands per month and they're very good.
    - donavanm 4y ago
      Huh. Ok, I admit I’m a bit surprised by the counter example but fair enough. My experience was more competing with them for the big dollar “enterprise” accounts I described.
- jonwinstanley 4y ago
  I was using a standalone niche host in the Uk called TSOHost who seemed quite good. 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!
IceWreck 4y ago
The orange logo while everything else is green (linode's design system) looks weird.
Lazare 4y ago
Fascinating that Akamai apparently thinks that the brand equity of "Linode" is less than whatever people will impute to some new "Akamai cloud computing" among their target customer base. Which is...puzzling! 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.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  I think anyone with the experience of Linode's good points isn't going to forget from a renaming of the service if all else stays the same for them. Having Akamai branding can bring in much more new business that the Linode branding hasn't brought in thus far.
- yarg 4y ago
  I think that the assumption is more along the lines that the cost of losing the Linode brand is lower than the value that can be built from brand awareness around Akamai. 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.
Giorgi 4y ago
Way to kill a brand
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
We used linode since 2007, and the experience was good. Would be sad for it to end up being swallowed by some huge soulless corporation which is acutely aware of preserving their own brand.
- gniv 4y ago
  It's funny to see Akamai called a soulless corp. I still remember when they IPO'd in late 1999. It was viewed very positively in academic circles too. 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.
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    In those days a lot of the staff were MIT alumni and a ton of MIT students did internships there, thus the academia connection. 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.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Hmm seems to be missing an obvious improvement: A more cost-sensitive version of akamai's CDN (which has a pricetag of "become fortune 500 and we'll be in touch") available to linode customers. Or does linode already have a CDN? I just want something like cloudflare where my image and video files are distributed to the edge network and post-processed into a variety of sizes.
jhgg 4y ago
Discord originally hosted on Linode in 2015. Unfortunately we had to move off, as we knew Linode would be the limiting factor in being able to continue to grow. So we chose to go with GCP. 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.
- quags 4y ago
  This is certainly the goal of Akamai as that is their core business. Linode though targeted the lower and and success stories are much rarer on that end. For every discord you have 100,000+ new clients. Linode was doing fine with this structure and cashed out at nearly a billion with just small customers. Plus discord was probably best to leave as their network wasn’t designed to handle dos attacks well.
- nik736 4y ago
  Are you still using a lot of bare metal servers? Or solely on GCP?
devsda 4y ago
It is a reasonable business decision if we think of it as combining the enterprise branding of Akamai and the solid product behind Linode. 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.
nik736 4y ago
Any alternatives that support nested virtualization and has global locations?
woadwarrior01 4y ago
I completely ignored Linode after they were hacked[1] ~10 years ago. I had one of their $5 VPS for many years, that was running an old blog of mine, which I migrated to another VPS provider. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756
amichal 4y ago
I used to be a happy linode customer. Commercial clients didn't want to use them since they didn't check the compliance checkboxes/certs. Akamai's rebranding claims all of these. 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
- xenonite 4y ago
  I canceled the signup progress with a bank because of a similar reason. Then I asked for deletion of my data. The customer service agreed and said that it will be deleted. However, they are still sending me newsletters. How should I trust this bank then? Guess I won't reevaluate, too.
  - newjersey 4y ago
