They were just bought by Akamai so unfortunately things like this are bound to happen if they are trying to integrate with Akamai the way they'd need to successfully keep growing. I'm not talking just software integration but process and people integration as well. We'll see I guess!
The Akamai acquisition has had me kind of stressed to be honest. Here in Oceania there aren't a whole lot of established "cloud" hosts to pick from that host locally.
Linode is fantastic and I have loved them for 10+ years. Digital Ocean doesn't host here, nearest is Singapore. Vultr does but I have had poor experiences with them. The other options are AWS and Google which are potentially unbounded expenses which is hard to sell to clients that already see $12/m (aud) as a cost sink, no matter what the server+service will save them in seat time.
There are of course local hosts but they're either oversold cpanel hosts or comparatively expensive (3-10x the price for the same hardware).
I guess it just feeds from my existential dread of being a small fish where if any one of these upstream providers decide "oh, no we flagged that account because of [black box reason], sorry!", you can be out a lively hood with no real recourse.
Guess it just kinda sucks to be at what feels like the end of the long tail of infrastructure.
Unrelated to the Linode thing, but in 15 years building and selling SaaS products, I've encountered a number of customers who nitpick prices or try to haggle. I'm not talking about non-profits with micro budgets, rather very profitable businesses.
Nowadays, whenever someone goes there, I just change my usual lighthearted tone to a serious one and say "Yeah, our prices are firm, if that's outside of your budget it's better we just move on". They 180 real fast. Every. Single. Time. Then they never mention prices again.
A caveat with them is that they're really trying to be price competitive, and can sometimes go overboard (like design their own custom datacenters and servers with watercooling, and skipping some things like fire suppression systems, and using cheap material such as plywood). Having a backup with a different provider, somewhere else, is always a good idea.
If you ever plan on colocating a 1U box somewhere, count me in for nibbling a bit off the end of it for $20/mo :) (I'm in Sydney, and seriously, seriously want my latency back)
I did a bunch of digging a while back and it looks like the "simply cannot go any lower" baseline is $250/mo.
I don't think that will happen with Linode (but I certainly could be wrong). When Rackspace bought Slicehost, people didn't really know what the future was going to look like. At this point, we've seen AWS/GCP/Azure and Akamai wants to have their own "run your apps with us" system.
Unlike when Rackspace bought Slicehost, Linode probably isn't even the leader in its niche. That's probably DigitalOcean. Akamai probably figured out which of the two it could buy and DigitalOcean probably would have cost $4+ billion while Linode only cost $900 million. When Rackspace bought Slicehost, there were really two alternatives: Linode and AWS. AWS came with a lot of complexity and Linode was small.
If you're looking for a new Linode to pop up, you don't have to wait. Vultr, DigitalOcean, and tons more already exist and have for years. It's not 2010 where you don't have loads of options in this space. Go with Hetzner or OVH Cloud and get really cheap prices (I've found Hetzner Cloud to be really nice). There are so many places that will give you a VPS today. Heck, AWS will give you a Linode-like experience with Lightsail, right?
That's why I think Akamai wants to use Linode as a way to build something that will let them start getting into the AWS/GCP/Azure space. It's somewhat where Linode was already heading, albeit slowly. Linode started offering hosted Kubernetes, object storage, block storage, hosted databases, and load balancers. How long before they might have added a queuing system, an app-runner so you don't even need to think about boxes/load balancers, etc.
For the low price of $900M, they could jump-start that process at Akamai. Rackspace thought that the future was their high-touch, high-cost, managed services. Akamai probably wants to use Linode to get into the AWS space and with a separate brand, they can do it without as much risk to their mainline business. There are too many alternatives for Akamai to be deluded enough to think they can just ruin Linode and not like that $900M on fire. That wasn't the case when Rackspace bought Slicehost.
Akamai looks at Cloudflare's valuation with envy (and some contempt because Akamai has the larger edge network). Definitely agree Linode was purchased as a growth opportunity.
DigitalOcean doesn't have much Asian presence, Linode's backup doesn't support non default file system like zfs, DO / Linode don't have HDD block storage like Vultr does (which I think is a hidden gem you can't realize until you go add one as it's not mentioned in the pricing page) that can be a very nice option to throw backup data in at 40GB/$.
Vultr's CPU isn't as good as the other 2 by the look of sysbench, even for high frequency types.
Those 3 vendors only have 2 or 3 backup slots which can be kind of unreliable if you didn't notice data loss over a weekend and weekly backup can be too far apart.
Hetzner is almost perfect if they have a bit more location. Very cheap, very high performing, daily backup with plenty of slots but no HDD block storage.
