Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) Reviews

Linode is a service that hosts virtual machines for you.

It is important to me that Linode offers a small, but well-focused set of cloud computing services, and there are two reasons. I've got a lot of choices because you can do a lot of things with Linode, but the core of what they offer is the ability to host your own cloud.

The size of the applications that you can use is significant. For example, you can run some massive infrastructure through Linode if you need to. The focused set of services is important because if you compare with Amazon, for example, they have AWS cloud, and it has a lot of things that get really very confusing. I understand technology, but I'm a business person more than a technologist. So, for me, the fact that they're focused means that they are working on the latest technology.

They are also practical and don't just use a component because it's there. They've got specific paths, such as migration paths, and they understand what I call fundamental IT. They understand that very well and it's invaluable. For example, one time I had to contact support because someone on my end deleted something. I phoned them at two o'clock in the morning to open a support ticket and a human being answered the phone. They said, "Oh yeah, no, we can do that. All done." Ten minutes later, the problem was resolved and life was fine. Essentially, they understand the practicalities of IT the way it should be in terms of the fundamentals. This is something that a lot of people don't understand.

An example that I'm thinking of is where you have a large call center that is located somewhere else in the world and people don't speak English, which is always a problem. They've got scripts that they go through and based on what you describe, they try to tell you the problem or ask you more questions. You'll be forced to go through a poor process, whereas Linode doesn't do that. Linode is just human beings who are IT literate, for want of a better word, dealing with you at every step of the way. That's important.

To me, it's very important that they haven't lost their focus, even though their capabilities seem to have expanded quite a lot.

Another way that Linode has improved the way my organization functions is that I don't have to have the physical infrastructure, anywhere. This means that I can work from anywhere in the world with the same infrastructure. Whether I'm in the United Kingdom, whether I'm in South Africa, whether I'm in Costa Rica, makes no difference. This is a massive advantage.

Many people think that because it's the web, and it's all-pervasive, it is just "old hat". But to have infrastructure that you can access from anywhere is absolutely brilliant. So, that's one area.

I used to host all my own stuff but I've gotten to the point now where I think I've got one server in-house, and that is full of what I call pet projects. I don't even know if I've got backups of that.

On the topic of backups, human beings don't like doing them. Also, IT people set backups and never look at them again. At least at Linode, you choose their backups and you know you've got three backups a day that you could fall back on, in the worst case. It's brilliant for me from that point of view.

Because of the ease of use, I can offer it to more clients. It's a doorway for me to customers where maybe I would have had to have a much more technical staff. As it is now, I don't have to, and it's not a deal-breaker. The customer is not saying that I don't have a server expert because I do. It's Linode.

In terms of helping me to accelerate innovation, Linode has got a whole bunch of storage options now. They've got features where you can attach data in different ways, which is something that they have addressed in the past couple of years. You can have Amazon buckets, as well as other clever things. I don't know whether they were the first to support or offer things in this way, but they definitely made the accessibility to some of these more obscure storage options easier. If you want to attach to an S3 bucket, it's always been quite a challenge, whereas with Linode, you just put in your credentials and it'll attach to the bucket for you. From that point of view, I see them changing the underlying technology constantly because you see the upgrades as they come through. Without even having a strategy to remain on top of things, Linode has enabled that for me.

If I want to fire up anything that is attached to any of the common data types, it's not a difficult thing to do at all because that is what they're doing. For example, I've just seen something new on their site, which is called a cloud firewall. It's in beta testing. So, looking around, I can see that there's going to be a new service that they're going to add back on top of all of that. It means that if I've got a cloud firewall, I don't have to worry about other firewalls on my machines. I just stick them all behind one firewall. This means one setup, one cost, etc. That's innovation for you because, one, they're making life easier for me. I don't have to set up a whole bunch of things. Secondly, they make a new income stream for themselves, which is brilliant.

I have my own social media system called bolixo.org, and I am hosting it using Linode.

For smaller companies, it is very important that they have a small but well-focused set of cloud computing services. They are very inexpensive and very reliable. I am a light user and do not use all of the services, but I'm a serious user. In the cloud business, there is another kind of entry-level service, where they provide you, for example, a web server and you only have to provide content. Linode is another side of the cloud business, where they're providing you a full solution. This is your server so you're managing whatever you want to host on it.

