I had a Linode 512 and switched to a 2x512 Dropplet setup and put my Database on one 512 and my Rails app server on the other.
My stuff runs as quickly if not quicker and I spend $10/mo less. In addition to this I also have a clear scaling path (e.g. If my DB grows I can up it to a 1gb. If my traffic grows I can either move the app server to a 1gb or maybe get a few more 512's and setup a load balancer.)
I was dubious about switching back to DigitalOcean as I was worried about how cheap they were offering packages. I bought a DigitalOcean VPS that had slightly better specs than my Linode and ran some tests. Just a few like response time on the site they were both holding, I/O and a Redis stress test and Linode seemed to come out marginally on top.
It took me a fairly long time to setup the dev environment so I was a bit pissed.
I do this with Linode stackscripts, and I couldn't live without it. Unfortunately DigitalOcean don't support stackscripts as of yet. And their support didn't want to tell me if they will ever support it.
RAM is the only thing that I feel Linode is lacking as of late.