Now I seriously need to look for alternative hosting if/when the corpo overlords decide to start changing the offered products.

In fact, I don't even know why one would pick Linode over DigitalOcean or vice versa

For a lot of people “momentum” is a factor: Linode has been around for significantly longer and has been fairly stable/reliable for the whole of that time even implementing a couple of complete tech stack changes¹ better than many other companies seem to manage. In the early days they were ahead of their time.

While Linode were at the head of the pack for a while, their product range, features, and UX, did stagnate at certain times, at those points DO and other companies looked more attractive for new customers.

As the market for such services has homogenised somewhat, with there being few genuinely unique-to-one-provider offerings, small differences in price/features at the scale you are buying, and differences in where data-centres are located & what their bandwidth peering is like from the PoV of your target users, are usually the deciding factors. All other things being equal, check if any of them has a special offer on!

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[1] Their services were originally user-mode-linux based², then switched to Xen³, then to KVM.

[2] I used them during that period.

[3] at the time of that switch I'd just moved to UML on a dedicated server for my own stuff, and later moved to a mix of containers & KVM.

Does Digital Ocean offer this service at prices competitive with (legacy) Linode? The site is a confusing mess of buzzwords and made-up terms, which is nothing like the straightforward presentation that was part of the attraction for Linode (and for Slicehost before them).

I find DO immediately offputting.

I used to use Linode ten years ago, but eventually switched to Digital Ocean.

I switched to using Hetzner instead of Digital Ocean a couple years ago.

Way too many bots and other automated stuff running on throwaway DO nodes.

I moved most of my stuff over to DigitalOcean a while back. The few remaining instances are now an urgent todo.

Same thing happened with Slicehost. They got absorbed by the Rackspace borg, which ruined everything we found appealing at SH -- so we found Linode.

I guess now I'm looking for the new Linode/Slicehost style provider. Sucks.

Besides that, it looks like people like DO.

Not completely because of, but definitely somewhat because of the buyout, my client has agreed they should diversify and we're going to adapt it from a fault-tolerant single location (i.e. right now there are no SPOFs for them except the DC itself going dark), to three independent locations, with less fault tolerance per DC, but greater overall resilience.

One location will probably stay with Linode, but the other two definitely won't be Linode (they'll almost certainly each be a different vendor).

The benefit for us is that adopting multiple (individually) lower-resilience locations means we can be less picky about the host for a given location, because we're not using as many "advanced" features at each location, due to the vastly reduced complexity at the individual DCs.

Vultr and Digital Ocean *seem* like the obvious "Linode type services but not Linode" vendors, but neither seem to have a fantastic reputation from what I've seen.

OVH and Hetzner seem like two alternatives that may be worth checking out more, but they both seem to have an almost-intentionally complex service offering list, and it's hard to tell if some fairly basic things are available with plain VPS services (e.g. private IP addresses).