Sometimes Amazon Lightsail can be a decent option as they have 7 daily backup slots, free bandwidth is comparable to the others and prices aren't bad except their CPU suck.
Switch to Pair - https://www.pair.com/ - they are older than Linode and have a great reputation. (PS: However, I am not sure if they have been acquired by another company now. The "old" Pair had a sterling reputation, and I can vouch for that as a former customer.)
Just pointing out that price comparison between two product or service needs to be done with similar yardsticks. A product or service being costlier doesn't automatically mean that it costs you more as it can save your business money elsewhere.
Pair is absolutely not price-competitive. Pair's "Starter I" plan is $30/mo, for 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB storage, and 500 GB transfer. Linode's most similar plan ("Linode 2 GB") is $10/mo, and includes 2 TB transfer.
Does look like they have hiked their prices. But it also depends on how you are making the comparison. For example, just a cursory look at both pricing shows me some major differences - Pair is offering "fully managed" VPS hosting which means the hosting providers employees will help you do most of the common hosting tasks (and provide better customer support) unlike "unmanaged" hosting where you have to do everything yourself with the tools provided. Is the Linode plan you cited also similar or for "unmanaged" hosting (which is what Linode was famous for)? Note that Linode (Akamia) also makes a distinction between "shared" vCPU vs "dedicated" vCPU and prices it differently. Don't know how Pair looks at that. The point is that the pricing variation can be justified by the services being offered. I admire and respect Akamai and also like Linode a lot. But I also recognize that Akamai is big B2B company offering enterprise services and small or independent developers will always be an after thought for them.
No, I don't. I am vocal about brands I admire or dislike. One of the ways I was taught to evaluate web hosting companies was to check how long they have been in the business (both the company and the management) as web hosting is an easy business to get into (even today, any Tom, Dick and Harry can start a web hosting business with next to nothing investment by becoming a reseller). Pair hosting is one of the oldest web hosting companies I know, and they have / had a reputation for high server uptimes (I still remember one of their employee had once posted in some forum on how one of their FreeBSD run server had an uptime of more than 2+ years - yeah, bragging about server uptimes was once a thing too) and great customer support. (I also have fond memories of Linode, Slicehost, Rackspace etc. before they all gave up and were gobbled up by someone, and web hosting became all this "cloud" bullshit.)
Tl;dr: No. Brand recognition / recall is a powerful marketing tool.
Some old businesses are still running because they've been able to stay relevant over the long term. And some old businesses are still running because they've been relying on name recognition and customers who can't be bothered to move.
Unfortunately, I think Pair is in the latter category.
Businesses that don't change with times do die a slow death. I have no idea how you've come to the conclusion though that Pair is in that category - would you like to clarify?
For Linode Ubuntu 22.04 installations, at least, the default seems to be DHCP, even if the IP address is fixed. And I certainly wouldn't have thought anything about this, since even when using fixed IP addresses, I'm in the habit of using DHCP to provide a central source of IP address truth for my networks, to ease the pain of the inevitable renumbering.
That being said, maybe check if you have `dhclient`, `dhcpcd`, `systemd-resolved`, or (less likely) `dnsmasq` or `bind` running (htop / ps aux).
If you do, your instance may fall over after its DHCP lease expires and it then presumably fails to acquire a new one and goes all 169.254.x.x on you.
The possible counterpoint / information-vacuum bit here is that I don't know what the DHCP lease time is, so the expiry may already have happened.
IOW, apparently this started 4h ago, and so the last leases were presumably issued 4h ago, and maybe the lease length is 1h, so everything's already as dead as it's going to get, so maybe if you're not already dead, you're fine.
We run some Windows instances, which were DHCP out of laziness. <facepalm> [edit: It's a PITA to fire up a Windows instance on Linode. Once working, switching out of DHCP is near the bottom of the todo list.]
I would expect the opposite. Doesn't DHCP make more sense, for example, if the user creates a snapshot and restores it with a new IP? I don't use Lenode, so I can't judge, but I would expect DHCP to be default.
Default created Debian based linodes use a static IP. How they assign you the IP is they have an initial network boot script that injects that static IP into your config.
I learned this because I wanted to test image recovery of deleted linode. When I restored it, I got a different IP address from linode (the static IP assigned to me), and I couldn't connect to it. Using the web console I found the IP address was hard coded to the old one still.
Just checked my tiny Nanode 1 GB image (Fremont) running Debian and it's indeed running dhclient. Still have access, but I need the instance this weekend for a virtual event. Kind of sucky timing for a potential outage, Linode.
