Are we bashing Digital Ocean again? I've never had any problems with short lived test machines. Their disk and network performance was always fine. I do run all my serious stuff on Linode, AWS, or my own hardware though.

The only real problem I had with Digital Ocean was that their mother was a hampster and their father smells of elderberries.

I'm rather fond of elderberries....

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I have 2 DigitalOcean droplets. Great latency, great speed, great reliability, and both are for only $10 USD and the first month was on them ( got $10 dollar credit with them ).

I give them 4 out of 5. The main reason being it is kind of annoying that you can't get larger disk space for a better value of money.

To be fair, Linode has this exact same problem. I'm hopeful that the advent of the hybrid SSD linodes will allow Linode to switch from 15K RPM drives (which max out at 600GB) to 7200RPM drives (which max out at 4000GB). The SSD caching should alleviate any performance concerns while giving us more usable space.

I'm hosting a bunch of footage from our convention on my personal linode because our company one doesn't have the space, and it'd be nice to be able to host footage from previous events too...

Totally agree. I am back with Linode for my main stuff, but DO can't be beaten (imho) for the lower end. Beefier stuff I will stick with Linode, but it's nice to have a per-hour based scratchpad to try stuff out on.

it seems really interesting

Why? You can install VirtualBox, VMware or use KVM for free and customize and run 24 hours a day for free.

I bought a Digitalocean vps just to try, I bought "quite" the same specs of Linode for half the price.
The disks performance are incredible, I can easily read up to 250MB/sec while I can't go over 100MB/sec with linode.
I like the possibility to produce a manual snapshot without the needs of paying a backup service.

I'm really disappointed from the fact that I cannot use my own kernel on digitalocean since they doesn't support something like pv-grub.
I like the possibility to create a linux image in my virtual box and load it on a linode, I cannot do this on DO.

My linode uses a Xeon E5 2670, don't know what DO uses.

I "feel more freedom" with linode and I like linode more, it costs more but it offer more.

Linode's new hybrid SSD instances that are in beta testing should resolve the disk performance gap.

nice to know that linode is working in this sense. is there any ETA for the switch from HDD to SSD?

Caker said they'll make an announcement on the subject in Q1 of 2014.

thanks for the answer, I hope that the "storage capacity" will be the same.

Check in the beta forum, it sounds like it'll be SSD's acting as a cache for HDD. So, same storage from the HDD backend, but increased speed from the SSD cache.

ah ok, an hybrid solution.
I pay twice for linode than digitalocean, can't understand why digital ocean offers SSDs (not hybrid solution but SSDs) while linode with double the price offers a simple hybrid solution.

You'll have to just wait and see.

-Chris