A larger client project needed more headroom than we were used to provisioning, so before committing to our usual DigitalOcean setup we spun up an equivalent Linode instance to compare, mostly because this particular client had an IT-adjacent stakeholder on their side who specifically asked whether we'd considered alternatives before signing off on infrastructure costs for the year.
We ran the same rough benchmark on both, a basic LEMP stack serving a copy of the client's actual application under a simulated load using a simple Apache Bench script, nothing scientific, but enough to get a sense of whether one was meaningfully faster than the other for the kind of traffic this client actually generates. Performance felt broadly comparable for our typical LEMP stack workload, response times within a margin we wouldn't call decisive either way, and Linode's longer track record in the VPS space, it predates DigitalOcean by several years, gave the client's IT-adjacent stakeholder some extra confidence, which mattered more to closing the decision than the benchmark numbers did.
Pricing came out close enough that the deciding factor ended up being familiarity with the control panel rather than any dramatic technical difference, we'd built a small internal runbook around DigitalOcean's dashboard and API over the past couple of years, and rebuilding that muscle memory for Linode's equivalent tooling would have cost real onboarding time for a switch that wasn't clearly justified by anything in the actual comparison.
One genuine point in Linode's favor we noted for future reference: their support response during the trial, we opened a routine technical question as a test, came back faster and with more specific detail than we're used to getting from DigitalOcean's support for a similarly routine question, though that's admittedly a single data point rather than anything we'd generalize from confidently.
Good problem to have, genuinely, two solid options where a few years ago the honest choice for a client this size was just shared hosting with no real alternative worth comparing against. We ended up staying with DigitalOcean for this project specifically, existing familiarity won out, but we're glad we ran the comparison rather than defaulting out of habit, and we'd happily recommend Linode to a colleague without hesitation based on what we saw.
We also compared the two providers' backup and snapshot offerings while we were at it, since that's become a standard part of how we evaluate any hosting provider now rather than an afterthought. Both offered a broadly similar automated backup add-on at a similar price point, so it didn't move the needle on this particular decision, but it's reassuring that neither provider would have required us to build our own backup tooling from scratch if we had picked the other one. We also asked each provider's support team the same slightly awkward question, what happens to our data and our ability to restore service if we need to move providers again in the future, mostly out of curiosity about lock-in, and got reasonably straightforward answers from both rather than the evasiveness we half expected.