We all knew this was coming. This came in an email from Linode today:
As we expand our cloud product portfolio and work to improve the resiliency and reach of our network, we face the same challenges as many of our customers: a tough financial climate with growing costs for data center space, energy usage, and newer hardware. We have resisted making changes to our offerings for as long as possible, and we understand this may not be the news you wish to hear from us, but we are announcing price changes for certain compute services effective April 1, 2023.
On April 1st, you will see the following changes to our pricing model:
Shared and Dedicated CPU plan prices will increase by 20%*.
The price of additional IPv4 addresses beyond 1 will increase from $1 to $2 each*, per month across all of our existing core data center locations.
Transfer (egress) fees are being reduced from $0.01 to $0.005 per GB* up to 1PB per month across all of our existing core data center locations.
What’s not changing?
The price of Nanodes (1GB Shared CPU plans).
The price of NodeBalancers, Backups, Managed Databases, Linode Images, Block Storage, Object Storage, High Memory plans, GPU plans, and the High-Availability Control Planes on Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) are exempt from price changes. All other cluster nodes deployed with LKE will be billed according to the new Shared or Dedicated CPU pricing.
I agree - it’s not too crazy. My server bills are going up, but not that much in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t likely to put companies out of business.
Just figured it would be of interest to some people here. And maybe we get to hear Marco talk about it on ATP.
Might be worth a different thread, but: what are the alternatives folks have considered? I went with Linode last year mostly because it seemed like the popular option and was at least as cheap as the others, but the decision was fairly arbitrary.
(I wonder what it’d take to move from service to service… hrm.)
I needed a web server that was not on my workplace network very quickly and with no fuss a few years ago (trying to track down the origin of some harassing emails that were being sent to a faculty member - once in a while work is actually fun), and I remembered that Marco Arment talks about them without complaining about them, so I gave them a shot. Since then they have been so solid, inexpensive, and have met my expectations so completely that I haven’t even considered looking elsewhere.
I suppose I should investigate Amazon’s serverless offerings some time, but for plain old Linux servers there is nothing about Linode that makes me want to look elsewhere. My use is very light and I have only three Nanode-level servers.
Thanks for the vote of confidence! I think I’ll just leave well-enough alone.
To reframe my question above: “would I pay an extra ~$30 this year not to have to muck around for hours with changing services…?” and the answer is “absolutely”
I have used Digital Ocean, AWS, Linode, and surely a couple others I don’t remember.
The Amazon options are much more expensive, laughably so, and I genuinely don’t see the value for simple server needs. Digital Ocean was pricier last I looked (although maybe that’s changed now, but I’m sure that Linode remains comparable), and DO also had fewer features (no automatic backups, for example).
I’m not stoked about the Linode price bumps, but I agree with others here that it’s really not that bad in the grand scheme of things. More worried about Akamai making long-term strategic changes to Nanode-based businesses (like mine) than I am about general pricing.
