Digital Ocean may be cheap but I honestly think both Linode and DO are on even footing right now. DO has to be cheap to make up for what they lack in a web UI, IPv6, less CPU cores to work with and just all around lack of established trust (they're super new and I for one am slightly wary). Oh, and their network can use some work too. I can get a bit slow sometimes.
Linode is expensive but they give you lots of control in your account panel, you know they'll be around for a long time, excellent support, IPv6, and on and on. Not that DO is bad though. They've got SSDs which is awesome, they're cheap, free snapshots, and so on.
I'm a happy customer of both services and I don't think one is better than the other. I think both serve different types of customers. For me, personally, Linode is where I go to host my serious projects - the money making ones. Digital Ocean is where I go for a quick, cheap server to mess around with. I have one "main" server on both services but I trust my Linode more. Maybe that'll change as Digital Ocean matures.
I recently went DO for a VM because they use KVM, not Xen paravirt, so 64bit VMs have decent performance. I needed to run a software package that was 64bit only.
Linode is expensive but they give you lots of control in your account panel, you know they'll be around for a long time, excellent support, IPv6, and on and on. Not that DO is bad though. They've got SSDs which is awesome, they're cheap, free snapshots, and so on.
I'm a happy customer of both services and I don't think one is better than the other. I think both serve different types of customers. For me, personally, Linode is where I go to host my serious projects - the money making ones. Digital Ocean is where I go for a quick, cheap server to mess around with. I have one "main" server on both services but I trust my Linode more. Maybe that'll change as Digital Ocean matures.