We’re celebrating our 14th birthday!
We’d like to thank you, our customers, for your business and support. I’d also like to thank our entire staff for their dedication and commitment to you and to each other. We’ve got a great team helping great customers. Shameless plug: we’re hiring!
It’s been a busy year – we’ve kept our heads down working on many efforts. Here are some highlights:
Linode Block Storage service (in beta)
The Linode Block Storage service allows you to create and attach additional storage volumes to your Linode instances. Block Storage Volumes are highly available, fast, and inexpensive – $0.10 per GB (free during the beta).
The Block Storage service is currently in beta, in the Newark region only. We welcome any and all feedback, so if you’re interested in trying it out (it’s free!) or want to learn more, please see the original announcement for details.
New API and Linode Manager (both early access)
The new Linode API (documentation | announcement) is a RESTful, modern implementation for Linode’s services. It will become the foundation of all current and future services.
The new Linode Manager is an open source, in-browser application. Our objectives for the new Manager are simplicity, great UI/UX, a streamlining of many of the existing workflows, and to build this as the platform for our future.
Both the API and the new Manager are still in active development, however you can use it right now. Again, we appreciate all feedback!
API Documentation: https://developers.linode.com/
New Linode Manager: https://cloud.linode.com/
Linode’s Global Network
In continuation of the work mentioned in our last networking post, our network engineering team has been busy building out Linode’s global backbone. We’re building our own transit backbone across the planet. More on that in an upcoming blog post next week.
Dallas2
We’ve expanded our Dallas, TX region with the opening of a second Dallas datacenter. This is a brand new, state of the art facility, and is seamlessly integrated into our Dallas region. There are already thousands of customers in this new facility. More detailed information in an upcoming blog post.
New Office
In addition to all of the hard work our core team at Linode has been working on over the past several months, we’ve also had a team of Linode contractors hard at work on our new office space in Old City Philadelphia. Progress is moving fast and our team is excited about moving into our newly restored digs at the end of this year. Once we’ve moved in, we welcome you to come pay us a visit if you happen to be in the city!
Thank you again for your support over the last 14 years. We are eternally grateful for each and every one of you.
Sincerely,
Christopher S. Aker, CEO
Comments (51)
You are hiring, but I assume you are not hiring for any remote only positions?
@Ilkka Thank you for asking, you would be correct – we are not currently looking for remote positions.
Happy birthday Linode!
The new Cloud manager requires hourly billing accounts? I hope this hourly billing is not the direction all of Linode is headed as opposed to the all you can eat monthly model. But at this point it said I’m on a legacy account and need to convert to hourly billing to log in.
@artem Each plan on the new metered billing has a cap per month, you won’t pay more on for your services on that billing type compared to the legacy prepaid model.
Yay! Give everyone a hug, from me!
Happy birthday, Linode!
Awesome! Happy birthday, Linode!
Artem, the hourly billing model is actually a better deal than monthly. It’s still “all you can eat” but billed for the time you have the service, as opposed to buying a month in advance.
Further reading: https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/billing-and-payments/#how-hourly-billing-works
Hey Linode! Happy Birthday! We’re excited about block storage here! If all goes well, is there a vague ETA for rolling out block storage in other data centers? **cough** Fremont **cough cough**
@trevor No ETA yet, sorry!
@Alex, @Soh, there’s a few of us lucky folks who are grandfathered in to a percent discount on our monthly plans. That’s probably Artem’s concern.
@artem Hourly is so much better than the old monthly model. I would expect Linode to continue to limit new features/upgrades to hourly accounts only.
Good times! Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday Linode!
The new portal looks fantastic! So far it’s very quick and nice to look at. I’m going to try out the block storage shortly!
@Jay After all the hard work that has been done, your comment means a lot – thank you!
Any plan to look at the odd pricing discrepancy for disk, bandwidth and CPU cores? 4GB linodes are not 4x better than 1GB, and the 12GB is incredibly poor value by comparison 🙁
@Ben We’re always looking to upgrade and rework plans. The current plans available (aside from the recently released high memory plans and the $5 plan) have each had multiple upgrades, keeping their price point while upgrading their allotted resources. We plan to continue that trend 🙂
Is Glish currently not available in the beta Manager?
Also, do you plan on phasing out the classic, lo-fi manager?
@William Glish isn’t available in it just yet, but it will be. No ETA on that just yet.
We don’t have anything to announce regarding phasing out the classic manager, but you should expect all important functionalities on the new manager if that did come about.
Wow! Just, wow! Is it really another birthday for you folks already? And wow, a 14th birthday to boot! Well, Linode, what else can I say, but, Happy 14th anniversary of existence! 🙂
Whoa! Philly? I’ll be over when you open, I’m over in University City. Where in Old City are you at?
@Greg We’re incredibly excited for the new office! You’ll find us at the old bank on N3rd street:
https://technical.ly/philly/2015/12/11/linode-real-world-philadelphia-office/
Happy 14th birthday! Looking great!
Wooow, the new mananger looks awesome! Wonderful job!
