Linode bet the wrong way by prioritising more cores over SSDs and I think this slip up is what gave DO room to enter the market. Had Linode moved to SSDs earlier and offered their cheapest VM @ $10 instead of $20, DO's trajectory may have been a little different. Also, Linode was (and still is) very bad at marketing imho. DO definitely spanked them on that front (both through their content marketing strategy and just by virtue of their $5 SSD offering which caused all the geek hobbyists to jump over and start blogging about them).
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.
Thanks for the feedback, we're definitely looking to improve a lot of the missing features and capabilities and really looking forward to 2015 in that regard.
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.
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).
We switched from DO to Linode a few months ago. I think DO is great, but three things convinced us to move over to Linode. 1) lack of robust logging, 2) we'd get intermittent connectivity problems about once a month (this was in the SF colo), and 3) backups were unreliable, and support didn't really have a good answer as for why the backups were so unreliable. You can send me an HN message if you want more details.
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.