The price comparison seems somewhat dependent on use-case and which part of the pricing tier you're at.
RAM: DO gives 2x as much RAM at each price point
CPU: Unclear. Linode gives you 8 cores across the board, but fewer "priority" ones. Probably needs benchmarking to be a sensible comparison.
Disk: Linode gives between 1.2x and 2.4x as much storage at each price point
Transfer: DO gives more transfer at the low end, but Linode ramps it up faster. DO gives more transfer at $20, they tie at $40, and Linode gives more at $80+.
I agree with the author that Digital Ocean is generally cheaper for my use-cases as well, but there are some where it isn't. For example, if you want 8GB RAM + 16TB transfer (to pick a configuration favorable to Linode), that's $160/mo at Linode but $300/mo at DO. On the other hand, if you need more transfer only occasionally, DO can be cheaper because it somewhat makes up for less included bandwidth with much cheaper overage rates ($20/TB vs. $100/TB at Linode).
I'm in the linode SSD beta and results are favorable so far. Here's a simple block write test I ran across Linode (SSD and HDD), Ramnode (SSD), and DO (SSD):
I think you might need to add the 'conv=fdatasync' option to your benchmark there in order to get real results - otherwise you could just be looking at results from the hosts cache:
Even then, the host could be lying and telling your VPS that a write was successful when it was not actually written to the host disk. Still in the hosts disk cache, which means great performance but if the host ever crashes, all data on your VPS disk will likely be lost.
Do you know of any third-party benchmarks? I haven't personally tried DO so I can't speak to the disk throughput, but I'd be interested to see how they compare with Linode.
With hetzner you find it nice until your first hardware failure occurs, which could take 3 days to get solved, then you come back to a VPS provider where you can destroy/create instances in a heartbeat. If you run a low traffic/profitless blog hetzner & co might be fine for you, for mission critical stuff I want flexibility.
Flexibility in my case. I can go from one server with 8GB of RAM to 8 copies of that server with 32GB of RAM each and back again at the press of a button as and when the need arises.
That's very true. All of my sites/apps are relatively low-traffic so I was only really thinking about the bottom couple of tiers. Also, I write primarily in Rails and Node with Passenger so RAM is more important to me than other specs.
RAM: DO gives 2x as much RAM at each price point
CPU: Unclear. Linode gives you 8 cores across the board, but fewer "priority" ones. Probably needs benchmarking to be a sensible comparison.
Disk: Linode gives between 1.2x and 2.4x as much storage at each price point
Transfer: DO gives more transfer at the low end, but Linode ramps it up faster. DO gives more transfer at $20, they tie at $40, and Linode gives more at $80+.
I agree with the author that Digital Ocean is generally cheaper for my use-cases as well, but there are some where it isn't. For example, if you want 8GB RAM + 16TB transfer (to pick a configuration favorable to Linode), that's $160/mo at Linode but $300/mo at DO. On the other hand, if you need more transfer only occasionally, DO can be cheaper because it somewhat makes up for less included bandwidth with much cheaper overage rates ($20/TB vs. $100/TB at Linode).