Not to diss Linode, I use them myself, but they're not the cheapest. It's quite evident to me that these free upgrades are a defensive tactic.
How much memory or disk space would $20 a month get from other providers 3 years ago?
I'll pay the extra few bucks for reliability and decent uptime.
I had very frequent downtimes and the support was often unhelpful. I heard from others that it was just the datacenter that my VPS was on and other DC weren't as bad, but I guess it gave me enough of a bad impression that I went back to Linode anyway.
Linode it is!
Also, my Linodes seem to have much more consistent CPU performance. With DO it's been very hit or miss at that 1/2GB size. They may be cramming too many VMs on their hosts.