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.
Because they don't want to sell it to anyone who has ever heard of Linode. They are going to sell through their existing corporate sales contacts, as a new cloud compute offering by your pals at Akamai.
> In fact, I don't even know why one would pick Linode over DigitalOcean or vice versa
For a lot of people “momentum” is a factor: Linode has been around for significantly longer and has been fairly stable/reliable for the whole of that time even implementing a couple of complete tech stack changes¹ better than many other companies seem to manage. In the early days they were ahead of their time.
While Linode were at the head of the pack for a while, their product range, features, and UX, did stagnate at certain times, at those points DO and other companies looked more attractive for new customers.
As the market for such services has homogenised somewhat, with there being few genuinely unique-to-one-provider offerings, small differences in price/features at the scale you are buying, and differences in where data-centres are located & what their bandwidth peering is like from the PoV of your target users, are usually the deciding factors. All other things being equal, check if any of them has a special offer on!
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[1] Their services were originally user-mode-linux based², then switched to Xen³, then to KVM.
[2] I used them during that period.
[3] at the time of that switch I'd just moved to UML on a dedicated server for my own stuff, and later moved to a mix of containers & KVM.
I used to use Linode, then they got hacked and leaked my CC details twice (IIRC) and at that point I switched to DigitalOcean. Guessing many are in a similar boat.
Exact same story. Linode was fine but after their breaches I headed to DO and haven't looked back. Heard good things about Vultr but no experience w/ them.
Is their IPv6 implementation is still broken? It was the reason I moved off immediately after banging my head for a few hours because they somehow managed to screw it up despite RFCs advising how to do such deployments.
Beware of Vultr. The product works fine but the customer service is horrible. I had three days of downtime and they got sick of me asking for updates, ignored me, and didn't tell me when the service came back up. I switched back to DO and I'm fine with that again.
I tried both, and stuck with DO. Linode UI was superclunky when you needed to dive into it, but DO was great. Any search for how to X immediately returned great documentation.
Is “DO documentation” in this instance referring to the knowledge base of (usually really poorly written) tutorials DO got people to write for them by offering them very paltry sums as some sort of SEO play?
Slicehost (acquired by rackspace) pioneered this type of in depth how to guides for webhosting on linux. In fact many of the setup docs on DO seem oddly familiar…
Does Digital Ocean offer this service at prices competitive with (legacy) Linode? The site is a confusing mess of buzzwords and made-up terms, which is nothing like the straightforward presentation that was part of the attraction for Linode (and for Slicehost before them).
Because DigitalOcean have dark patterns around their subscriptions - they charge for the capability to deploy, not for actual deployments. It's counter intuitive and, however I look at it, I can't get away from the notion that it is a really scummy way of doing business. Which is why I voted with my feet and choose to do business elsewhere.
A client of mine has used Linode for several years, increasing from 2 low end VMs when I first started with them, to the current 8 machines (well technically it's 13 right now but the 5 extras are because of their network migration breaking stuff and us needing to setup new VMs)
Not completely because of, but definitely somewhat because of the buyout, my client has agreed they should diversify and we're going to adapt it from a fault-tolerant single location (i.e. right now there are no SPOFs for them except the DC itself going dark), to three independent locations, with less fault tolerance per DC, but greater overall resilience.
One location will probably stay with Linode, but the other two definitely won't be Linode (they'll almost certainly each be a different vendor).
The benefit for us is that adopting multiple (individually) lower-resilience locations means we can be less picky about the host for a given location, because we're not using as many "advanced" features at each location, due to the vastly reduced complexity at the individual DCs.
Vultr and Digital Ocean *seem* like the obvious "Linode type services but not Linode" vendors, but neither seem to have a fantastic reputation from what I've seen.
OVH and Hetzner seem like two alternatives that may be worth checking out more, but they both seem to have an almost-intentionally complex service offering list, and it's hard to tell if some fairly basic things are available with plain VPS services (e.g. private IP addresses).
The writing has been on the wall for a while. Linode was great and reliable for a time, but their pace of development of new features has slowed significantly. That's not a problem per se but as Akamai muscles in more and more, it's clear the "good ol' Linode" was dead. Not specific to this announcement today, but as of a few weeks ago I terminated my Linode account, which had been my primary and active hosting provider since Feb 2010.
Why acquire Linonde when you are going to throw away everything which makes Linode valuable? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just create a cloud computing offering from scratch?
In the medium run (first 2-5 years) it’s not cheaper.
In the short run? Buying Linode gave them a foothold in the market. Creating it from scratch, would have taken months (or even years) to be able to make the first offer, and years until they built a reputation that would attract customers.
But they are starting with a customer base, some of which have been with Linode for over a decade. Way easier and faster to build reputation from that as a starting point. (And also already cash flow positive and profitable, ignoring the purchase=setup cost)
Exactly, we are happy client for more than 14 years. And don't plan to move if they keep what Linode was good at. I mean when it is setup, except extremely rare migrations, you forget about it.
Yeah, but that's the big if, isn't it? Once they enact changes which require action on your part (sunsetting services, changing prices, ...), you'll probably move, or at least seriously consider it.
