Linode was founded in 2003 by Christopher Aker in Galloway, New Jersey, making it one of the oldest cloud VPS providers in operation. The company pioneered the commercial Linux VPS market alongside Slicehost (acquired by Rackspace in 2008) and became a benchmark reference for developer-focused cloud hosting for nearly 20 years. Akamai Technologies acquired Linode in 2022 for $900 million and has since rebranded the platform as Akamai Cloud, though the Linode product and brand remain active.
The platform’s philosophy has been consistent across its history: transparent pricing, generous included bandwidth, straightforward billing, and a stable Linux environment without the complexity and pricing opacity of hyperscalers. A Linode account in 2026 feels familiar to developers who have used it for years — the provisioning flow, the pricing structure, and the documentation quality remain strengths.
Shared CPU plans start at $5 per month for 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25GB SSD, and 1TB of included monthly bandwidth. This is the standard entry point for development environments, small web applications, and personal projects. The 4GB Shared CPU at $20 per month is the most commonly used tier for production web applications and small databases. Dedicated CPU plans starting at $36 per month provide dedicated vCPUs for workloads that require consistent performance without CPU steal from neighboring instances.
The $100 new account promotional credit is one of the most generous trial offers in cloud compute. New accounts receive $100 in credit that applies to any Linode service within 60 days — enough to run a 1GB Shared CPU instance for approximately 20 months at zero cost for evaluation, or to test higher-tier configurations for several months.
Egress bandwidth pricing is among the lowest in the non-hyperscaler category at $0.005 per GB in most regions — lower than Vultr ($0.01/GB) in comparable locations. Included transfer allowances are generous: a 1GB Shared CPU includes 1TB of outbound transfer per month, and transfer is pooled across all instances in an account.
The Akamai acquisition has brought tension in the Linode community. The rebranding effort created confusion between the longstanding Linode product identity and the Akamai Cloud direction. Some longtime users have noted pricing adjustments and feature changes post-acquisition. The Linode product continues to serve its original developer audience effectively, but the long-term product roadmap under Akamai’s ownership adds uncertainty that was absent during independent operation.