And Linode has always had faster CPU, I/O, Network. And lots of small things like that DO only catches up in the recent years, like pooled bandwidth.
Although these days I tend to go with UpCloud, it is very similar to Linode and DO, except you can do custom instances like 20x vCPU with 1GB Memory, spin it up for $0.23 an hour. Compared to standard plan on Linode and DO, 20 vCPU with 96GB Memory would be $0.72/Hr.
I love Linode, their support is awesome, their CPUs on "Dedicated CPU Plans" are great (by benchmarks - similar to GCP n1 CPU), disks io bandwidth just amazing. But I had to leave them because their network is not so reliable. It was difficult decision and I tried to return few weeks ago (because I really love them), but again network in London was just not so great.
I'd love to see the benchmarks you used. I've done a bunch over the years, mostly I/O focused because that's the most common bottleneck for the kind of work I do. While Linode does pretty well, especially compared to the cloud giants, DO has pretty much always come out on top.
Really depends on underlying hardware of the Linode and DO VPS servers as they can vary greatly especially on DO depending on datacenter and region you end up in. Newer DO datacenters getting newer hardware so difference compared to older DO datacenters is huge - benchmarks of same DO droplet plan on different hardware https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-us-15-...
Although these days I tend to go with UpCloud, it is very similar to Linode and DO, except you can do custom instances like 20x vCPU with 1GB Memory, spin it up for $0.23 an hour. Compared to standard plan on Linode and DO, 20 vCPU with 96GB Memory would be $0.72/Hr.