Does Linode/Akamai maintain privacy about which username owns instances?
First and foremost, let me make it clear that I'm not talking about WHOIS privacy. That's already been covered in this community question, and I'm well aware of it:
https://www.linode.com/community/questions/21542/how-do-i-keep-my-privacy-when-owning-a-website
It is important for me to maintain a wall of privacy between my business website ownership and personal website ownership. Is that privacy maintained by Linode/Akamai?
As an imaginary example, if my account with username @arabicas_filerons is running two separate Linode VMs, LAMP stacks, which are hosting websites registered as:
HikingAndCampingGear.com
and
FileronsStarWarsBlog.com
…(both with WHOIS privacy, at the domain-registration level), will anyone be able to identify me as the owner of both, since they are both managed by the same Linode/Akamai account owner?
1 Reply
jhartman
Linode Staff
✓ Best Answer
As a matter of protecting the personal information of all of our customers, we do not reveal account information to anyone unable to authenticate as the owner of that account. Functionally, this means that without proper authentication (or in legal scenarios court orders), we are unable to either confirm or deny the existence of an account, let alone the services that run on that account.
Publicly available information that can be revealed through commands like whois, dig, nmap may still reveal information that confirms your website is hosted on a Linode, but again, authentication as owner would be necessary to confirm direct ownership of the IP. If you proxy/obfuscate your websites' IP addresses through a CDN like Akamai or CloudFlare, this can help provide additional protection since it can hide that your website is even using a Linode IP.