    World Remit kicked me out and canceled my transaction because I didn’t realize soon enough that Ally Bank now requires me to reply with yes to a text message every time I make a big transaction with my debit card. World Remit has closed my account but still sends me marketing emails every three days. Snip We're sorry to inform you that we've made the decision to cancel your transaction and close your account. This means that we've cancelled your payment. In the majority of cases, it should appear in your account within 2-3 working days but it can take 7-21 days depending on your bank/card issuer. There are a number of reasons we may need to close a customer’s account: we may have concerns over security or feel that there's been a breach of our terms and conditions. Sometimes, a customer simply has more than one account to their name. We’re not legally able to tell you the exact reason for each closure, but we always aim to stay balanced, fair and safe when reviewing our transactions – so if you think we've made the wrong decision, we'd love for you to get in touch. Please visit our help pages for more information. Best Regards, WorldRemit Customer Service
neom 4y ago
Good work Linode team, a worthy sparring partner for many years. I must say, although it makes sense, my nostalgic nerd heart is sad to see the brand die.
time4tea 4y ago
Personal experience is that akamai is very expensive, has poor api integration, and limited set of real world features (especially regarding certificate management, for example), poor response times when "expert" is needed, and experts needed often due to lack of api... Didn't know about this acquisition, seems like a bad outcome. YMMV, of course.
t0mislav 4y ago
Do you remember good old times when almost every Linode birthday they bumped either memory x2, storage space or something else, for free?
pc_edwin 4y ago
It is difficult to comprehend the rationale behind the decision to abandon a longstanding and well-known brand name that has endured for over two decades, and replace it with the rather awkward and unappealing moniker of "Connected Cloud." One might reasonably question the wisdom of such a decision and its potential impact on the perception of the brand by consumers.
hit8run 4y ago
One word: RUN. 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.
quectophoton 4y ago
Anyone here can comment on how good or bad is the support on OVH or Hetzner when opening a ticket? 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.
- gyaru 4y ago
  As someone who has used both, Hetzner felt a bit more customer-friendly overall. 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.
robertlagrant 4y ago
Surely the best name would've been Alkaline.
simultsop 4y ago
I wonder if Cloudflare is going to make a move like this.
tarkin2 4y ago
As a customer it makes me nervous Akamai have decided to ignore Linode's great brand name and good will. If they ignore one of Linode's best assets that took a lot of hard work to create then I fear future decision making. I think I'll get ready to move should Akamai continue with the same kind of decision making.
- busterarm 4y ago
  As a former customer, what great brand name and good will? 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.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    I had to work for hours over several weeks because Digital Ocean _did_ have DDoS protection, that was awful. 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.
infecto 4y ago
Not sure how the Linode site looked most recently before the rebrand but this new Akamai branded page gives me Alibaba cloud enterprise vibes. https://us.alibabacloud.com/en https://us.alibabacloud.com/en
gustavorg 4y ago
> What won’t change is the price-performance, portability, and award-winning support that developers love. 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-the-cloud/ https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/a-bold-new-approach-to-th...)
nubinetwork 4y ago
Everyone freaking out over a name change... Akamai has owned Linode for months (if not a year)... As long as they don't change any of the services, there isn't anything to worry about.
bleuuuu 4y ago
Linode sounds much better
temptemptemp111 4y ago
[dead]
wdb 4y ago
Akamai to me sounds expensive. Not sure if it's a good idea
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Missed opportunity. Why not use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanikai_Beach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanikai_Beach or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea ? Like Linode and Akamai, nice like the beach, vast like the supercluster, easy like Ikea?
yencabulator 4y ago
What's "a bold new approach" about an acquisition coming to conclusion? Adding new data centers sure ain't new. It might be bold, but only if the company is wary of its future growth.

