Linode claims their HDDs are faster than el-cheapo SSDs.. Still waiting for migration to test myself though.

Yeah, such generalizations make no sense. Your mileage will depend on the characteristics of your workload.

I've been working on a HN clone. The HN codebase creates a ton of small files for storage (one per post or comment), which need to be loaded up en masse on startup. Switching to Digital Ocean from Linode reduced startup time by 50x.

That's interesting because cost is Linode's reason for not offering SSD. Digital Ocean actually uses very expensive enterprise SSD in the servers. I'm a current customer of Digital Ocean after being with Linode for over 2 years.

Where did you get this information?

When I looked at their site I didn’t see information about what kind of SSDs they are using and, based on the price, assumed they are MLC (consumer grade). I’d never want that on a server.