The message being sent to customers claims that they “remain more aggressively priced than our peer providers”, which is nonsense as far as I can tell—unless they now consider their “peer providers” to be the likes of AWS, Azure, and GCP?
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.
What is really weird about this, they are now more expensive than comparable systems on AWS Lightsail. (Assuming they have not already updated the pricing page on linode.com)
To be fair, though, the lightsail instances that are subject to oppressive throttling aren't really a good comparison. Those should be dirt cheap, as they are useless if you use them in almost any real fashion.
I had some personal projects a while ago that I used to run on Linode, I later moved them to LightSail and I never noticed any performance difference in these projects running there.
It depends on the instance. If you use up the burst capacity, you will notice. The very bottom end only allows about 5% usage before the throttling kicks in. There's a chart here:
Hmm, interesting. I unfortunately don't have the metrics anymore since this project is long dead.
But I do remember on another host (I tried a different one between linode and light sail) that I actually got an email that I was using too much CPU and was shut down.
So I do remember using a lot of CPU, but I don't know where that percent was.
Doesn't LightSail rely on t-family (burstable) instances? If so, that's probably because your projects' regular sustained usage do not go above the minimum threshold (which is fairly low).
A major difference about Digital Ocean (A long time user) why you may want to mindfully avoid them:
- 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.
Yep - I just migrated my gaming server to Hetzner a few weeks back. With this increase in price I'll be pushed to migrate my other self-hosted services there as well.
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!
Same, I have been using Linode for a little over 10 years. The main barrier to migrating off is that I will lose the IP I have been using to send mail for the last 10 years. I guess big email is going to win and I'll have to use fastmail or Google in some way now.
OVH had a data center burn to the ground just a couple of years ago, due largely to owner error. I’m not in the market for a European data center but that would give me substantial pause.
> Akamai faces the same macroeconomic headwinds of growing costs for data center space, energy, and hardware as other providers. We resisted making any changes to our offerings for as long as we could.
Can we just stop pretending that everything a buyer tells you in the first year has any relationship to reality?
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.
Huh. Well damn, so they did. The acquisition didn't hit my radar till the name change.
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.
I’ve been a customer for over a decade, and have had a bunch of clients sign up for hosting.
20% increase after no price increases ever seems reasonable, but I’m going to be looking around for alternatives to recommend if things start to decline.
While hardware should cost less over time, cost of electricity and support people increased in last decade. Moore's Law can't outrun the money printers.
I've been a Linode customer for almost 15 years. As far as I remember, this is their first price increase ever. No surprise it happened post-acquisition :(
Same here. One of the things that made me a loyal Linode customer was that often they would have a resource upgrade (i.e. "we've doubled your RAM!") without a price increase. Not pairing this with some kind of resource upgrade feel anti-Linode. Thanks Akamai...
I have been using Linode for a little less than 15 years.
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.
I've been a customer since 2011 (moved away a couple of years ago). Even though they didn't increase their nominal prices, my prices raised steadily during all that time. Usually with some minor amount of extra resources added without me requesting them.
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.
> Even though they didn't increase their nominal prices, my prices raised steadily during all that time. Usually with some minor amount of extra resources added without me requesting them.
This is strange, I've been a customer for a long time and never noticed that.
Prior to the acquisition they killed their long-lived “pay yearly and get a 2-month discount” offer. I loved that. With that gone and the recent increases I’m going from paying us$200/year a couple of years ago to us$288, before tax, and this with no increase in capacity.
I've been a customer of Linode since about the time they were created. I've also been a customer of Akamai in the past. Based on my experience with Akamai I was expecting this to happen just was not sure when it would.
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.
This is probably not the answer you are looking for but I don't have a blog on this. For what it's worth there are existing blogs that talk about managing instances on multiple VPS providers with Ansible. I would actually defer to the proper devops people here that probably have their favorite write-ups on this topic since I basically fumbled my way through it. Some VPS providers have written Ansible plugins that integrate with their API's and some do not which just means spinning up nodes has to be done in their web interface ahead of time and setting up the SSH key trusts. For the ones that do that just means setting shell environment variables that contain the API token and calling their plugin. Linode has an Ansible plugin.
Your non-expert/non-specialist perspective is precisely what would be most valuable to me, a fellow non-expert/non-specialist. Your use case is similar to mine. You sound like you have a low threshold for extraneous BS that might nerdsnipe a prosumer, just like me. And when you say "fumbled my way through it" I hear "I dunno man, I just want it to work," which is exactly my viewpoint. All that means that whatever you might write would come at a subject I find intriguing from a perspective very similar to my own, and would therefore be more readily applicable to my interests, and probably require less flailing to make useful, than something written by or for "proper DevOps people".