464 points by hanru 4y ago

rbut 4y ago

Akamai Node would have been a better name. Still retains the essence of the old name, and still indicates a small cheap VPS offering. "Connected Cloud" could mean anything.

skilled 4y ago

Linode was one of the OG providers back in 2000s. 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.

mynameisvlad 4y ago

RIP Linode. 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.

schmichael 4y ago
Same! It is still the only ad conversion I’ve ever been: I saw their ad on sourceforge.net, clicked, and bought a VPS. That was probably 20 years ago, and I can’t think of another time I’ve clicked an ad and bought anything.
godzillabrennus 4y ago
[flagged]
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  "Akamai Connected Cloud" is practically peak corporate brand. The only thing it's missing is "Powered by Akamai" The co-founder's fate doesn't exactly change Akamai's brand in my opinion, either. They've built themselves up as the Enterprise CDN which is the exact antithesis to the brand Linode cultivated.
  - dangus 4y ago
    I'll literally forget how to get there and login with a name like that.
    - ta988 4y ago
      I just hope you turned those servers off.
  - badcarbine 4y ago
    But it’s fun to say. Makes me feel like a samurai
- tempest_ 4y ago
  That was 22 years ago. Plenty of time to establish a bland corporate brand, Google seems to be doing it just fine.
- viraptor 4y ago
  The experience with them is very enterprisey and a few years ago very manual. When CloudFlare went all in on API management, Akamai required changing many things in the web panel. Their official terraform module only started in 2020! Their preferred onboarding is still extremely "talk to an expert" and "contact sales". I can't find a pricing page for their CDN. I'm not criticising their tech itself, but as far as brands go, they present as the extremely bland B2B, stay away if you're not a corp. (Also, they do airport adverts...)
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    This is exactly what I meant by a bland corporate brand. Their tech stack might be great, but their entire look and feel is "old school corporate you need to talk to sales and if you need to ask how much you can't afford it" vs Linode's "developer first, here's all the info you need go ahead and sign up" approach.
    - jeremyjh 4y ago
      Oh and the salesperson is going to look up your company info before deciding if they'll even call you back to give you a quote.
  - WirelessGigabit 4y ago
    Are you my colleague? I don't understand why part of our teams chose Akamai. The other ones who use Cloudflare just do API calls when they deploy. The Akamai team needs to send an email, then 2 meetings going back and forth, staging, approval, and then go-live.
    - bushbaba 4y ago
      Because Akamai still has better performance and price point than cloudflare.
- diveandfight 4y ago
  The fact that the founders named the company based off a Hawaiian-English dictionary look-up strikes me as pretty bland-corporate, "The company was named after akamai, which means 'clever,' or more colloquially, 'cool' in Hawaiian, which Lewin had discovered in a Hawaiian-English dictionary after the suggestion of a colleague." [0] From what I've seen living here and hearing Hawaiian Creole English (aka pidgin), nobody uses akamai to refer to something that is cool... Always used in the smart/clever context. But then again, I wouldn't expect the founders to know that if they didn't have knowledge of local Hawaii culture. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies#History
  - hparadiz 4y ago
    Look up Aegis and see how many companies use the Greek word for shield. Sometimes a name is the last thing you actually want to be dealing with when starting a company.
    - deleted 4y ago
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  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 1123581321 4y ago
  Wow, I didn't realize that was him. He was on Flight 11 (struck North Tower) and his throat was cut. It's thought that he may have been trying to interfere with the initial disturbance as he had a combat background with the IDF.
- recuter 4y ago
  He wasn't just killed, he was the first and possibly only person on AA11 to try and fight them off. Man went down swinging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lewin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lewin
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Not just killed in the 9-11 attacks. But a brave, courageous person who stood up against the terrorists on the flight.
guluarte 4y ago
RIP, it sounds so generic like IBM/Oracle cloud service
dragontamer 4y ago
Linode was my second VPS provider. My first was Slicehost. I remember the big Slicehost vs Linode wars.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
I remember using them when I first started getting into Linux. Lots of good memories getting Debian to work on my Thinkpad X40 and marveling at having a cheap shell account online all the time from Linode. It felt like the future.

djha-skin 4y ago

I'm a big fan of Jupiter broadcasting and so I tried to use their sponsor Linode once, but they needed my social security number so that was a no-go for me. Hopefully with the rebranding they'll change this requirement.

mmgutz 4y ago

Was put off by the pricing page, which used to be no nonsense. It now looks like a cryptic AWS/Azure calculator. Might be time to switch to DO.

xwdv 4y ago

Akamai must be feeling the pressure from Cloudflare.

pxtail 4y ago
Interesting way to reduce that pressure - I suspect that intention is to acquire some "dev friendly" company and try to replicate what CF is doing when it comes to capturing developers mindshare, exposing knowledge of availabile and offered services etc. Instead of working to make Akamai brand services more accessible and not perceived as stinky corporate concrete slab they decided to just buy something with good reputation among developers. General strategy is somewhat good because otherwise (I think) they will be very slowly moved into obsolescence by CF but the execution..

deleted 4y ago

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dgut 4y ago

Goodbye, good old trusted Linode :(

onphonenow 4y ago
Not sure it was trusted - I think they had root level control plane breaches in their stack?
- arp242 4y ago
  That was over ten years ago. AFAIK there's never been a pattern of problems.
  - onphonenow 4y ago
    My memory was there were multiple and at least one badly handled - but it’s been awhile
- jorts 4y ago
  Yes they did about 8 years ago.

chirau 4y ago

Yeah. I signed in earlier today and was shocked to see the orange Akamai logo.

badwolf 4y ago

Pour one out for our departed homies. RIP Linode.

