As a customer it makes me nervous Akamai have decided to ignore Linode's great brand name and good will. If they ignore one of Linode's best assets that took a lot of hard work to create then I fear future decision making. I think I'll get ready to move should Akamai continue with the same kind of decision making.
Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
271–280 of 361 posts
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what I've been worried about since the acquisition. I've been a loyal customer for over a decade and hosted jsonip.com there for 12 years. Now I seriously need to look for alternative hosting if/when the corpo overlords decide to start changing the offered products.
I've been with DigitalOcean for a very long time, their prices seem comparable to Linode, I always saw them marketed more or less the same. In fact, I don't even know why one would pick Linode over DigitalOcean or vice versa
> 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.
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#273As a customer it makes me nervous Akamai have decided to ignore Linode's great brand name and good will. If they ignore one of Linode's best assets that took a lot of hard work to create then I fear future decision making. I think I'll get ready to move should Akamai continue with the same kind of decision making.
As a former customer, what great brand name and good will?
I still remember having to work 20 hours _on fucking Christmas Day_ because they had no meaningful DDoS protection in place.
Thankfully I had been working for the past 3 months on a DR strategy and the 20 hours of work was an extended switch-flipping operation because I was prepared. That was the last day we were a Linode customer.
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but why not just call it something "Linode by Akamai" or "Akamai Linode"? Because they know they're up against the AWS, GCP and Azure's of this world.... So it's probably a touch of the "nobody got fired for buying IBM", i.e. they consider "Akamai" to have more clout on a proposal sheet than "Linode". Of course nobody sensible reads anything into a brand name, but if you're trying to impress the customer's C-suite…
I never saw any clout attached to Akamai of all things, it's just "that other big CDN"
Isn't it actually the biggest?
Cloudflare is popular because they have that crazy free tier, but Akamai has the biggest CDN network.
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a reputation that would attract customers. But the whole point is that they're throwing away any of Linode's existing reputation in favor of banking on the Akamai name.
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)
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).
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#276Not sure how the Linode site looked most recently before the rebrand but this new Akamai branded page gives me Alibaba cloud enterprise vibes. https://us.alibabacloud.com/en
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Lin…
It's now called "Akamai Connected Cloud". I don't know what is "Connected Cloud". I'll guess that it's something like CRM for businesses or IoT BaaS.
The cloud is just someone else's computer. Connected cloud is just another marketing term.
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#278As a customer it makes me nervous Akamai have decided to ignore Linode's great brand name and good will. If they ignore one of Linode's best assets that took a lot of hard work to create then I fear future decision making. I think I'll get ready to move should Akamai continue with the same kind of decision making.
As a former customer, what great brand name and good will? I still remember having to work 20 hours _on fucking Christmas Day_ because they had no meaningful DDoS protection in place. Thankfully I had been working for the past 3 months on a DR strategy and the 20 hours of work was an extended switch-flipping operation because I was prepared. That was the last day we were a Linode customer.
I had to work for hours over several weeks because Digital Ocean _did_ have DDoS protection, that was awful.
We had an SSH-only machine (that ran backups), but because someone was spraying traffic at the non-operational port 80/443, they kept on disconnecting the network and requiring manual intervention from their support team to reinstate networking.
When we asked them to please stop disconnecting our database backup machine from the network, their answer was "put Cloudflare in front of it". They didn't have the technical knowledge to understand why this was a stupid recommendation.
We solved this by moving everything off Digital Ocean. Like Linode, a perfectly reasonable day-1 solution, and not bad for ancillary services, but not something I'd run production systems on long term.
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#279Was put off by the pricing page, which used to be no nonsense. It now looks like a cryptic AWS/Azure calculator. Might be time to switch to DO.
Re: Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services
#280I'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…
Hell even if they're determined to ditch the Linode brand, why make it "Akamai Connected Cloud", surely just "Akamai Cloud" is cleaner?