Linode Invests $45M in New Cloud Offering

Linode, a cloud hosting provider, has made a $45 million investment in its cloud infrastructure and services offering, its largest capital investment to date.

“We decided that the best strategy was to do it big or go home,” Christopher Aker, founder and CEO of Linode, told Talkin’ Cloud. “We’ve invested in the absolute best.”

With six data centers across three continents, Linode supports 250,000 customers worldwide. According to Linode, the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform enables customers to select a plan, platform distribution and facility, and have their cloud infrastructure up and running in seconds.

“The cloud hosting industry is changing and Linode is changing with it,” Aker said in a prepared statement. “With faster Solid State Drives (SSDs), more flexible payment options and unprecedented customer support, we are not only setting a higher standard of service but are also proud to still be the only cloud hosting company built and owned 100 percent by developers.”

All new Linodes will be created exclusively on the new Linode Cloud, the company said. In addition, Linode now bundles compute, persistent storage and network transfer into a flat hourly rate that allows customers to pay for only what is used. And at the end of the month, Linode’s services are billed automatically, and customers are charged the hourly rate for a service up to its monthly cap.

Aker noted that Linode’s hourly billing can help customers manage their expenses.

“While many cloud providers have complicated and unpredictable billing where you pay separately for instance time, storage, network transfer, IP addresses, each keystroke, etc. – we kept pricing simple by integrating everything into one price,” Aker wrote in a Linode blog post.

Linode has transitioned to native SSDs (solid state drives) that it claims offer up to 100X performance improvement over previous hard disk drives (HDDs). The company also has doubled RAM across all of its plans and increased network throughput to each host server from 2 Gbps to 40 Gbps.

Aker discussed Linode’s $45 million investment in detail in a blog post here. He pointed out that Linode is committed to ongoing upgrades for its customers as well.