As a prior article states, I’ve used countless VPS and dedicated hosting solutions over the years and for over the last decade I’ve been solidly using Linode for my semi-private web hosting business.
Now that Akamai is buying out Linode and integrating with it, I am now, after a decade+, once again concerned about how things may turn out. I went through a Mosso/Rackspace merger, a Slicehost/Rackspace merger, etc. and the specific ends of the merger I was on, I lost out on pricing and features and ended up leaving the new combined entity.
With this recent Akamai/Linode merger, I’m *REALLY* hoping Akamai doesn’t go crazy and wipe out all the loyalty, ease of use, cost-effectiveness and simplicity of management features that soooooo many have become accustomed to over the years.
I have no problem with them adding new features within the interface we are so used to now, but it would be tragic if Akamai changes that interface over to a bloated, non-user friendly experience that places like Google Cloud Console, Amazon Web Services, Azure and others have.
Also not nickle and dime-ing the users for every little thing would be nice too. *ALTHOUGH* Akamai/Linode has increased pricing starting April 1st affecting a large number of users.
“The price of Shared and Dedicated compute plans will increase by 20%.”…
A 20% increase is pretty substantial, and on my accounts, will affect 9 of my servers. A 20% increase across the board on those.
Long gone are the days when Linode would give all users a 20% RAM increase, a 25% SSD Storage increase for free, I always looked forward to those events. I haven’t seen any of those in many years. 😐
Since the merger, In anticipation of the potential need to “move” my services, I’ve already stood up a new VPS on Hetzner (Even this website was moved over to Hetzner tonight, just prior to this post) that I will be putting all of my new sites on for the time being. And with Hetzner I’m getting the same level of VPS and faster performance for about 30% less.
Basic Benchmarks:
Linode: 2 VCPUs, 78GB (usable SSD), 6,928 MB/sec SSD Read
Hetzner: 3 VCPUs, 75GB (usable SSD), 17,625 MB/sec SSD Read
BOTH are using AMD EPYC chips, but Hetzners seems to be a bit faster MHz wise and BogoMIPS
So Hetzner for the win.
I know I’m not a major VPS consumer, I’m only typical. I’m hoping Akamai/Linode sees this post and will take note of my thoughts, there are 100’s of thousands of other small entities like myself that will be going through and thinking the same thoughts over the next few months.
In conclusion, My hope is Akamai/Linode keeps it simple, but still have all the features that 99.5% of entities need and will not go ANY crazier with pricing. That will be key to them remaining a viable player in the VPS world today.