Linode , now sold as Akamai Cloud, is one of the best-known cloud hosting services, offering a range of powerful and reliable hosting solutions.
With a focus on flexibility, scalability, and performance, Linode’s hosting plans are designed to meet the needs of even the most demanding users.
What is Linode?
Linode is an American cloud hosting company founded in 2003 by Christopher Aker and based in Philadelphia. Akamai Technologies bought it in 2022 for about $900 million, and the platform is now called Akamai Cloud (you’ll still see the Linode name in the dashboard, where servers are still called “Linodes”).
It offers a variety of products and hosting plans that are designed to meet the needs of different types of users, from small businesses to large enterprises.
Its plans are priced according to the number of resources given to each server. That means you pay as you go, with no upfront payment.
Also, Linode is considered a cost-effective and reliable option for web hosting and its flexibility in hosting options and add-ons makes it a popular choice for many people.
Pros and Cons of Linode
Pros:
- Affordable pricing, with the Nanode 1 GB plan still starting at $5 per month.
- High-availability services with a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
- Optimized servers for fast loading time.
- The pay-as-you-go model allows customers to only pay for what they use.
- 33 data center regions in 26 cities across North America, South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
- Reliable, flexible, and customizable.
Cons:
- No domain registration services.
- No live chat for technical issues (chat only covers account and billing questions).
Linode Plans and Pricing
Linode offers a variety of plans from basic to pro, which are designed to meet the different needs and budgets of users. One of their hosting products is Compute.
One of the Compute options is the Shared CPU (Cloud VPS server). It’s the cheapest and the most used option with prices starting at $5 per month.
The Linode Shared CPU Plan is perfect for those looking for an affordable cloud hosting solution for their blogs, CMS, small to medium businesses, and small to medium eCommerce websites.
For the $5/month Nanode 1 GB plan, you get 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 25 GB of SSD storage, and 1 TB of transfer. Akamai still lists these exact specs on its pricing page. The screenshot below shows the full shared CPU price list as of 2026.
Does Linode accept PayPal?
Yes. Akamai Cloud accepts all major credit cards, PayPal and Google Pay, and you can keep up to six payment methods on your account. You can add PayPal from the billing page and make it your default. Just keep in mind that a valid payment method is required when you sign up, even if you’re only using the free credit.
Linode Performance
Web hosting performance is a major metric that measures how quickly a web server responds to requests.
Linode focuses on performance. This has helped them to stay at the top of the game in this competitive industry.
The three most common web hosting performance metrics are server uptime, page load time, and server Location.
1. Uptime:
Linode is a highly reliable virtual private server provider, it offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee on all Linode hardware, and on network connectivity.
This means that every 30 days, your website may face downtime for less than 5 minutes. And if your server on Linode is down for more than 0.01%, you may request a credit for that.
2. Loading speed:
Website speed is a factor that has a great influence on conversion rates as well as ranking on search engines.
In fact, a study by Akamai found that a 100-millisecond delay in load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%. An older Akamai study also found that “40% of visitors will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load”.
That is why we ran our own tests on a Linode VPS to see exactly how fast it is. In our earlier tests, we created a $5 server and installed WordPress on top of it. Here are the results:
- Linode Speed on PageSpeed Insights:
This result shows that the Largest Contentful Paint (fully loading the site) loads in 1.1 seconds, which is incredible, and this is without even optimizing the website.
- Linode Speed on Pingdom:
3. Server Locations “Datacenters”:
The location of the server has an impact on the speed of the website. The closer your server is to your customers, the faster your site will load. This is because it takes less time for data to travel from the server to the customer.
Akamai Cloud now has 33 core data center regions in 26 cities and 15 countries, with nine cities in the United States, plus locations like Toronto, São Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney. That makes it easy to pick a location close to your website’s visitors. The map below is from our original review, when there were far fewer locations.
Linode and WordPress Integration
Installing WordPress on Linode is simple thanks to the one-click WordPress app in the Marketplace (Akamai now calls these Quick Deploy Apps). The app runs on Ubuntu 24.04, lets you pick Apache or NGINX, and can set up a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for your domain. To install WordPress on Linode:
- Create a Linode VPS.
- From the market place choose WordPress.
- Choose server region for performance.
- Select server plan.
- Add server name and tags.
- Set the root password.
- Enable backups, if desired.
- Confirm options and create the server.
Read in detail how to install WordPress on Linode.
Linode Support
Customer support is important because it provides a way for customers to connect with the company and get help when they need it.
Support tickets are the main way to reach Linode’s team, and they’re answered around the clock. Unlike many unmanaged cloud providers, Akamai also has a phone line (+1 855-454-6633 toll-free in North America). Live chat exists too, but only for account and billing questions.
However, they do have huge guide tutorials covering everything related to their services. Also, they have a big community you can rely on when you need help.
Linode Alternatives
- DigitalOcean is a leading cloud service provider that provides reliable and high-performance cloud infrastructure. Read DigitalOcean review.
- Vultr one of the best cloud hosting company provides reliable hosting. Read Vultr review.
Read the DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Linode comparison.
Conclusion
Linode is easily one of the best cloud hosting providers on the market. It’s fast, reliable, simple to work with, and the Akamai backing has only made its network bigger.
It’s great value too: SSD storage, generous bandwidth, and all the popular Linux distributions with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, starting at $5 a month. If you want to know what the bigger plans cost, see our Linode pricing guide, and once your site is live, follow our tutorial to install a free SSL certificate on Linode.
If you want to start with Linode use this link to get a $100 free credit for 60 days to test their services (new customers only, and GPU plans aren’t covered).