Using Linode helps me for a simple reason, which is that I do nothing with respect to the servers. I don't have servers and I do not want to have servers. I managed servers for four years and I know how it's done, but, I don't want to care, for example, about power. Where I am, we have a lot of power failures. This week alone, I have had 16 hours of power failures. Clearly, I don't have the technology in-house to support that long without power. I know that it exists, where I can put in a generator or come up with another solution, but I don't want to do that. Instead, I want to concentrate on what I'm doing. Linode delivers an inexpensive service and it's completely reliable.

I run a small company as well as my own personal website. I am using their cloud servers for managing websites and the web applications that I develop applications. So, I use Linode both for development and hosting public applications on my website. I also use their object storage to store things, like backups and files, which I want to keep for safekeeping, but not on my personal laptops. 

I have benefited from their flexibility, the object storage particularly. I know that I have almost unlimited capacity there. I don't have to provision loads of storage, keep buying loads of hard drives, etc. It is just there and usable.

The primary use cases involve renting virtual private servers for our infrastructure, which is used for the development of software, website databases, websites, and some infrastructure such as for audio and video conferencing.

The main purpose for using their virtual private servers is for our in-house development program.

We use a Linux environment for our website database applications.

Linode has done a lot of help to us when it comes to streamlining anything where we need a server. Whether it is development servers or even servers for clients, Linode has helped us a lot.

It has helped us to accelerate our innovation, although there are similar services available so we didn't choose Linode mainly for that. Nonetheless, it certainly has helped because we don't have a core infrastructure. Obviously, all of the development that we do internally is happening on their server. This means that it's very important for our innovation and development, but other services would be able to compete with them, so it's not an exclusive advantage.

We choose Linode because they are very Linux-focused with their operating systems. It is very Linux-friendly and Linux-oriented. Mainly, in the end, it's all about vendor lock-in. If I compare it to Amazon and Google Cloud, they have a vendor lock-in, and we want to avoid that. This is something that Linode is very helpful with. They have a very standardized open system, which is easily configurable.

It is difficult for me to assess the price to performance ratio of Linode compared to other product providers because I don't have much experience with them. But, at least compared to our self-hosted servers, I think they have very good uptime and response time.

I have a single 4GB model Linode and I use it as a personal server. I originally set it up to act as an email server, just for my own personal vanity domain. I don't use it for that anymore, but it's proved to be useful for many other things.

Right now, I run a Minecraft server on it and I also use it for a little bit of software development. I also use it as a jump host, if I need a stable place to SSH from my laptop to get to other online resources. It means that I only have a single point that I go through to get to the other stuff that I need.

I would say it's very important that Linode offers a relatively small, but well-focused set of cloud computing services because it differentiates them from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud by being focused and by having a more personal touch. I could probably get the same compute power for a little bit less from other providers, but the value of the continuity and the high quality of support is worth it. It's rare that I need to reach out to support, but when I do, the support is great.

Even though I use it for personal use, some of the things that I use it for are in a software development capacity. For example, the ability to experiment with running my own Mercurial server, Git server, and source control servers on this machine have leveled up my own knowledge of those products in a way that I think a more managed solution wouldn't. Having the tools in-hand of just a Linux box that I can play with, and that I can wipe and reimage at will, is more useful than a physical machine by virtue of that virtual rewriting. It is also more useful than a more abstracted managed service, just in that I can get my hands dirty and do rapid experimentation.

Linode has helped me to accelerate innovation and even though I'm not using this in an enterprise way, it has improved the way I innovate with respect to personal stuff. For example, it has helped with the things that I'm trying to learn and the things that I'm trying to do. Setting up a Minecraft server is a good example of that. Being able to read some of the documentation that Linode has about setting up a Minecraft server on your VPS, and just learning and figuring stuff out, has been valuable.

We're a software company that uses a 1980s American product called Appgen, as an application generator. We've got accounting, finance materials, and information packages running under Appgen and we have a number of hospitals in Victoria, Australia using that for their finances. They tend to run on SCO Unix or UnixWare, but our own version of it, which we use for developing is SUSE Linux.