UseStrict 4y ago

End of an era, I hosted personal work on Linode for years before moving to GCP.

winrid 4y ago

Odd decision. People know Linode and the logo.

glasshug 4y ago
Possibly more people know Akamai?
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  A completely different crowd associates Akamai with anything positive, IME.
- viraptor 4y ago
  Depends on which people. More developers know Linode. But more business people have seen Akamai adverts at the airports.
  - ing33k 4y ago
    I would bet that all developers sort of know Akamai as a CDN ( the one that small companies cannot afford )

VectorLock 4y ago

Were they acquires or were they always Akamai? 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.

mynameisvlad 4y ago
Acquired in 2022.
mardifoufs 4y ago
Acquired quite recently, in the past year ish.

MBCook 4y ago

That’s a mouthful of a name.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

What’s a good alternative for Linode these days? I just want a vps where I can install Debian, be root, and have a web and email server. A 4gb Linode has been enough for my needs for years.

glerk 4y ago
Until they start crippling Linode or increase their prices, I'll keep using it. Doesn't look like anything has changed yet except for the logo.
- coffeefirst 4y ago
  Yep. I've been running all my personal stuff on Linode for 11 years. Does this bode well? No. Am I going to migrate over a swapped logo? Also no.
artellectual 4y ago
How about digitalocean? or vultr?
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  DigitalOcean has been a good companion to Linode. It seems like many of the offerings are either on par or better, though some prices are a little higher.
ge96 4y ago
OVH
- mindcrime 4y ago
  I started migrating from Linode to OVH a while back (Probably a year and a half or so ago). Parked the migration for a while, and started in earnest again a couple of months ago. All told, my experiences with OVH have been fairly positive. There's a quirk here and there that annoys me, but the same is true for every cloud provider to some extent. Still, on balance, I'd have no problem recommending OVH. 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.

rablackburn 4y ago

I’m curious to the reasoning behind a decision like this. 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?

tailspin2019 4y ago
I anecdotally agree. For some reason I find Akamai’s brand in general very uninspiring and this particular rebrand is the typical low effort corporate affair… they’ve literally swapped the logo and kept all the Linode green elsewhere as well as various mentions of Linode everywhere that haven’t been updated and now look out of place.
- Manfred 4y ago
  You would be surprised how deep branding tentacles reach. Sometimes up to constants in protocols that need a migration cycle to change. If you want to transition without stopping all active development and operations, you have to do it gradually.
jacquesm 4y ago
I don't particularly see Linode as a valuable brand, more one to avoid.
Godel_unicode 4y ago
It also makes no sense to me, if you want an offering with a different name, just add it to the UI and call the same backend to provision the resources. I bet the majority of customers will never know or care that the other one is the same thing with a different name.
mardix 4y ago
Checkout Hetzner. You will love their infrastructure. You will love their price.

adenozine 4y ago

I’ve run some medium/large scale side projects with Linode in the past and like many others, I was absolutely blown away by the high quality and professional support I received. 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.

riffic 4y ago

rebrands are never a good sign.

pvg 4y ago

Popped up yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34786762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34786762

RowanH 4y ago

Ask HN: I was just about to sign up to their Managed service offering (basically they monitor the VPS's and if a monitored URL goes down they do initial trouble shooting for the basics to bring things back online before they contact you). I've rarely seen this offered elsewhere. Any other hosting co's HN knows about that does this (and had good experiences with?) ? Vultr doesn't from what I can see. I prefer my servers a little less than crispy so OVH isn't on the menu. [ I had my first network interruption on my VPS in years this weekend... so just a touch nervous and looking at other options ]

bombcar 4y ago
Rack space (used?) to offer something like this and it was somewhat worthwhile if what you were doing was bog-standard. 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.
- RowanH 4y ago
  Yeah I remember from back in the day. The Linode offering (assuming it works) gives some degree of confidence if a key person or two are out of action, you still can get back online if it's something not app related. And it's almost always the stupid stuff or an Apache reboot to get back online. For the money is worth that initial peace of mind. In that awkward in-between phase of starting to grow and not quite there yet for another set of back-end hands :)
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I was actually thinking of how this story reminded me that Rackspace's cloud product started off as the acquisition of Slicehost.
nwilkens 4y ago
At MNX, we manage your infrastructure at your existing provider or ours (mnx.io) and provide 24x7 monitoring and response. Our customers usually have 10+ servers, and pricing starts at ~$2500/month.

