> In fact, I don't even know why one would pick Linode over DigitalOcean or vice versa
For a lot of people “momentum” is a factor: Linode has been around for significantly longer and has been fairly stable/reliable for the whole of that time even implementing a couple of complete tech stack changes¹ better than many other companies seem to manage. In the early days they were ahead of their time.
While Linode were at the head of the pack for a while, their product range, features, and UX, did stagnate at certain times, at those points DO and other companies looked more attractive for new customers.
As the market for such services has homogenised somewhat, with there being few genuinely unique-to-one-provider offerings, small differences in price/features at the scale you are buying, and differences in where data-centres are located & what their bandwidth peering is like from the PoV of your target users, are usually the deciding factors. All other things being equal, check if any of them has a special offer on!
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[1] Their services were originally user-mode-linux based², then switched to Xen³, then to KVM.
[2] I used them during that period.
[3] at the time of that switch I'd just moved to UML on a dedicated server for my own stuff, and later moved to a mix of containers & KVM.
I used to use Linode, then they got hacked and leaked my CC details twice (IIRC) and at that point I switched to DigitalOcean. Guessing many are in a similar boat.
Exact same story. Linode was fine but after their breaches I headed to DO and haven't looked back. Heard good things about Vultr but no experience w/ them.
Is their IPv6 implementation is still broken? It was the reason I moved off immediately after banging my head for a few hours because they somehow managed to screw it up despite RFCs advising how to do such deployments.
Beware of Vultr. The product works fine but the customer service is horrible. I had three days of downtime and they got sick of me asking for updates, ignored me, and didn't tell me when the service came back up. I switched back to DO and I'm fine with that again.
I tried both, and stuck with DO. Linode UI was superclunky when you needed to dive into it, but DO was great. Any search for how to X immediately returned great documentation.
Is “DO documentation” in this instance referring to the knowledge base of (usually really poorly written) tutorials DO got people to write for them by offering them very paltry sums as some sort of SEO play?
Slicehost (acquired by rackspace) pioneered this type of in depth how to guides for webhosting on linux. In fact many of the setup docs on DO seem oddly familiar…
Does Digital Ocean offer this service at prices competitive with (legacy) Linode? The site is a confusing mess of buzzwords and made-up terms, which is nothing like the straightforward presentation that was part of the attraction for Linode (and for Slicehost before them).
Because DigitalOcean have dark patterns around their subscriptions - they charge for the capability to deploy, not for actual deployments. It's counter intuitive and, however I look at it, I can't get away from the notion that it is a really scummy way of doing business. Which is why I voted with my feet and choose to do business elsewhere.
Now I seriously need to look for alternative hosting if/when the corpo overlords decide to start changing the offered products.