Linode Review: Plans, Prices & Specs

What Akamai Cloud (Linode) is today

Linode launched in 2003 as one of the first companies to rent Linux virtual machines by the month, and it spent two decades building a reputation for plain pricing and a developer-first control panel. Akamai bought the company in 2022 and folded it into its own portfolio. The product line is now marketed as Akamai Cloud Computing: the pricing pages, the legal agreements and the product catalog all sit on akamai.com, while the control panel, the API and the sign-up flow still live on linode.com. Nothing about the underlying service was renamed out of existence – a virtual machine is still called a Linode, the API still answers at api.linode.com, and the Service Level Addendum is still signed with Linode LLC.

Who it suits

This is infrastructure for people who are comfortable on a command line. You get a virtual machine, a public IPv4 address, an IPv6 address and a root password; everything above that layer is yours to install. Developers, small agencies running client applications, and teams that want predictable invoices instead of a metered bill with forty line items are the natural audience. It is a poor fit if you want a control panel with a one-click mailbox and a website builder – there is no cPanel bundled, no free domain and no shared hosting tier.

Pricing and the billing model

Plans are published as a flat monthly price with an hourly equivalent, and the hourly rate is what you actually pay – usage is rounded up to the hour and invoiced at the start of the following month. There is no introductory rate and no renewal markup, so the price you see is the price in month thirteen. The entry point is the Nanode at $5 a month (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB disk). Shared-CPU plans then step through $12, $24, $48 and $96 for 2, 4, 8 and 16 GB of memory. Dedicated-CPU plans, where the cores are not shared with neighbours, start at $36 a month for 2 vCPU and 4 GB. High Memory plans trade disk for RAM – 24 GB of memory on 20 GB of storage for $60. GPU instances are sold too, from RTX 4000 Ada cards billed by the hour up to RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell configurations that require an access request.

Regional price differences

Most of the 33 regions charge the same rate, but two do not: Jakarta and Sao Paulo carry a surcharge. The Nanode that costs $5 in Newark costs $6 in Jakarta and $7 in Sao Paulo, and backup add-ons scale up in the same way. The plan prices in our table are the standard-region rates.

Bandwidth and overage

Each older plan family includes a monthly transfer allowance that grows with the plan – 1 TB on the Nanode, 4 TB on a 4 GB instance, up to 20 TB on the largest shared-CPU sizes. Allowances are pooled across the account, so a fleet of small instances shares one bucket. Inbound traffic is free, and local IPv6 traffic historically did not count. Once the pool is exhausted, egress is billed at $0.005 per GB, which works out to $5 per TB. Two caveats matter: the newest G8 dedicated plans and the accelerated compute plans ship with no bundled transfer at all, so every gigabyte out is billed; and Object Storage has its own allowance of 1 TB free egress per month on top of $0.02 per GB stored.

Support and management

Instances are unmanaged by default. The support team answers tickets, email and phone around the clock and will help with the platform, but not with your application stack. If you want hands on your servers, the paid Managed Service costs $100 per compute instance per month with no contract, and adds monitoring with incident response. Between those two extremes sit the self-service building blocks: Managed Databases for PostgreSQL, MySQL and Valkey, a managed Kubernetes engine where you pay only for the nodes plus $60 a month for a high-availability control plane, and a Marketplace of one-click application images. Free bundled extras include DDoS protection, cloud firewall rules, DNS hosting and basic monitoring.

Backups and snapshots

The Backup Service is an add-on priced per plan rather than per gigabyte, which makes it easy to budget: $2 a month on the Nanode, $2.50 on the 2 GB plan, $5 on a 4 GB plan, $10 on 8 GB and $20 on 16 GB. It keeps automatic daily and weekly snapshots plus one manual snapshot slot. Block Storage volumes are separate at $0.10 per GB per month.

Verdict

Akamai Cloud is one of the easier clouds to forecast. Flat rates, a fat bundled transfer allowance on the classic plans, cheap overage and a published 99.99% uptime commitment for generally available compute add up to a sensible default for a self-managed production server. The reservations are the lack of any money-back guarantee, the $100 per instance price of real management, and the fact that the newest plan families quietly dropped bundled transfer – read the plan family before you size a bandwidth-heavy workload.