SC

Strategy Canon

Linode: sourced choices

41 product and go-to-market choices, oldest first. Back to the case study

  1. 2003Product · Core design choice Aker built the service around server virtualization, which he describes as giving customers the shared equipment cost of shared hosting with the privacy of dedicated hosting. LN1
  2. 2003Go_To_Market · Acquisition route Aker names word of mouth as Linode's primary acquisition route and says he treated customer service as marketing, since one bad experience would be repeated to ten people. LN2
  3. 2003-06-16Product · Launch infrastructure Aker launched the service on June 16, 2003 after building it alone over seven months on two machines, a switch and remote-management equipment bought on eBay, housed in 14U of leased data-center space. LN2
  4. 2008Product · Hypervisor Linode ran customer servers on the Xen hypervisor from 2008 until its 2015 move to KVM. LN18
  5. 2008-09-19Product · Entry plan and administration model The entry plan cost $19.95 a month for 360MB of RAM, 12GB of storage and 200GB of transfer, with root access and a choice of Linux distributions but no cPanel-style control panel. LN7
  6. 2010-02-09Product · Provisioning automation Linode introduced StackScripts, scripts that configure a new server on first boot, and made them usable through the Linode API. LN8
  7. 2011-07-13Product · Load balancing Linode launched NodeBalancers, a managed load balancer priced at $19.95 a month, in July 2011. LN57
  8. 2012-03-02Go_To_Market · Incident communication 2012 After an intruder used its customer-service portal, Linode stated the activity was limited to eight customers with references to bitcoin and that security was its 'number one priority'. LN9
  9. 2013-04Product · Account security After the April 2013 intrusion Linode announced plans to add two-factor authentication. LN26
  10. 2013-04-12Go_To_Market · Incident response 2013 Linode reset all Linode Manager passwords after detecting suspicious activity and maintained that card numbers remained encrypted, while the attackers publicly disputed its account. LN13
  11. 2013-05-06Product · NextGen resource upgrade Linode's 2013 NextGen upgrade doubled RAM and CPU cores and raised bandwidth tenfold on existing plans, while the $20 plan kept 24GB of conventional disk rather than SSD. LN12
  12. 2013-09Product · Monitoring Linode launched Longview, a Linux system-performance monitoring service. LN26
  13. 2014-04-17Product · SSD migration Linode announced a $45 million upgrade that moved plans to SSD storage, doubled RAM at unchanged prices, raised per-server network capacity from 2Gbps to 40Gbps and let existing customers migrate from their dashboards with about 20 minutes of downtime. LN15
  14. 2014-04-17Go_To_Market · Price held, resources added In April 2014 Linode kept its entry price at $20 a month ($0.03 an hour) while doubling RAM and moving to SSDs. LN15
  15. 2014-04-28Product · Adjacent services By April 2014 Linode sold NodeBalancer load balancing and managed services alongside its virtual servers. LN16
  16. 2014-06-16Go_To_Market · $10 plan and hourly pricing Linode added a $10-a-month plan ($0.015 an hour) with 1GB RAM and 24GB SSD, matching the specification of DigitalOcean's comparable plan. LN17
  17. 2014-07-10Go_To_Market · Capacity constraint Aker says Linode was heavily capex-constrained for several years because each server cost about as much as a car. LN2
  18. 2014-07-11Go_To_Market · Pricing structure Aker says Linode charged a single flat fee with everything bundled, in contrast to rivals whose pricing he calls complex, variable and unpredictable. LN3
  19. 2014-07-12Go_To_Market · Marketing allocation By 2014 Linode was investing in the Linode Library of documentation, conference attendance and online advertising, which Aker said was converting extremely well. LN4
  20. 2014-07-12Go_To_Market · Customer mix Aker described a 50/50 split between business and consumer customers and between domestic and foreign customers, with a bias toward small and medium-sized businesses. LN4
