As we expand our cloud portfolio and work to improve the resiliency and reach of our network, we face the reality of also evolving some of the economic fundamentals that make this expansion possible, while staying true to our core mission of making cloud computing affordable and accessible.
As a result, we want to let you know about updates we are making to our pricing. Some of these changes will provide new, lower-cost options, while others will raise prices for certain products.
Which services will have new pricing?
We are increasing prices for some compute instance types and additional IP addresses.
The price of Shared and Dedicated compute plans will increase by 20%. Our shared Nanode plan remains unchanged at US$5 per month.
Additional IPv4 IP addresses will increase from US$1 to US$2 per month. IPv6 addresses remain free.
Reduces egress overage costs from US$0.01 to US$0.005 per GB (up to 1PB per month) applied across all of our existing core data center locations.
Why are we making these changes?
Akamai faces the same macroeconomic headwinds of growing costs for data center space, energy, and hardware as other providers. We resisted making any changes to our offerings for as long as we could. We believe that this pricing change reflects the new market reality, but we will continue to deliver the highest of standards, capabilities, and performance at the best prices our customers have come to expect.
We know Nanodes are important to many of our individual customers. Despite our costs going up, we made the decision to keep our Nanode pricing intact. And while we have increased the prices of our Shared and Dedicated plans, our prices are still 60% lower than the big hyperscalers’ prices and in line with or lower than the prices of many of our other competitors.
Cutting egress pricing in half
When Akamai acquired Linode, we promised to leverage our content delivery network (CDN) economics to aggressively drive down the price of egress, as it was one of the biggest pain points we heard our customers were facing when moving to the cloud.
High data transfer rates have become a point of friction for the free movement of data, often used as a lever to lock customers into a single provider. High data transfer fees are also one of the drivers behind the European Union’s push to enact policies that foster greater flexibility of choice for cloud services.
So, while we’re increasing prices in some of our compute plans, we’re also driving down the pain of data transfer by cutting our cloud egress costs in half — on top of the already large amount of free capacity that we already offer.
Akamai’s scale not only gives us the ability to scale our new cloud computing services around the world, but allows us to apply that scale to cloud data transfer and offer significantly discounted rates compared with other cloud providers. The new pricing structure for egress sets a new bar for the cloud computing industry.
When will the new prices go into effect?
The new pricing will go into effect on April 1, 2023.
Improving your cloud experience
As we highlighted in our recent announcement introducing Akamai Connected Cloud, we have been hard at work to scale our global network and infrastructure services. We’re also continuing to invest in our cloud computing services, and we’re excited about the new and improved services on our roadmap.
Network updates to connect existing core sites to the Akamai backbone
Capacity improvements and the introduction of new core and distributed sites
Recently released certifications for ISO, SOC 2, and HIPAA standards compliance
Product updates and global rollout for additional cloud primitives
Since Akamai’s acquisition of Linode in early 2022, we’ve been hard at work to bring the platforms together under one roof. With the announcement of Akamai Connected Cloud, Linode is now fully integrated into the Akamai brand. Going forward, Linode’s services will be referred to as Akamai’s cloud computing services.
What is Akamai Connected Cloud? Akamai Connected Cloud is a massively distributed edge and cloud platform for cloud computing, security, and content delivery. Akamai’s cloud computing services include the essential compute, storage, networking, database, and container management cloud services required to build, deploy, and secure applications and workloads everywhere businesses connect online. The cloud computing services running on Akamai Connected Cloud enable companies to distribute workloads and applications across the continuum of computing — from core to edge — to meet the challenges of cost, performance, and scale that centralized cloud computing platforms present today.
Expanding our mission The Linode mission was about accelerating innovation by making cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible. That mission continues as part of Akamai’s bold new vision, now with the full breadth of services that developers need, running on one of the world’s most distributed cloud platforms. It also will give developers access to: Three new enterprise-scale core cloud computing sites across the U.S. and Europe. Adding to the existing 11 cloud computing sites, the new sites will plug into the Akamai backbone — connecting them to the most distributed edge network on the planet. They also become the template for 10 additional core sites we plan to roll out across the globe throughout the year. More than 50 cities in which we plan to begin rolling out distributed sites this year, to bring basic cloud computing capabilities into difficult-to-reach locations currently underserved by traditional cloud providers. These regions offer a subset of Akamai’s cloud computing services but are identical in terms of availability and performance. Aggressive new cloud egress pricing that uses the power of Akamai’s network to drive down the cost of cloud egress by bringing CDN-like economics to cloud data transfer. The new egress pricing model is designed to result in significantly discounted egress rates relative to the hyperscalers and alternative cloud providers.
New ISO, SOC 2, and HIPAA standards compliance, available immediately. Over the next few months, you’ll notice some cosmetic changes to your Linode experience — such as seeing the Akamai logo where the Linode logo appeared. We’re also working to improve the overall flow between the two sites to maintain the simplicity that developers have come to know from Linode as well as introduce both developers and enterprises to new services running on Akamai Connected Cloud. Over time, you’ll also notice other design and user experience improvements based on our product roadmap. For now, there are no changes to Linode’s social channels, so continue using them to communicate with us. What won’t change is the price-performance, portability, and award-winning support that developers love. We appreciate the trust you put in us and we’re excited to help you build, secure, and deploy your modern applications on a cloud built for the future.
I am excited to announce that Linode has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Akamai. You can read the official press release in our press room.
First things first: For the immediate future, we will continue to operate as we always have. Akamai has no intention of changing what has made us successful. This acquisition will propel us both forward — not take anything away. Linode will soon be able to call on the power of Akamai to offer entirely new products, services, expertise, locations, and scale, while Akamai will be able to tap into Linode’s deep expertise in compute, storage, and on-demand infrastructure-as-a-service.
If you don’t already know Akamai, they’ve been around since the early days of the web. They invented the CDN and operate the world’s most sophisticated content delivery platform. Over the years, they’ve added world class security and edge solutions to their portfolio, among other things.
There is natural synergy between Akamai and Linode, not only in our missions and cultures, but in the potent combination of strengths we each bring to the table. Combining Linode’s compute and storage products with Akamai’s serverless, CDN, and security solutions, will give customers a broader range of services to build, modernize, and scale the next generation of applications.
Today, we start a new chapter in Linode’s story – one that strengthens our position in a market increasingly looking for alternatives. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022. In the meantime, we want to thank you — our customers — for supporting and empowering us to make cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible.
