Akamai Kills Linode Brand
Blair Lyon (via Hacker News):
Since Akamai’s acquisition of Linode in early 2022, we’ve been hard at work to bring the platforms together under one roof. With the announcement of Akamai Connected Cloud, Linode is now fully integrated into the Akamai brand. Going forward, Linode’s services will be referred to as Akamai’s cloud computing services.
I understand that Akamai execs may have thought killing the Linode brand would help bring their compute services upmarket, but very strongly believe this was the stupidest thing they could do.
Linode’s success and brand name came from reliable, cost-effective servers managed by knowledgeable people, and everything I know about Akamai at a personal level these days is the exact opposite[…]
Meanwhile, DigitalOcean is doing layoffs.
Previously:
Update (2023-07-26): Marco Arment:
Linode/Akamai has notified me that they’re forcing an offline migration of one of my primary databases within 48 hours.
In the middle of a week.
It’ll cause ~8 hours of complete Overcast downtime if I don’t bring up a new instance and migrate everything over myself by then.
And this server costs 20% more than it did a year ago.
The Akamai acquisition of Linode has not improved anything for Linode’s customers, as far as I can tell. So far, we’re just paying more for equal or worse service.
5 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Marco's been raving about how great Linode is for years on ATP, in paid ads and in unsponsored discussions of his Overcast servers. On the other hand, I can't recall any mention of Akamai. Such a waste of a great reputation.
Meh, probably makes sense. I think the Akamai brand has considerably more value than the Linode brand, outside of the podcast influencer sphere anyway. Tthough, in the grand scheme of things, neither of them are terribly valuable present day. I mean, Akamai's biggest moment was when Steve Jobs gave them a shoutout at, what, MacWorld 2000? I don't think anyone should be precious about either of these brands, so it makes sense to drop one of them.
You what??? Everybody (of a certain technical persuasion) know who Linode were. Competent people who "got" developers, albeit, surprisingly, with much more uncomplicated and up-front offerings than is usual in the hot cloud space (although, admitedly, in more recent times, post-account registration and login). Akamai? They're just that big CDN that only corporates use, init?
Agreed. Really stupid move.
Linode’s influence is absolutely not limited to “podcaster circles”. Overcast is just a data point. Linode has a hell of a lot of value to the entire small-to-midrange application market.
I’m old enough to have been through enough merger/acquisitions to know that the external branding choice isn’t done lightly, and it’s not limited to the external messaging. They will certainly transition Linode into the Akamai way of doing things, now - including the people involved.
As an extremely happy Linode customer of 12 years now, I hate all this.
This is going to sound stupid, but I stopped using Linode because I ended up liking FreeBSD better and Linode only does… Linux. Switched to Lightsail for all of my projects, I think the AWS instances are faster and more reliable (US East 2) than what I had on Linode.
