row1an

IME, DigitalOcean performance is usually a little lower than Linode, but some zones seem(ed) to be particularly bad. However, on the zones I do use, reliability on DO in 2016 has been the best of the three. I can hardly remember any outage at all.

Edit: Vultr has been reliable as well, but I've experienced a few outages (not lasting many minutes I think) in the 6 months I've been using them.

Vultr's creators (Choopa) have been in the hosting business for nearly 20 years, so not all that surprising actually.

1TB is between $90 and $250 on AWS. Azure and GCP are even worse. However, I don't think that this is a huge issue, as attacks generating large amounts of outbound traffic charges can usually be mitigated with some effort.

It loads from the cache in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, and Edge for me.

Expires is a HTTP/1.0 header, Cache-Control is HTTP/1.1 and used by anything created in the last 10-15 years. Most sites set the Expires header similar to their Cache-Control max-age, but I guess Google just doesn't care and it doesn't really matter anyway.