Linode still don't have a $5 offering. Linode's cheapest VPS is $10 per month on a 125Mbit port. DO's cheapest is $5 per month on a 1Gb port.

That difference is huge if you're doing high-bandwidth work and you run a ton of droplets.

But you're sharing the 1Gb/s link with who knows how many $5 droplets - resulting in unpredictable IO. Linode network IO is dedicated and scalable to 10 Gb/s. DO is shared and capped at 1 Gb/s - even on the largest droplet.

Thanks for bringing this up, this is part of why we closed such a large debt round so that we could really focus on the next evolution of the hardware that we use. There are a lot of things in the works for that and we will be really excited to share them.

Thanks

Absolutely. I don't need $10 droplets for all of my internal servers, so the cost adds up significantly. I run a cluster of $5 droplets as well as a few large units, and I'm sure many people have similar use cases.

Linode also charged you the $20 right up front and held on to it for the month.

That's a very popular use case and something that has allowed digitalocean to grow so fast.