I think that's a lot of the point here. They won't be starting with that customer base if most of that customer base leaves because of these changes (which I think a significant portion of them may).
Yes, as I recall, when Rackspace ruined Slicehost, a lot of people moved to Linode. I am guessing the same thing is likely to happen to Linode now. I'm just not sure if there is as clear a choice for a new company as it seemed to be when a lot of people moved from Slicehost to Linode.
I think these acquisitions are partly about the customer base and infrastructure but I believe a big part is getting the staff - existing functional highly skilled.
My guess is their organic growth rate wasn't impressive and so this change, which is only changing the name, isn't throwing away the most valuable part of Linode. The staff, operations routines and their technology are the most valuable parts. Even though they may not be using brand recognition to pitch this to their corporate sales contracts, I have a feeling its going to get mentioned as a counter to any concerns about new or immature offerings.
* already existing SOPs and MOPs. Way easier to integrate or copy something that works than building it from scratch
* already existing systems -- ordering gear is still weeks or months out for us, plus no need to engineer or setup a new system as above, way easier to integrate or copy than starting from zero (in a business sense, anyway)
“Going forward, Akamai’s rent-a-server cloud services will be called Linode” would have been a better solution, yeah. So the way you say “Amazon EC2” or “Amazon AWS”, you’d say “Akamai Linode”. The only downside is that inevitably people would shorten that to “Linode” instead of “Akamai”, which hurts brand recognition. And I guess that downside is significant enough to cause them to go with this bland “Akamai’s cloud services” moniker. That’s what commenters here are reacting to more than anything, I think: it’s very “bland corporation”-y to care that much about brand recognition and that little about other things.
Because big corporations buy the exact same things, you just market to them differently. Throw in various kinds of support contracts and "enterprise" whatever and you make much better margins off of the corporate contract even if what you are selling is pretty much identical.
The point is that Akamai is probably correct that all Linode really needs to change to be seen as viable by large corporations is the marketing. Its incredibly dumb that the world works like that even at the scale of large corporations that you would think would care less about being marketed to, but my experience has been the opposite / being tickled by marketing is even more important for big corporations.
It should also be noted that the people who choose infrastructure vendors are rarely the actual sysadmins in charge of the infrastructure. These kinds of decisions are standardized across large organizations (sysadmins would never be able to agree on something like that let's be honest) and the choices tend to be made by people who haven't set up a new server in a decade, (if they've ever done so then they are more technical than most in charge of IT purchasing).
Existing customers of what? Akamai didn't buy a business (or if they did, they don't care that they did.) Akamai already has a business, one with (very profitable) customers. Rather, in buying Linode, Akamai bought another supply chain to use to feed their existing business-model with.
Think like: a sporting goods company buying a tire company, not to make tires, but because they want to sell their existing customers rubber balls to go with their knee pads and stickball sticks; and the tire company happens to have a good rubber-goods supply chain that can be repurposed to do that.
Akamai doesn't want to get into the VPS business. They want to repurpose Linode's systems to extend their "cloud-services integrated solution provider" solution portfolio. Remember "IBM SoftLayer"? Akamai wants to be IBM, and so they need a SoftLayer of their own.
Not unlikely the employees booking these ads weren't even aware of the rebranding at that time. Or weren't allowed to tell third parties and so pretended nothing would change.
Akamai is not. I bet i you asked 10 random people what Akamai was they would never guess it, probably think it was new drug pfizer came out with or something
Revenue: Total revenue of $975.2 million representing an increase of 49% year-over-year.
GAAP net loss was $193.4 million compared to $260.3 million for fiscal 2021. GAAP net loss per basic and diluted share was $0.59, compared to $0.83 for fiscal 2021.
Akamai:
Revenue of $3.617 billion, up 4% year-over-year and up 8% when adjusted for foreign exchange. GAAP EPS of $3.26, down 17% year-over-year
The larger the company, the worse they are at naming things...
Large company a name has a go through several committees in different depts, then to legal, then to some exec committee, and through all of that creative dies, slowly and painfully
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"?
Maybe the same person works in the B2B space. There was the B2B platform Insite that was bought out by Episerver a few years ago (who bought Optimizely and then took on the name) and rebranded to Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud by Insite, where they quickly lost "by Insite". Then in the last few months they've decided to rebrand the product again to Optimizely Configured Commerce to separate it from their other eCommerce platform which they are calling Optimizely Customized Commerce.
It's less about brand awareness and more about telling customers upfront what it does. If I'm an Akamai customer that's never heard of Linode, maybe I ignore "Akamai Linode" because I've no clue what it does. If I hear "Cloud Computing Services", I know exactly what that offering is likely to entail from the name alone - Compute as a service.
The downside with this approach is that you lose any brand awareness of Linode. Perhaps that's not a terrible thing if their market share was minimal. You could have gone with "Akamai Linode Cloud Computing Services" or "Linode Cloud Computing Services by Akamai". But Linode seems a bit redundant in that name to my eyes.
I don't know if it is just me, but I think that names of the form "X by Y" come across as particularly soulless and makes it look like X was just gobbled up by private equity and turned into a small department.
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.