jay-barronville 4y ago

The Linode brand is so well known by developers. Why in the world would Akamai risk the brand any further than they already have like this?

twblalock 4y ago
Is it really well known? I've only ever heard of Linode because they sponsored some Youtube videos. I've never heard it mentioned in a professional setting as a developer. On the contrary, Akamai is incredibly well known.
- jay-barronville 4y ago
  I can’t tell you why you haven’t heard of Linode much, but yes, the Linode brand absolutely is 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.
  - echelon 4y ago
    They're not the only ones. I consider myself up to date, and I had no idea Linode was in the VPS business. If I had to guess their mission, it sounds like Tailscale. [1] I've used Digital Ocean and all the big cloud providers. Vercel, Netlify, Heroku. Haven't touched Akamai, but I certainly know of it. [1] https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/ https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/
    - super256 4y ago
      Linode is better comparable to Vultr, UpCloud and DO, rather than the serverless stuff at Netlify and Vercel. :)
    - johnnylambada 4y ago

kamyl 4y ago

RIP Linode. It was the 2nd (after Slicehost) "cloud service" I was introduced to back then in 2009 I believe, when my, back then CTO, insisted that "cloud" is the way to go and some job skills (sysadmin) will eventually fade and turn irrelevant. 3 years later same CTO complained that I made other teams within that startup look bad by using Hetzner and OVH duo instead of Amazon's then still relatively new AWS - bills were telling the story way better than I could!

aknosis 4y ago
Slicehost was my favorite no frills hosting provider. I had to migrate to them from Servepath after it was shutdown in 2008?
neom 4y ago
Fun fact, Jason Seats who founded slicehost was massively important in helping us get DigitalOcean going.
radiojasper 4y ago
Slicehost on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840718
mindcrime 4y ago
Basically the same here. I used Slicehost until they were acquired by Rackspace... and for a while afterwards, truth be told. Inertia is a real thing, let me tell you. 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.

pbnjay 4y ago

They have my interest piqued with “Aggressive new cloud egress pricing” Fingers crossed but so often these don’t pan out

LanternLight83 4y ago

As an outsider, this feels absurd. Linode had so much good-will and brand recognition built up through their sponsorships and reps.

accrual 4y ago
Just yesterday I watched an MJD video on YouTube (mostly retro PC and OS videos) and he always mentions being sponsored by Linode. Since I like MJD, I was inclined to like Linode by association. Bummer it's going away.
- oars 4y ago
  So now you'll be inclined to like Akamai by association, what's the actual difference? 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?
  - wallmountedtv 4y ago
    I have a strong suspicion that the sponsorships will be going away now. Akamai killed the enthusiast-run Linode to instead create executive-run cloud computing services. That is what the difference is, and why these news are so worrisome for enthusiasts.
coffeebeqn 4y ago
I get it for the Linode guys. Sell now- server hosting is an arms race against giants. I don’t wanna compete against AWS! I use AWS! Maybe I shouldn’t be? Maybe I should run my software on organic Linux-farmers open source electronic fields that run on hydroelectric power. They can get fiber and backup power too.
- _blu 4y ago
  Stop using AWS! Linode was great for me up untill they got bought and now they have been doing abrupt "maintenance" work and stuff that Linode never did. But AWS is killing the world and so does companies like Akamai. We need to use pure VPS services and keep moving and not take any shit. I'm sick of it. VPS services should be state-run/owned to end this nonsense.

dangus 4y ago

I won't even say RIP because I've already moved on to greener pastures. 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.

nickhalfasleep 4y ago

I’ve had an account and small mail server on Linode for almost 19 years, and it has done all I need. * 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.

