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Linode increases price of compute plans and more
- sschueller 4y agoMy Linode costs have already gone up 20% this year when they started charging VAT. :/ I have been with Linode since 2008. Now I can expect another 20%? I don't understand why there is a cost for IPs other than trying to prevent people from "wasting" them.
- pointlessone 4y agoIPv4 addresses are a scarce resource and we’re running out of them. Of course they will go up in price.
- sschueller 4y agoBut isn't it against IANA policy to sell or let other resell IPs?
- geerlingguy 4y agoThink of it more like a "lease" — you don't own the IP, just the right to apply it to one of your instances for a time.
- bombcar 4y agoExactly. 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.
- ThatPlayer 4y agoI'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.
- godzillabrennus 4y agoJust another reason to put Cloudflare in front of your website so you can have ipv4 and ipv6 with SSL and a WAF for free.
- bombcar 4y agoCloud flare will someday want their money, too.
- RowanH 4y agoThis 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...
- chihwei 4y agoI hope they can bill me a fair price; otherwise their service can't sustain for long.
- calcifer 4y agoI'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 :(
- ivyirwin 4y agoSame 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...
- sschueller 4y agoI remember those days :). Support was always reachable in IRC which doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
- hjr265 4y agoI 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.
- marcosdumay 4y agoI'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.
- antoineMoPa 4y 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. This is strange, I've been a customer for a long time and never noticed that.
- LinuxBender 4y agoI'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.
- cfiggers 4y agoI would definitely read a blog write-up of any length on this, if you either already have or would be interested at all in making one.
- Shared404 4y agoI'll second that.
- LinuxBender 4y agoThis 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.
- cfiggers 4y agoYour 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).
- hjr265 4y agoThis news is shared as a banner within the Linode Manager interface with the following text: "Effective 04/01/2023 the price of compute services will change by decreasing transfer fees and updating shared and dedicated plan rates. Read more."
- sschueller 4y agoDoing it this is very dishonest and tells you a lot about what kind of people work at Akamai communications department.
- j_ckley 4y agoLinode 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.
- winddude 4y agoOr you could tell them to axe the price increases. And maybe axe some management and CEO salaries at akamai, https://www.comparably.com/companies/akamai/executive-salaries https://www.comparably.com/companies/akamai/executive-salari...
- cptcobalt 4y ago> prices will change by decreasing transfer fees and updating shared and dedicated plan rates this is a stellar example of the dark pattern of passive user-hostile language.
- bombcar 4y agoI don’t know how many people hit transfer fees - a few VPS and you’ve got terebytes to spare. But the 20% hits everyone.
- dan1234 4y agoDoes 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?
- l_theanine 4y agoThe immediate implication would be to expect lesser price raises from other providers. Akamai recently acquired Linode, and it was definitely perceived as a foreboding piece of news... and now here they go raising the prices.
- thaumaturgy 4y agoOther 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: - Since their third or fifth or who-knows-which breach and subsequent fumble: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 - Since the announcement that they were acquired by Akamai: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30352772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30352772 - Since they became "Akamai Cloud": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34799273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34799273 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.
- reaperducer 4y agoDigital Ocean already increased its prices recently, then laid off a bunch of people. So the meager support it used to have is now gone. Word on HN is that it's getting bought by Microsoft. If that's true it makes sense that DO would go away entirely.
- elforce002 4y agoReally?!! We're planning on using their spaces and kubernetes offering for our video hosting division. Where are you getting these news?
- linuxdeveloper 4y agoSad but expected price increase on short notice. RIP Linode (2003-2023)
- linuxdeveloper 4y agoAlso, when did backups go from $2/month to $5/month per linode? What a joke.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ubermonkey 4y agoYeah, surprise surprise. Akamai will ruin everything good about Linode.
- corobo 4y ago> 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. Bro it's only been 2 weeks
- markstos 4y agoI've been paying the same price for my Linode server for about 10 years. This seems fair.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- schemescape 4y agoHave the server specs changed? If not, then I’d expect it to get cheaper, just like the hardware. Edit: other comments imply they’ve been improving the provided specs, so my comment might not be relevant.
- karlshea 4y agoSince the name change. To be fair, they bought Linode a year ago.
- corobo 4y agoHuh. 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.
- relaxatorium 4y agoAs 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.
- thaumaturgy 4y agoAkamai 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?
- relaxatorium 4y agoNot really, that's why I'm reviewing other providers as per the second half of the sentence.
- Keverw 4y agoDisappointed:( 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.
- ethicalsmacker 4y agoI can't seem to find if this will affect me...I currently pay $600 per-month for $480 shared instance w/$120 backups. Looks like this is going to cost me an additional $1440/year for... nothing. Anyone have a recommended alternative to Linope?
- thaumaturgy 4y agoI'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.
- pritambarhate 4y agoDO also raised their prices recently. I think Linode is just following the suit as both the companies have similar user base.
- ethicalsmacker 4y agoEven with the price increase, DO looks like it would be 2x Linode's cost for what I require.
- tedivm 4y agoDigitalOcean 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.
- thaumaturgy 4y agoI 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.
- antoineMoPa 4y agoThat'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. We need a new independent VPS provider.
- winrid 4y agoMost hobbyists will use the $5 machines which are not changing, though.
- ryandrake 4y agoYep, 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 $4 competitors.
- antoineMoPa 4y agoI mean that's nice, but it's not so nice for my 10$ instance.
- winrid 4y agoDo you mean your $12 instance? :)
- ilaksh 4y agoI'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.
- 4y ago
- csnover 4y agoThe 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. A “bold new approach to the cloud”[4], indeed. [0] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud [1] https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/compare/ https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/compare/ [2] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets [4] 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...
- nerdjon 4y agoWhat 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) https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing So I am really not sure how they are looking at their "peers"
- tyingq 4y agoTo 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.
- scottLobster 4y agoIt'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.
- graderjs 4y agoLinode is good. But so is Vultr, and Hetzner.
- elforce002 4y agoWell, 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.
- daedalus_j 4y agoHow 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.
- elforce002 4y agoWe're using it to test some solutions before going live and everything is ok atm.
- jolmg 4y ago> 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?
- elforce002 4y agoThey don't allow different comm. protocols between vps.
- jolmg 4y agoCould you elaborate? Do they block some ports when using private IPs or something?
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoYay 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.
- markstos 4y agoI 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.
- bananapub 4y agoas 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.
- Arch-TK 4y agoWelp, 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.
- bityard 4y agoI 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."
- dahfizz 4y agoIt 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.
- JonChesterfield 4y agoAlternatives 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.
- j45 4y agoAs 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.
- subarctic 4y agoso weird that it says Akamai on the linode website
- shirro 4y agoI 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.
- markboost 4y agoIf 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.
- dev1776 4y agoAs 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. YMMV.