We've got an in-house virtual machine running there, but I was concerned about backup. My original reason for choosing Linode was it was an affordable Linux cloud node system that could run both Fedora and SUSE Linux.

I just chose on those grounds initially and we didn't do much else with it. But in fact, one of the services that we provide is called Medicare Online, for the Australian government health billing service. In this system, doctors and hospitals bill patients and then claim the expenses back from the government. That's been running the product's security system. Moving on to the web services, I thought when we started developing them, we'll try using Linode.

I think it's very affordable and although my initial intention was just to use it as a backup, I'm mirroring our machine with it. When we go ahead and develop the web services interface, we'll use Linode to do it.

The company got a lot more out of Linode than I expected. I thought that I was just buying a cloud-based backup, but I'm getting much more than that. I'm getting a really good Linux with technical support.

Essentially, the fact that we're developing web services interfaces and it is all fully supported, is 

I was using it primarily for virtual private servers. But recently they came out with the Kubernetes platform and most of what I do at my day job is Kubernetes engineering. I'm very familiar with it. I had wanted to switch all my personal projects over to Kubernetes, and it was really great when Linode finally came out with it. Now I'm using Linode for Kubernetes clusters. I still do hold some VPSs, but most of my stuff is on Kubernetes now. I don't use Linode at my day job. We use Azure for the same thing there, but I choose to use Linode for all my personal projects.

I like it because it gives me scalability but, that's true of Kubernetes in general. But I do really like that it is consistent with all the stuff that I regularly do in my day job with Azure, using Kubernetes. It's nice that I can easily transfer that over to Linode using their Kubernetes.

Linode Kubernetes Engine is pretty great when it comes to the amount of Terraforming and manual integrations. Kubernetes does a great job of staying running and looking after itself. I find with VPSs that, every once in a while, something will go down and I will have to restart it manually. With Kubernetes, that tends to happen a lot less. I also find maintenance to be a lot easier.

When it comes to the Linode Kubernetes Engine and the amount of automation it provides, it's awesome, it's a game-changer. If a process randomly dies, it could take me a while to notice that it has died, if I haven't set up monitoring. With Kubernetes, it will just restart itself using Heartbeats.

In addition, the visibility that the Linode Kubernetes Engine provides is awesome. It's better than some of the other cloud providers', such as  Azure which is one I work with specifically. I find the Linode version to be a lot more user-friendly. It feels like the Linode interface is designed by someone who actually uses the product, whereas with Azure, it doesn't necessarily feel like that. It feels like some things are user-hostile.

Another feature that is quite helpful for setting up servers is the StackScripts. I've used it to set up game servers, previously. They have a library of instantiation scripts that will set up an environment for you on a VPS, from scratch, with one click. There's a pretty large library too, so that's quite handy.

And the fact that Linode offers a relatively small, but well-focused set of cloud computing services is the reason to go with Linode. What they do, they do well, and they're slowly adding stuff. They were a little bit late to the game on Kubernetes, but their Kubernetes is incredibly solid, in my experience so far. It feels very stable and well thought out.

It's also important that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers. I'm based around Toronto and they have a data center right in Toronto. It works very well for me. With other solutions, I often have to pick data centers in Chicago or the like.

I am generally using them for bringing up websites and servers for customers. Oftentimes, a company will want their own mail server and/or web server, and I will use Linode for that. It is extremely convenient and easy for me to do this. I really like how they are set up. They just seem to do everything right.

It is a very cost-effective solution. It allows me to give high availability. Having it be a VM instead of a dedicated piece of hardware is extremely valuable in the fact that they are very proactive about their monitoring. There have been several times where I have seen them migrate a VM from a server that was having problems onto a new server. I have had that happen a couple of times over the years that I have been with Linode.

The service has helped our organization accelerate innovation because, in certain cases, I have wanted to try something new. So, I would just spin up a VM briefly for a short period of time to try some things on it and see how it worked, then I could just turn it off again. It basically made me a rapid prototyping environment so I could try new things and get stuff working pretty quickly.