Shank 4y ago

I'm sure they spent a lot of time thinking about this, but why not just call it something "Linode by Akamai" or "Akamai Linode"? Neither "Akamai’s cloud computing services" or "Akamai Connected Cloud" sound like viable names. Is the goal just to get people to say "I use Akamai"? 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.

Hamuko 4y ago
>Neither "Akamai’s cloud computing services" or "Akamai Connected Cloud" sound like viable names. Haven't we gotten pretty used to Amazon Web Services?
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Not in the least. What we've gotten used to is "AWS". However "ACC" sounds more like a condition to avoid, rather than a service to use.
  - alpaca128 4y ago
    I think that only needs some time to get used to. ACC is less awkward to pronounce than AWS at least.
- cfuendev 4y ago
  We hate AWS
whalesalad 4y ago
Akanode
- tnzk 4y ago
  Linomai also sounds not too bad

bfrog 4y ago

Corporate speak takes over a beloved brand, news at 11

synergy20 4y ago

At least been with Linode for the last 15 years, I'm used to the brand, you change it, I may just leave. 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.

8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
I've been with DO for 8 years. Still happy with them.
voiper1 4y ago
I don't get what the big deal is about the name. 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??
- Veen 4y ago
  The name change indicates Akamai’s intentions for the Linode platform. Linode is a well-established brand with developers, smaller agencies, small businesses, hobbyists,and so on. Akamai is an enterprise brand that serves large businesses. They have never had an interest in serving the sort of people who know about and like Linode. Dropping the Linode brand is evidence they continue to have no interest in that market segment. It now seems more likely that Akamai wanted a ready-made cloud platform to sell to their enterprise customers. That’s why Linode users are worried about the name change; it indicates they are no longer the market their preferred platform cares about.

raisin_churn 4y ago

Well, that's it for me. I've been nervous since the acquisition, but that post has all the telltale signs of imminent brand doom. I've had a few small services running on Linode for years I'll be pulling the plug on/moving to other providers.

mardix 4y ago

Goodbye Linode. They should have at least left the name. We know business is business, but business is business, therefor Goodbye Linode. Goodbye!

winrid 4y ago

Doesn't surprise me, though. I talked to some E-staff a while ago and they said the CEO wanted a data lake. I asked what for, and they said he didn't know yet. They just wanted it. So not surprising they'd throw away so much brand recognition.

dgb23 4y ago
Sounds like one of those Dilbert comic strips.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

I'm hoping this means they will finally build a cloud product that can compete, but if the same management is there, probably not. What a sad product lineup and UX. DO, Hetzner, etc have much better products. But nerds love pushing buttons and looking at stats, so somehow Linode's limited functionality and constant maintenance-induced downtime don't seem to faze them. Brands are so weird. 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.

dan1234 4y ago
What products does DO offer that Linode doesn’t? 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).
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  DO has had both an app platform and serverless functions for a while, and Linode has neither (they have edge computing which is similar but different to serverless) 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.

j45 4y ago

I forgot Linode was bought by Akamai. Sad since Linode provided quality vps’ when few did. 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.

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low_tech_punk 4y ago

Waiting for Cloudflare to buy it and restore its name.

haik90 4y ago

Linode was my first VPS provider in 2004 or 2005, it had a special part in my heart. I'm a bit sad Linode is gone, but for what it's worth, thanks Linode.

antoineMoPa 4y ago

I wonder how employees feel about that change and how they feel since the acquisition. A key determinant in whether I stay with Akamai or not is if I know there are competent developers behind the cloud that care and would use the service. Other determinants: simplicity, performance in the UI and pricing that makes sense for an individual developer. 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.

tomxor 4y ago
> Other determinants: simplicity, performance in the UI and pricing that makes sense for an individual developer. 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.
- smaudet 4y ago
  I agree, I think the people saying it's irrelevant haven't used them in years, they had one of the best set of controls I've seen.
- paganel 4y ago
  Also, the few times over the years (more than 10) when I had to get hold of their customer service they were pretty good. Last time around I contacted them on a Sunday afternoon and they got back to me later that evening, no AI automatic response, no other bs like that.