  21. 2014-07-14Go_To_Market · Financing: equity declined Aker declined venture investment despite strong VC interest, judging that none of the three reasons to take it (growth capital, investor expertise, personal liquidity) applied to him. LN6
  22. 2014-07-14Go_To_Market · Financing: debt and personal funds Linode asked banks for loans of $50,000 to $100,000, was refused by lenders who saw it as 'selling imaginary computers', and funded growth by other means including second mortgages. LN6
  23. 2015-06-16Product · KVM migration Linode moved to KVM virtualization and claimed a 2GB KVM Linode scored above 2400 on UnixBench against 800 on Xen. LN18
  24. 2015-06-16Go_To_Market · Comparative customer testimony Linode's KVM announcement quoted a customer, PlushForums, reporting KVM Linodes 84% faster than DigitalOcean core for core, and claimed more than 350,000 customers. LN18
  25. 2016-01Product · Network dependency Linode's retrospective on the attacks, as summarized by customers, identified reliance on colocation providers whose IP transit capacity proved smaller than represented and infrastructure reachable without VPN protection. LN21
  26. 2016-01-02Product · Attack mitigation During the holiday attacks Linode bought dedicated transit with DDoS mitigation on January 2, 2016 and temporarily disabled AXFR zone transfers on its DNS service. LN20
  27. 2016-01-04Go_To_Market · Incident communication 2016 Linode apologized for the lack of detail in its status-page updates and used BGP communities to block traffic from Asia Pacific, the Middle East, South America and other regions. LN19
  28. 2016-01-29Product · Network remedy Linode's own retrospective on the 2015-16 attacks said its colocation providers had less IP transit capacity than Linode had been led to believe, and committed to stop relying on them by backhauling 200 gigabits of transit and peering capacity. LN53
  29. 2017Product · Block storage Linode opened a Block Storage beta in Newark with 1-1024GB volumes, triple replication and $0.10 per GB pricing, free during the beta. LN22
  30. 2017-02-14Go_To_Market · $5 plan Linode introduced a $5 plan with 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD and 1TB transfer, against 512MB on DigitalOcean's and Lightsail's $5 plans. LN23
  31. 2018-06-12Go_To_Market · Reinvestment of profits Aker described Linode as growing its top line with 'years and years of margins to work with', investing in headcount, salaries and benefits and in a $5 million Philadelphia headquarters bought in December 2015; the company reported 150 staff and 400,000 clients. LN52
  32. 2019-10Product · Object storage Linode introduced S3-compatible object storage. LN26
  33. 2019-11-19Product · Managed Kubernetes beta Linode opened Linode Kubernetes Engine to beta testers. LN24
  34. 2020Product · Managed Kubernetes availability Linode Kubernetes Engine became generally available in four regions with the Kubernetes control plane included at no extra charge. LN25
  35. 2020Go_To_Market · Kubernetes pricing Linode positioned its Kubernetes service on cost, including the control plane free against larger clouds that charged for it. LN25
  36. 2021-06-03Go_To_Market · Positioning Aker positioned Linode as an alternative cloud serving smaller enterprises and individual developers, leaving mass-scale enterprise use to the hyperscalers. LN27
  37. 2022-02-15Go_To_Market · Sale of the company Linode agreed to sell all its outstanding equity to Akamai for about $900 million in cash. LN28
  38. 2022-02-16Product · Footprint at sale Linode operated 11 regional data centers when Akamai agreed to buy it. LN32
  39. 2022-08-09Go_To_Market · Revenue at sale Akamai reported that Linode contributed about $32 million of revenue in the second quarter of 2022 and that it had been growing about 15% a year before the acquisition. LN50
  40. 2023-02-14Product · Platform under new owner Akamai relaunched the Linode platform as Akamai Connected Cloud, committing to new US and international sites beyond Linode's 11 data centers and to lower data-transfer pricing. LN38
  41. 2023-02-15Go_To_Market · Brand and price after sale Under Akamai the Linode logo gave way to Akamai's and price increases were announced for April 1, 2023. LN37