What are Akamai prices?

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Posted by SuziC, 05-07-2014, 07:54 AM
I am trying to get an idea no how much it would cost to get Akamai. What are some costs you've heard of or are paying for Akamai? I am curious to know for both just CDN and the full ADC package if you have the details. I did see this post http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=918241, but it's from 2010, links are broken, and the posts mentioned are just really out of date. I haven't found anything really up to date and as you probably know, Akamai does not advertise their costs. Thanks for any help you can give! S
Posted by llothar, 05-07-2014, 08:11 PM
Akamai only gives personalized offers. I heared about price differences upto factor 20x for differentcustomers.
Posted by Mr Terrence, 05-07-2014, 08:51 PM
Akamai only deals with enterprise customers so make sure you have you cheque book in hand when you contact them.
Posted by avifreedman, 05-07-2014, 10:50 PM
Being very careful here not to step on any NDAs... Dan Rayburn posts pricing reports 1 or 2 times/year, including Akamai, though more focused on streaming. Just google, I'm too new to post a URL. As mentioned above, Akamai pricing is enterprise-focused and certainly premium, but it's generally worth asking, as long as you're looking to pay in the thousands/month. I believe there are also some providers they work with that resell them that work with smaller customers/volume, though that generally won't include WAF, some reporting, and other advanced "solution"ish features. Also worth noting, as far as I know they {still} don't accept porn customers. Avi
Posted by JakeMS, 05-08-2014, 06:54 AM
I would avoid akamai personally, not because of the service, but lack of visible costs, or at least estimates. I always avoid services which refuse to tell you a price or estimate until you sign a contract :-). There's always cloudflare or various other competitors you can get costs from :-).
Posted by SuziC, 05-08-2014, 03:35 PM
I've still been searching around and found some good info. Google doesn't seem to understand I want the price of Akamai, not the price of the stock. Here is the link for the Dan Rayburn pricing report. It's done very nicely for 2012, but for 2013 it's in a 40 minute video (link at the top of the 2012 article). http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2012/...this-year.html I also found some price mentions from 2014: http://www.fromdev.com/2014/04/Akama...omparison.html http://www.cdn77.com/akamai-vs-cdn77 Yes, the lack of transparent pricing is a turn-off, but I can't not consider Akamai because of it. Our company is looking for a CDN and I'm just presenting the options.
Posted by rasputin, 05-08-2014, 03:46 PM
Has Akamai moved to a pay for their bandwidth model now? I've not paid much attention since we removed their servers from our network way back when. The model used to be, Akamai shipped you (ISP) servers, you plugged them in and all the content your dialup users would get would come from the Akamai servers, locally. It was marketed as a cost savings for the ISP since their content delivery was localized and cached, and your userbase would benefit from the acceleration, and Akamai would get free bandwidth which in turn was also providing the localization and acceleration for other ISPs. In turn Akamai charged their clients for this service. I'm just assuming that they are actually paying for their own bandwidth now and paying ISP's for the colocation of their gear. Otherwise, there's not much point/benefit to the ISP any longer. I'm truly mesmerized that this model made it as long as it did. Seems in retrospect it was more beneficial to Akamai than the ISP.
Posted by avifreedman, 05-08-2014, 03:51 PM
Disclaimer: I worked at Akamai for 10 years, left 5 years ago, and ran the network group from late 1999 to 2001. rasputin - Akamai, Google, and Netflix all do ISP depoyment now and all do save themselves and ISPs money. The bar's gone up. Back in 1999 when bandwidth was $hundreds/mbit the power (for ISP) and equipment capex (for Akamai) were easily offset. Nowadays the #s need to be in the gigabits for those things to make sense, but since the total pie is in the hundreds of terabits, they do make sense at scale, just not for 2-4 box deployments like in the old days.
Posted by rasputin, 05-08-2014, 03:56 PM
Yeah, I should have stated how long ago this was. Back then I received some pretty nice toys from Akamai. Ironically one of the things they sent me was stolen by the TSA. Pretty nice Swiss Army Knife with the Akamai logo on it. Found that rather ironic when some years later the co-Founder was killed on a flight on 9/11. I am pretty sure we still have a toy gun around here that shot rubber rings... Miss those days when companies sent cool stuff to the people they did business with. I hear you, keeping repeat traffic localized is a lot more efficient, even today.
Posted by avifreedman, 05-08-2014, 04:26 PM
Well, budgets were pretty crazy in 2000. The Swiss Army knives were the most popular but we actually got in 'trouble' at NANOG for the guns. Offended the midwest sensibilities of the people who had been running NANOG at the time.
Posted by rasputin, 05-08-2014, 04:31 PM
Party poopers! My son still plays what that thing here at the office. Somewhere out there there is a TSA agent with a very nice Swiss Army knife. You know, at that time you could still fly with those things. I had placed it in my laptop case and in my suitcase because I had another laptop and carry on and after a week all the airline could produce was the laptop bag. Someone had taken the laptop bag out of my luggage, stole the laptop, contents and then threw the laptop bag in a lost and found bin. US Air, I think it was actually issued a nice check to replace it. Unfortunately the knife could not be replaced. Still have that nice case it came in. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Posted by hsie, 05-12-2014, 04:15 AM
hi, Akamai is now easy to you, just google with XCDN, they are the reseller.
Posted by David@CDNsun, 05-12-2014, 08:02 AM
Akamai Swiss Army knifes? That's nice
Posted by SuziC, 05-15-2014, 05:17 AM
Thanks for the help. I proposed 5 different providers. It came down to Akamai vs Incapsula and we're going to do a trial with Incapsula. FYI, the XCDN option from Akamai isn't exactly the same as Akamai. It's based on Aqua Ion, but with less features and support. It does run on a pay for bandwidth model with paid add ons.

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