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neilv 4y ago

I hope they will keep what is good about Linode. 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.

IAmGraydon 4y ago

I’ve been a Linode customer for well over a decade and am sad to see them go. They always felt like a part of the older hacker culture that hadn’t been destroyed by corporations yet, and we all know where this is leading. Guess it’s time to explore alternatives.

zwilliamson 4y ago

Linode was my bread and butter for a while. They had cheap prices and decent support. And just enough bootstrap automation to get the job done (system online and ready for my Ansible or Puppet to mold it).

asim 4y ago

Sad day for Linode. Great standalone niche hosting platform. I get that these things happen. I was part of a Google acquisition that eventually got shutdown/rebranded. From an acquirer standpoint it makes sense. For existing users they probably now feel deflated as the whole reason they went to Linode was to avoid incumbents.

donavanm 4y ago
> the whole reason [existing users] went to Linode was to avoid incumbents. 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.
- acdha 4y ago
  I used them for years in the thousands of dollars per month range. They were perfectly happy with that arrangement.
- scandox 4y ago
  That is the reverse of my experience with Akamai. Doing business with them in the thousands per month and they're very good.
  - donavanm 4y ago
    Huh. Ok, I admit I’m a bit surprised by the counter example but fair enough. My experience was more competing with them for the big dollar “enterprise” accounts I described.
jonwinstanley 4y ago
I was using a standalone niche host in the Uk called TSOHost who seemed quite good. 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!

IceWreck 4y ago

The orange logo while everything else is green (linode's design system) looks weird.

Lazare 4y ago

Fascinating that Akamai apparently thinks that the brand equity of "Linode" is less than whatever people will impute to some new "Akamai cloud computing" among their target customer base. Which is...puzzling! 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.

karmakaze 4y ago
I think anyone with the experience of Linode's good points isn't going to forget from a renaming of the service if all else stays the same for them. Having Akamai branding can bring in much more new business that the Linode branding hasn't brought in thus far.
yarg 4y ago
I think that the assumption is more along the lines that the cost of losing the Linode brand is lower than the value that can be built from brand awareness around Akamai. 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.

Giorgi 4y ago

Way to kill a brand

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

We used linode since 2007, and the experience was good. Would be sad for it to end up being swallowed by some huge soulless corporation which is acutely aware of preserving their own brand.

gniv 4y ago
It's funny to see Akamai called a soulless corp. I still remember when they IPO'd in late 1999. It was viewed very positively in academic circles too. 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.
- jpgvm 4y ago
  In those days a lot of the staff were MIT alumni and a ton of MIT students did internships there, thus the academia connection. 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.

phendrenad2 4y ago

Hmm seems to be missing an obvious improvement: A more cost-sensitive version of akamai's CDN (which has a pricetag of "become fortune 500 and we'll be in touch") available to linode customers. Or does linode already have a CDN? I just want something like cloudflare where my image and video files are distributed to the edge network and post-processed into a variety of sizes.

jhgg 4y ago

Discord originally hosted on Linode in 2015. Unfortunately we had to move off, as we knew Linode would be the limiting factor in being able to continue to grow. So we chose to go with GCP. 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.

quags 4y ago
This is certainly the goal of Akamai as that is their core business. Linode though targeted the lower and and success stories are much rarer on that end. For every discord you have 100,000+ new clients. Linode was doing fine with this structure and cashed out at nearly a billion with just small customers. Plus discord was probably best to leave as their network wasn’t designed to handle dos attacks well.
nik736 4y ago
Are you still using a lot of bare metal servers? Or solely on GCP?

devsda 4y ago

It is a reasonable business decision if we think of it as combining the enterprise branding of Akamai and the solid product behind Linode. 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.

nik736 4y ago

Any alternatives that support nested virtualization and has global locations?

