Fyi: Linode rebrand

[David A. Wheeler]

Fyi:

Aa you may know, the us.metamath.org site runs on Linode, a well-respected cloud service.

However, Akamai acquired Linode in early 2022.  It's just been announced that Linode’s services will now be renamed to Akamai’s cloud computing services:
https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/a-bold-new-approach-to-the-cloud/

As long as this is just a name change, that's fine. However, there are definitely some concerned that this will lead to changes that would dramatically increase costs and make it a poor match for our purposes, because Akamai is kmown for enterprise services that make no sense for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34799273

Should they change things to make them a bad fit, I'll post about the problem and look at options. There are some plausible alternatives I've heard of. They include Digital Ocean,  Vultr, Hetzner,   Vultr, Hetzner, mnx.io, Vercel, Netlify, Heroku, and of course the big ones (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud).

Anyway, I just wanted everyone to know that I am aware of this business announcement and I am monitoring it.

[heiph...@wilsonb.com]

Yikes. That's a tad worrisome. Thanks for these updates.

Hetzner has some machines that support Alder Lake's relatively new TME-MK. I've
not looked deeply into whether they've exposed that into their products, but
it's probably worth looking into if you're particularly security-conscious.

Another one to add to the list is Greenhost [0], based in the Netherlands.
They're not particularly price-competetive, but the company is invested in
doing social good. They have a reputation for active lobbying against bills
that are perceived as harming user privacy, transparency about their efforts
and shortcomings with sustainability practices, etc.

[0]:https://greenhost.net/