No pressure intended, though, blog writing is work (unpaid work no less, for the overwhelming majority of people who aren't trying to make it their whole deal).
That's a really anti-hobbyist move. With CAD losing value compared to USD, it means I have been paying more in the last year already. As a tiny hobby developper who has almost no traffic, lower egress fees mean nothing to me and the higher pricing means I'll just kill my projects. I guess they don't care about losing loyal customers and are shifting towards entreprise. It's a bit sad to sell your business to people who have no care for your original set of values.
After more than a decade of never increasing prices and improving the hardware for free, charging $12/mo instead of $10/mo means all hobby projects will die and Linode hates their customers.
It should have been something that happens before acquisition or years after. What I dislike is the message that this increase sends. My bank account can absorb this increase, my heart can't accept that Linode changed.
I've been using Linode for more than a decade. I advise hobbyists not to use the cheapest VPS option and neither do I. Its noticeably less performant and just because you are a hobbyist or whatever doesn't mean you can't spend $10-20 per month.
In the United States, people regularly spend more than $10,000 per year on hobbies.
The $5 machines work fine for a lot of tasks. I have some services in production that people pay for running on $5 machines and they aren't anywhere near capacity, lol.
As some people pointed out, Linode used to increase the value of existing plans as RAM/disk/CPU got cheaper. Here, we are losing value relative to the price we are paying. They are trying to do just enough to not lose hobbyists, but the message is clear that individual developers are not a priority anymore.
I'd like to point out that this comment is an assumption and isn't backed by any hard data.
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.
Yep, as a 1GB Shared Nanode customer, that was the first thing I checked. Smart move. As a hobbyist I'm pretty price sensitive, and will not hesitate to abandon them if they go too far over their $4 competitors.
Not necessarily. There tends to be a sweet spot for performance and I expect the lowest hosting plans mostly serve to acquire customers in the expectation many will upgrade to more expensive plans
What I HATE about these VPS deals from lowendbox is my past experience of getting burned multiple times on VPS systems that have terrible uptime, become randomly unresponsive and the the provider being unresponsive, shutting down, or disappearing one day. I don't know if things have improved but I tread carefully because at some point my time and sanity become more valuable. Id love a microinstance for the cheapest possible price but I dont have a way to measure average uptime reliability.
Yeah, it's really sad. I am going to be switching off of Linode after using it for many years happily.
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 know Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore, but conventional wisdom has always been that hosting prices should go _down_ over time, due to compute, memory, and storage getting denser and cheaper, plus competition in the marketplace. This seems to not be happening anymore, except for cloud providers switching to ARM64.
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."
It does get cheaper. The problem is your needs grow in lock step with the growth in CPU & memory.
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.
As a small business running like 30 Linode instances, this isn’t “hit the ejector seat button” stuff but it is absolutely “move up the schedule to check-in with all other cloud providers RE: pricing” stuff.
Akamai doesn't have a reputation for being interested in the bottom of the market. They announced this price increase with 31 days' notice. Future price increases and policy changes can be expected to be announced on a similar schedule.
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?
It's a publicly traded company. Of course they're going to stop all that expensive innovation and screw their customers as much as they can get away with. It's the American way.
According to the ticket I got, the VPSes are going up 20% but the backup price isn't changing, so your new bill will be around $696/mo, an increase of $1,152/yr.
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.
Can confirm. Have been using them for a while now and they have yet to cause me any issues.
Prices are super reasonable, especially for the cheaper instances. Been using them as my static IP vpn for my homeserver for a while now.
Maybe they'd be uncomfy if you want a non German owned vps, which is understandable, but $/performance wise, they are pretty damn good
I always like the affordability and the no-frills, no-BS Web design of Linode.
Looks like it's time to potentially transition to Hetzner, who I knew as good-quality and GDPR-compliant but didn't have on my radar as particularly low-cost before.
Any other options for low-end experimental boxes? $5/month, anyone?
I've been happy with DigitalOcean, although they recently laid off their technical documentation team, which was terrible news. Otherwise, it's been rock solid and performs well.
DigitalOcean is already more expensive for the same performance (as in, when you actually benchmark machines). I moved my workloads to Linode and cut my prices in half, so a 20% increase still leaves it as cheaper.
I suppose as usual it depends on what you're doing. For boring application hosting, DO has been indistinguishable from Linode performance-wise.
DO had excellent technical documentation, okay support (I really miss Linode's), and has been regularly churning out new products. For someone that doesn't like moving infrastructure around, they are a good long-term bet.
