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.
Linode was maybe well known 5-10 years ago but I haven’t heard that name spoken in a long time
Linode hasn’t put themselves out there like other companies. For example, Digital Ocean has all those tutorials that show up in results. Vercel is linked to a hit framework (Next.js). Heroku was a darling linked to Ruby’s community and rode a wave of popularity.
Linode just has… existed for people specifically looking for virtual machines. That’s not a lot of people, relatively
> Linode just has… existed for people specifically looking for virtual machines.
I feel they have been improving little by little throughout the years. I don't remember the exact times when each change happened, but I remember when they introduced hourly pricing, also their $5/month VPS, more variety in the VPSes they offer (GPU-specialized options, high-mem specialized options, etc.), the update of their web interface, etc. I imagine there probably must've also been improvements in their APIs for launching servers, etc. since hourly pricing must've made that useful for automated scaling.
It may be different for other sectors but it seemed like they sponsored every episode of Changelog podcast for quite some time. At the very least they must have sponsored every episode I listened to.
> When I think Linode, I think developer, small consultancy, etc. When I think Akamai, I think enterprise.
Yes, they're clearly trying to sell cloud services into their enterprise customers.
Because small developers/consultancies have small pockets, and enterprises have large ones.
It makes perfect sense as business strategy.
But it requires understanding that you don't matter to them (you are not the main character of Akamai's story/strategy).
Although it does mean I'll probably need to consider moving clouds myself finally after a decade, because the writing has to pretty much be on the wall at this point that they're not going to want me as a customer...
I would expect to see them adding a lot more services in order to compete. Since they're relying on cross selling the quality will likely be lower but the overall package will make the numbers look happy, even if the developers using it aren't.
> Because small developers/consultancies have small pockets, and enterprises have large ones.
Enterprises love long term contracts. Cloud is all about highly-dynamic PAYG. Who does not love long term bulk contracts at [roughly] the price of dynamic PAYG?
CDN is just a fancy name for web hosting and you can use Akamai through Azure CDN anytime you want. I worked on the Edgecast/Verizon CDN, it's just DNS and web servers all the way down but with more expensive buzzwords.
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.
You are probably too young to remember the php Cpanel hosts then.
Linode was one of the big names in being cheap and having an actual vps where you could do whatever. Short of actually buying a rack and the accompanying hardware/networking software (not renting and having your electric/network subsidized) having a vps is the cheapest slickest option to do whatever, part of why I have never bothered with any of the Iaas options. At least AWS blows hard-core in comparison, a lot of the alternatives focus on optimizing some use case, not doing whatever the hell you want.
I'm not sure how you would even compare tailscale, that's focused more on connecting all your boxes e.g. on linode...
Linode has been around forever and were once one of the few games in town. They were into cloud computing years even AWS was. A lot of, er, elder statesman developers remember them from way back then. So if you’ve gotten into the game less than 15 years ago, it makes sense that you may not have heard of them.
I was running websites for clients on Linode like 10 years ago. I have to check, but I’m almost certain DigitalOcean didn’t even exist back then. Linode has been in the game for a very long time.
Edit: I just checked. DigitalOcean launched their beta product in 2012. I think it took another couple years before developers started to really take them seriously.
Linode, Slicehost, MediaTemple and a few others I'm forgetting belong to a declining generation of hosting businesses that used to be popular in their hey days.
I just remembered Engine Yard. Like the others, Engine Yard is another notable one from that era that is still around (but their focus then was on RoR, IIRC).
I certainly have heard about Linode but all historically — probably a decade since that was mentioned as something someone was switching _to_. I think Akamai is looking at the future and figuring that any substantial growth is going to come from directions where their CDN reputation carries more weight.
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.