Now I seriously need to look for alternative hosting if/when the corpo overlords decide to start changing the offered products.

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!

--

[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.

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).

I find DO immediately offputting.

I used to use Linode ten years ago, but eventually switched to Digital Ocean.

I switched to using Hetzner instead of Digital Ocean a couple years ago.

Way too many bots and other automated stuff running on throwaway DO nodes.

I moved most of my stuff over to DigitalOcean a while back. The few remaining instances are now an urgent todo.

Same thing happened with Slicehost. They got absorbed by the Rackspace borg, which ruined everything we found appealing at SH -- so we found Linode.

I guess now I'm looking for the new Linode/Slicehost style provider. Sucks.

Besides that, it looks like people like DO.

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).

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 the whole point is that they're throwing away any of Linode's existing reputation in favor of banking on the Akamai name.

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.

* 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)

* lingering brand name recognition

Akamai doesn't want you as a customer if you're not spending millions a year. It's not worth their time.

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.

It should take few brain cells to understand business is driven by return on investment and not "most burgers served"

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).

As recently as 2 days ago (the day before this was announced): https://youtu.be/b-WFetQjifc?t=51s

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.

Wasted money I guess?

They offer a managed Apache Kafka. Which is called...

...Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka...

Or RHOSAK for short. So terrible in all ways.

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 ....

Cloudflare:

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

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

Haven't we gotten pretty used to Amazon Web Services?

What we've gotten used to is "AWS". However "ACC" sounds more like a condition to avoid, rather than a service to use.

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

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.

Precisely.