11th Linode Birthday, $10 Linode plan

This is great news; I have, for the past few years, been moving all my lower-end VPSes from Linode to Digital Ocean. I recently told a Linode rep at DrupalCon that I would start moving servers back as soon as they had a lower-cost plan, and it looks like Linode has delivered.

Very few of my servers need more than 1 GB RAM, and the CPU and SSDs perform similarly across DO and Linode (for my purposes). I'll still be using a bunch of 512MB Digital Ocean servers for utility purposes, but I'm hoping that these Linode VPSes will continue the trend of being slightly faster/more stable than low-end VPSes from Digital Ocean and other lower-end/inexpensive hosts.

Since I now use Ansible for all my infrastructure management (and Ansible integrates easily with Linode[1] and Digital Ocean[2]), it's trivially easy to move individual servers between providers. This is not only nice to assist with using the best price-performance combo, regardless of provider, but also so I can move production infrastructure from provider to provider and benchmark them against each other more easily.

[1] http://docs.ansible.com/linode_module.html

[2] http://docs.ansible.com/digital_ocean_module.html

Have been a satisfied customer with Linode for 7 years. Now I can move my testing site to this new $10/m plan.

Meanwhile I'm slightly concerned about the future quality from Linode, as low-priced $10 plan will certainly get lots of customers, but it may also bring down quality from Linode. Popularity normally plays against quality, I hope I am wrong.

And there goes my DO plan. This is what Linode was missing, and I'm so happy it's here. Thanks, Linode!

Does anybody have a good comparison or story of why Linode is "more reliable" than DO? I've read the simple "Digital Ocean vs. Linode" stuff posted here, but it never offers any quantitative insight as to why people find Linode more reliable. Anecdotes encouraged :)