IME, AWS is slower to set up initially. Since you are starting out with it, I'd say it will take longer to do things "the AWS way". This article should help quite a bit with that part.

The real trick with AWS, IMO, is figuring out what you want to do yourself vs what you want to have hosted. For example, they offer a hosted cache such as memcached or Redis. For my app, I run Redis myself as it required roughly 15 minutes of work total to set up and maintain in 2014. OTOH, that's not nearly the case with Postgres. I spent a day and a half tuning the version I host, switching to RDS, then switching back because RDS was too slow (even though by the specs, it was using a more powerful VM than the EC2 box I was running my instance on).

Basically, once you grok AWS, things become more productive AND you don't need to spend time on doing things like setting up VLAN's, transferring data between boxes, etc. You can do cool things like detach a virtual disk from one VM and attach it to another, rather than pushing 100 GB's of data over a network. This, AFAIK, is not something that Linode or Digital Ocean can do.

Having said that, DO is great for lots of things. It's a good place to experiment and to run lots of really small things. For me, that's side projects or things that I am trying out before thinking about moving them to the "big iron".