Can you provide a link to this somewhere for those of us who don’t know where to find it?
If things go belly up with Linode, Digital Ocean is probably where I’d go next (or — regrettably — Amazon).
Same here. Nothing wrong with Linode adding products and services as a result of the acquisition - but I hope they don’t pull one of those nonsense things where they claim they can’t make money doing what Linode is currently making money by doing, and have to exit that market.
Dang. Would love to read it, but it’s not worth actually spending money on for me personally (although Ben is a great writer, so that’s no jab at folks who feel otherwise). Like you, I also don’t want to have to move off Linode. They’ve been an easy recommendation for my clients for years now.
Yeah. I’m still there, and I have no intention of moving unless things get really weird, but at this point I think I’d be cautious about sending new people there until we know how things with Akamai land. 
My clients are typically small businesses or NPOs running something like Craft CMS. My immediate thought is that the best alternative for somebody like them may be Digital Ocean. Thankfully, it’s not too tedious to migrate a SQL database and some Twig, but I’m curious where you plan on sending new folks for the time being?
No plans yet. I have a big-ish server at Linode where I host most clients with simple needs, so spinning up separate boxes doesn’t come up as often as it might for you. But when somebody asks again, I’ll let them know that I used to suggest Linode, but I can’t recommend it right now. I’d probably say Digital Ocean as well, but I’d want to do a tiny bit of due diligence before I actually recommended them.
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marco was strangely subdued. maybe he is still in shock. his bill would increase 4x if he had to move to aws. mine would probably double if I move to DO
4x didn’t sound right to me when I heard it, based on the price/performance of Linode and AWS equivalent products. It made me curious about his setup.
I realize he’s not the type of developer to use spot instances, given his disdain for lock-in, but general purpose computing is roughly equivalently priced, and he might still come out ahead if he can use Graviton servers or if EC2 has a better match for his CPU/RAM/disk mix.
I haven’t found general-purpose computing to be equivalently priced if you factor in the complete package.
For example, Linode offers 16vCPUs and 64 GB of RAM with a 1.2TB SSD disk for $320/month. The cheapest comparable (all in one package) Amazon VM had slightly less disk, and ran about $520/month. If I go with a different package that doesn’t include the SSD I can start approaching the Linode cost, but then I get to pay for EBS at about $100 extra to match Linode’s offering.
Linode also offers 20TB of transfer with that $320/month package. Amazon would price that at $90/terabyte based on my math.
It just doesn’t add up. At all.
The only way to break even would be if something in your Linode package were unnecessary, and you could just drop it in the move.
Other cloud providers do a little better. The Digital Ocean flavor of that same box is $480, but only has a 200GB SSD.
Vultr is almost dead-on equal, other than less transfer allowed.
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Ah, right, the included bandwidth from Linode can make a big difference if not optimizing/controlling egress to a CDN. Which he might not bother with now if he just pools something like 300TB unoptimized Linode transfer in his account and calls it a day. With AWS, assuming you wouldn’t see benefit to using Cloudfront in particular to reduce bandwidth costs, you’d want to use Cloudflare or KeyCDN to bring the transfer cost to the Internet down quite a bit ($0-2500/mo.)
Besides that, assuming Marco has relatively constant needs, I would compare that Linode 64GB shared server to a reserved m5d.4xlarge which is about $420/mo and has 600GB SSD.
So in this simple example, assuming he uses every TB of his free Linode transfer, he might spend $8,800/mo at Amazon + Cloudflare on a totally unlocked-down/unoptimized implementation to replace his $5,000/mo at Linode. That’s not awful for someone who doesn’t care enough to utilize any cost-saving features that would lock in.
About $18,000/mo if he wants to do it all through in-house Cloudfront tranfer with a DIY commitment discount and not call sales, which could be where he got 4x from.
A client also uses LiquidWeb and I second that they are great with very good customer service.