Happy 14th Birthday Linode 🙂 Looks Like a Bright Future is Ahead. Keep it up.
The manager looks great. Is there going to be a link to Longview? That’s actually mostly what I use the manager for.
Really looking forward to block storage in Singapore!! Thanks team.
Hi, I sent feedback about the new linode manager to the feedback address but I got a bounce message:
“We’re writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (devs) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group”.
Should I just ignore this, or do I need to e-mail someone else? Thanks!
@Ben Sorry to hear that isn’t working, please feel free to either make a forum post or open a ticket with us with the feedback. We can forward that to our Dev team. Thank you!
Happy B’Day
Do you have any plan for Cloud Firewalls?
@sss Thank you! We currently don’t have any plans for a firewall service, but it certainly is in the request list 🙂
Why do your plans have an inverse volume discount? Spending $20 on a server gets you far less resources than spending $5 four times.
Examples.
Bandwidth:
$5 server: $5 / TB.
$10 server: $5 / TB.
$20 server: $6.6 / TB.
$40 server: $10 / TB.
Storage:
$5 server: $0.25 / GB.
$10 server: $0.33 / GB.
$20 server: $0.42 / GB.
$40 server: $0.42 / GB.
Something is clearly not right here, a plan that costs twice as much should come with exactly twice the resources, or more, definitely not less.
Happy 14th birthday! Live long and prosper 🙂
(need to swicth to hourly billing to test the new manager…)
@John: Well, you’re free to go find another reputable VPS host that scales their resources by price the way you seem to think Linode should. Gonna take you a while.
Do you have any promo t-shirts available?
We do! Please either open a ticket or send a message over FB with your billing info + shirt size and we’ll take care of you.
“We’re building our own transit backbone across the planet. More on that in an upcoming blog post next week.”
It’s been over a week, where is the new blog post regarding the network upgrades?
Gratz, linode! I switched to you for my dev/honeypot years ago, and am glad I did! Stable, prompt updates and alerts. Perfectly meets my vps needs!
Love the vagrant linode support as well! Makes dev instances a breeze.
Hey good news hearing about this block storage! I just didnt understand the difference of having a block storage attached to a linode VS using a linode with more disk space? I know it’s still beta and only Newark, but could I use this block storage to extend my linode size? Currently I have a linode at dallas and most of the time 90% of memory and CPU are completely free. I just need to use my plane cause of the space I need. If I could use a cheaper linode I would but unfortunatelly the cheaper linodes have also a cap in the disk size. So with this block storage news, could I use the cheapest linode available and attach a block storage to it?
You can use the block storage to increase the storage of any of your servers, so you would definitely be able to attach the desired block storage size to the cheapest Linode as needed.
Happy 14th birthday
If I’m forced to switch to hourly billing to use new services then I will plan to switch to AWS. Thanks.
Happy birthday, Linode! I’m a proud customer. Your services has really been a great change for my business. 🙂 Keep up the great work!
Block storage should come at lower price or offer additional functionality such as mount over NFS or mount on multiple linodes. We should also be able to take manual or automated snapshots of a volume. Also looking forward for high CPU and/or custom (CPU, RAM, HDD) linodes.
Comments such as “Hourly is so much better than the old monthly model” are not made by anyone that has been prepaying for years. If you have servers configured for the entire month, there is no pricing advantage to hourly and the switch to hourly means you’ll be paying either 10% (one year prepaid) or 15% (two year prepaid) more under hourly billing.
I’ve been prepaying for the 15% discount for over 6 years, and as Dilton suggests, removing the discount will cause many of these accounts to sadly leave Linode, either because of the cost or because of the hurt that removing a loyalty perk will result in. You have to remember, the annual discount was implemented over 9 years ago. It’s easy for those that have never been a part of it to tell us to tell us the hourly plan is better.
While I understand the hourly model is one Linode wants to embrace for all and makes sense for them, and I have no problems with it myself, unless there @caker finds a way to provide a similar loyalty break, the price increase will greatly diminish loyalty of clients like us, much like we now already feel the line has been drawn in the sand and we will never be using the new Linode manager, and someday will have to leave. That will be hard when you’ve been proud to see Linode’s success over the years and have been so happy to be a part of it.
We certainly hear this and it’s being discussed at lengths among the company. We won’t just hard-push everyone from prepaid over to metered, we’re looking for solutions that will incentivize the transition over. It’s amazing to have had you guys with us for so long and we have no intention to disrespect what we’ve built together 🙂
I have some feedback on the beta block storage service:
1) It rocks! Thanks for finally rolling this out.
2) See #1.
Now using this on a 100gb volume and enjoying lots of breathing room for scheduled backups. Do you have any update on an ETA for the final release?
We’re so glad to hear that! We don’t have an ETA yet but we are moving to include more datacenters in this beta soon, then work from there.
Please bring block storage to Europe (london)! Would really help with backups.
For followers, block storage is available in Fremont now (guess they haven’t blogged about it yet)…woot!