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Comment by rablackburn | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious to the reasoning behind a decision like this.

Part of what Akamai bought was the Linode brand name. Anecdotally as a user Linode’s brand seems to have a fair bit of value and positive reputation. Havent they just written off a non-trivial amount of value from what they just acquired?

Or is it as simple as they really want brand consistency?

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I anecdotally agree. For some reason I find Akamai’s brand in general very uninspiring and this particular rebrand is the typical low effort corporate affair… they’ve literally swapped the logo and kept all the Linode green elsewhere as well as various mentions of Linode everywhere that haven’t been updated and now look out of place.

You would be surprised how deep branding tentacles reach. Sometimes up to constants in protocols that need a migration cycle to change. If you want to transition without stopping all active development and operations, you have to do it gradually.

It's strange how the brand means so much. They've made it obvious to me that I (small time solo developer but long time Linode customer) am not their target market now.

I was uncertain I would keep using them after the acquisition, but oddly (and despite no technical changes) this has convinced me I need to leave. The only associations I have with the Akamai brand are "enterprise" and "overpriced."

Exactly...I pay $$ for linode as soon as that turns to $$$, count me out.

Checkout Hetzner. You will love their infrastructure. You will love their price.

Do you perhaps have any affiliation to disclose? This reads like ad copy.

Probably just likes Hetzner. I've recommended them here before. They have some of the best priced dedis.

He probably is just a normal Hetzner user.

Do you know how Hetzner is when something happens?

Say you receive a fraudulent DMCA takedown request. Or someone doesn't like what you're hosting there (like the recent core-js situation where they receive a lot of hate) and somehow sends a complain/report to Hetzner.

Would Hetzner shutdown the VPS first and ask questions later? Or would they approach me first?

I'm taking this chance to move from Linde to a different provider, so I'm interested in how they handle situations like this.

By law Linode is supposed to turn off and wait for a counter claim. Most companies forward and wait forward. Hetzner is not fast to react on abuse and are quite large.

Can confirm. For me, Hetzner has been great.

It also makes no sense to me, if you want an offering with a different name, just add it to the UI and call the same backend to provision the resources. I bet the majority of customers will never know or care that the other one is the same thing with a different name.

Our marketing team is crap, there’s no consistency e.g. we acquired prolexic and still use that brand.

Internally a number of the engineers are scratching our heads at this one.

probably execs wanted to abosord linode the easiest way posible

I don't particularly see Linode as a valuable brand, more one to avoid.

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