woadwarrior01 4y ago

I completely ignored Linode after they were hacked[1] ~10 years ago. I had one of their $5 VPS for many years, that was running an old blog of mine, which I migrated to another VPS provider. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756

amichal 4y ago

I used to be a happy linode customer. Commercial clients didn't want to use them since they didn't check the compliance checkboxes/certs. Akamai's rebranding claims all of these. 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

xenonite 4y ago
I canceled the signup progress with a bank because of a similar reason. Then I asked for deletion of my data. The customer service agreed and said that it will be deleted. However, they are still sending me newsletters. How should I trust this bank then? Guess I won't reevaluate, too.
- newjersey 4y ago
  World Remit kicked me out and canceled my transaction because I didn’t realize soon enough that Ally Bank now requires me to reply with yes to a text message every time I make a big transaction with my debit card. World Remit has closed my account but still sends me marketing emails every three days. Snip We're sorry to inform you that we've made the decision to cancel your transaction and close your account. This means that we've cancelled your payment. In the majority of cases, it should appear in your account within 2-3 working days but it can take 7-21 days depending on your bank/card issuer. There are a number of reasons we may need to close a customer’s account: we may have concerns over security or feel that there's been a breach of our terms and conditions. Sometimes, a customer simply has more than one account to their name. We’re not legally able to tell you the exact reason for each closure, but we always aim to stay balanced, fair and safe when reviewing our transactions – so if you think we've made the wrong decision, we'd love for you to get in touch. Please visit our help pages for more information. Best Regards, WorldRemit Customer Service

neom 4y ago

Good work Linode team, a worthy sparring partner for many years. I must say, although it makes sense, my nostalgic nerd heart is sad to see the brand die.

time4tea 4y ago

Personal experience is that akamai is very expensive, has poor api integration, and limited set of real world features (especially regarding certificate management, for example), poor response times when "expert" is needed, and experts needed often due to lack of api... Didn't know about this acquisition, seems like a bad outcome. YMMV, of course.

t0mislav 4y ago

Do you remember good old times when almost every Linode birthday they bumped either memory x2, storage space or something else, for free?

pc_edwin 4y ago

It is difficult to comprehend the rationale behind the decision to abandon a longstanding and well-known brand name that has endured for over two decades, and replace it with the rather awkward and unappealing moniker of "Connected Cloud." One might reasonably question the wisdom of such a decision and its potential impact on the perception of the brand by consumers.

hit8run 4y ago

One word: RUN. 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.

quectophoton 4y ago

Anyone here can comment on how good or bad is the support on OVH or Hetzner when opening a ticket? 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.

gyaru 4y ago
As someone who has used both, Hetzner felt a bit more customer-friendly overall. 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.

robertlagrant 4y ago

Surely the best name would've been Alkaline.

simultsop 4y ago

I wonder if Cloudflare is going to make a move like this.

tarkin2 4y ago

As a customer it makes me nervous Akamai have decided to ignore Linode's great brand name and good will. If they ignore one of Linode's best assets that took a lot of hard work to create then I fear future decision making. I think I'll get ready to move should Akamai continue with the same kind of decision making.

busterarm 4y ago
As a former customer, what great brand name and good will? 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.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I had to work for hours over several weeks because Digital Ocean _did_ have DDoS protection, that was awful. 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.

infecto 4y ago

Not sure how the Linode site looked most recently before the rebrand but this new Akamai branded page gives me Alibaba cloud enterprise vibes. https://us.alibabacloud.com/en https://us.alibabacloud.com/en

gustavorg 4y ago

> What won’t change is the price-performance, portability, and award-winning support that developers love. 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-the-cloud/ https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/a-bold-new-approach-to-th...)

nubinetwork 4y ago

Everyone freaking out over a name change... Akamai has owned Linode for months (if not a year)... As long as they don't change any of the services, there isn't anything to worry about.

bleuuuu 4y ago

Linode sounds much better

temptemptemp111 4y ago

[dead]

wdb 4y ago

Akamai to me sounds expensive. Not sure if it's a good idea

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

Missed opportunity. Why not use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanikai_Beach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanikai_Beach or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea ? Like Linode and Akamai, nice like the beach, vast like the supercluster, easy like Ikea?

yencabulator 4y ago

What's "a bold new approach" about an acquisition coming to conclusion? Adding new data centers sure ain't new. It might be bold, but only if the company is wary of its future growth.