At the end of the day, I feel sorry for linode. The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way) and are often overlooked by many customers.
That difference is huge if you're doing high-bandwidth work and you run a ton of droplets.
Thanks
DO seems to be for devs farting around and kids putting up wordpress sites. Its not really competing with shops like Linode or Rackspace. That may change, but everything about DO screams, "Do not use me for production."
Meanwhile, my 7 or so production VMs on Linode are going strong and now have been migrated to their new SSD-based platform.
I was very happy with Linode, but they dragged their feet for years on it. My workload was I/O-bound and I got far more bang for my buck from DigitalOcean, so I jumped.
Linode should have taken them seriously.
But it would definitely be to Linode's benefit to gank DO's $5 option.
The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.
Having said all of that, Linode are still going very strong and remain the much better option for production stuff. I have 3 machines with DO (two $5 ones and a $40 one) and about 15 with Linode (of varying sizes) and in my opinion Linode is head and shoulders above DO in terms of features, capability, professionalism and reliability. They just need to improve their marketing.
As for the professionalism and reliability I'd love to hear more as those are items we need to be addressing immediately and the feedback would be very welcome.
Thanks
Only just seen your reply now. I have no doubt you guys are going to keep on getting better and better and if I were Linode I'd be very worried. I should have mentioned too that it's natural for their to be a capability gap at the moment - Linode's been going since 2003 IIRC so they have had a rather large head start.
In terms of reliability and professionalism, my complaints are very similar to pangram's. Another issue that bit me last week was OpenVPN failing after an apt-get update due to DO forcing a particular kernel outside of the VM.
All of these things are teething issues though and I'm sure you'll get them licked sooner or later (hence why I'm keeping the 3 VMs I have with you).
Being a hosting provider is a big, big deal. They have less margin for security errors than almost any kind of tech company.
In the VPS market it's nothing unusual to oversell CPU, you can't only have 24 VM on a single server, that doesn't work financially (except if they count threads from hyper-threading as a core but that's not dedicated).
There's probably a better way to find out...
But I think the general consensus amongst a lot of people is that DO are better suited to devs wanting to play around and Linode are better for when you want something more than that or want to push something to prod.
edit: now that I think of it, DO developed a reputation for terminating VMs with no notice if you violate their terms or do other things. I personally had my VMs terminated because I signed up for 2 accounts with the same IP. Imagine if I was hosting production content on there....
DO is great at what it does (I have 3 vms with them) but when you need more, Linode wins.
If you need a few small VPSs to play around and test things out, and are fine with the (very) occasional performance / bandwidth degradation, I don't see how Linode offers you a "much better service", at least in terms of cost.
I have a Linode VPS for production, but find myself often spinning up and tearing down DO VPSs for experimentation.
DO is cheaper but it's not quite the same level of product.