Evidently DO is doing layoffs and their support may be suffering for it. So there's that.

Anecdotally, people seem to have more "human" support experiences with Linode than with Digital Ocean.

Besides that, it looks like people like DO.

That doesn't bother me as a customer. If the company is laying people off it's probably also getting more efficient and therefore cheaper.

Empirically, it doesn't really correlate

that money just goes somewhere else. I'd rather see it invested in technology/service than management, marketing etc