I'm not sure "disposable" is a good word to describe DO's approach. We do know that they cram a lot more people per host machine, though. That may be where the "treat VMs like cattle" statement was getting at.
You need only fire up a few instances of comparable type, get some CPU load, and watch some basic metrics to determine this for yourself.
OTOH the lowest ($20) tier on Linode is probably used by more serious projects that, on average, exert considerable load.
I'm not sure about that. For me, I pay the extra few bucks on Linode for the customer service, stability, and the consistent performance. I'm not running my VMs ragged, I'm just willing to pay a little more for a higher quality service.
Anecdotally, it's a quality thing for me. Digital Ocean = Economy car, Linode = A nice Hyundai sedan or a higher end Accord.
I was with Linode and had to deal with constant outages (at Fremont DC) and went through two major hacking incidents where I found out through Reddit instead of from them. I've never been with a worse provider than Linode.
That being said, I do think they're great value, and I have a reverse bidding dedicated server from Hetzner, that I use as a test and staging server. But I wouldn't dream of using them for production instances though - for the amount you'd have to pay to beef up support and get access to things like out of band console access, you might as well pay for a server from Bytemark.
> If you some evidence that DO is inferior at the same price level as Linode then you should post it.
I don't care to do this, I'm not out to prove anything. I'm here to share my experiences. Take them or leave them, I don't care either way.
If you are using DO and you like it, then stick with it. I've personally been happy with DO (for the price), but feel like you get what you pay for in this regard. Sometimes over-provisioned host machines, erratic network and disk IO, frequent maintenance windows, slow and hurried customer service.