The apps I made were very CPU and Network intensive- in one case it was a web crawler[1], the other was a github application that had to scan and review repositories fairly often[2]. CPU ended up being the ultimate bottleneck, and Linode performed far better.
Linode has been such a great deal. Had been. I think the trick to saving money might be to find out how much RAM and CPU you actually need. If you really need the 20 cores and 96GB of RAM or whatever then that's another thing.
I could do with fewer cores, but the memory (and most importantly, the disk space) has been critical for me). When I compare alternatives, it seems pretty bleak.
That's an option, but seems to be only slightly cheaper (at Linode at least). I am also unsure of the block storage speeds and reliability (for example, use as a data directory on a database).
As for the 20% increase… all I know is that it makes a bunch of excellent managed hosting companies (i.e. Pair Networks) now competitive with Linode.
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.
Alternatives mentioned here are vultr, hetzner, ovhcloud, digitalocean. I'm reluctantly coming to terms with the idea that my decade(s?) old linode instance is not going to survive the acquisition, mostly based on the increasingly corporate/incoherent emails I get about it.
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.
Linode employee here! We're also sending tickets to active customers about this – if you have services with us, you should get a ticket (and email) at some point today.
Well, We switched from linode to Vultr because we needed all VPS to talk to each other. Vultr pricing is also a plus since they have the most affordable vps offer amongst linode and DO.
> Well, We switched from linode to Vultr because we needed all VPS to talk to each other.
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?
How has their stability been? Last time I tried a vultr $5 node they had periodic network problems and it would see really high packet loss for 10-20 seconds every couple hours, as well as some unexpected outages.
Does this mean we can expect similar announcements from the other budget cloud providers (they all seem to be around the same price points) or is it time to jump?
Other providers may follow along with the same kind of copycat behavior we've seen with layoffs and price increases in other markets, but it's hard to imagine that their costs have gone up 20%. Certainly their payroll hasn't.
There have been good reasons to flee Linode for a while now:
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.
I mainly keep a cheap vps at linode (now Akamai) because I am addicted to using their DNS as a hidden primary. It is dual stack and has really good geographical coverage and performance. I have been looking for months, perhaps years for an alternative that ticks the boxes for me. Their VPS offerings were broadly competitive and the DNS is a nice bonus for someone with little money to spare and particular requirements. I don't really want to use cloudflare and well known hobbyist friendly free services can be >100ms (eg he.net) or even > 200ms (anything euro like 1984) latency from my part of the world. Then cheaper paid services tend to have deficiencies like bunny don't seem to offer dual stack.
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.
Yay just came here to vent - the writing was on the wall since the Akamai deal. Of course it didn’t take long for them to start milking the Linode cow.
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.
Exactly. And to linode’s credit they default give you free IPv6 so it’s an option. I had a database server on IPv6 only for awhile (though you can do the same with private IPs if you need, it’s easier to SSH directly).
AWS would charge for static IPs and absolutely no way to get IPv6 pretty recently, I think they might finally be changing.
I'm surprised more services don't do IPv6 only. Vultr has it, but only for a lowest end plan. My stack on Linode uses private IPs and do not need a public IPv4 address at all.
This is the thing that scares the most about hitching my wagon to cloudflare, the pricing is 'too reasonable' for what you get, one day when you're putting through a tonne of traffic and reliant on their services you get the "the time has come..." email. Bam...
As a long time time Linode user I was hoping changes might first happen to improve innovation and the products, before the pricing.
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.
Welp, time to move the first piece of my infrastructure (and the only piece currently hosted on Linode) to a different provider. It has been almost 9 years now I think with the prices remaining basically the same. I started in 2014 with a Linode 1024 and now have a Linode 2GB (all through free upgrades, I believe the disk and ram have been doubled since I bought it). But now there seems to be no real reason to stay with Linode.
I guess I might as well update my methods too and automate some of this while I'm at it.
I use AWS daily at work and have a personal Linode server. I love the simplicity of Linode when I just need a server. Prices are fair, service is good.
Disappointed:( I am starting to hate when hosting related stuff gets acquired. For example I pay for a cPanel license, used to be $15 now it’s $40+ a month with tax. Kinda makes me think about just going back to shared hosting since not making any money from my server but it is fun to play with and having root if anything messes up.
If anybody is outraged by the Linode announcement, Civo will help you. I think we're about the only provider around right now who hasn't or doesn't plan to increase prices.
In fact our mission is to reduce the cost of cloud and the complexity.
as a customer for nearly twenty years (!), I think this is actually the first time they've ever raised prices. I'd been meaning to move away ever since Akamai bought them but I guess this is a good nudge.
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...