They've been around a lot longer and have a lot of expertise. I think you'll find that they'll perform better during benchmarking of hardware and have superior

They've been around a lot longer and have a lot of expertise. I think you'll find that they'll perform better during benchmarking of hardware and have superior network performance and uptime (I've personally experienced times where the entire DO network dropped offline for minute(s)). Their support is great too. I recommend reading up on a few comparison blogs if you wish; just make sure they were written recently and are comparing apples with apples. But I think the general consensus amongst a lot of people is that DO are better suited to devs wanting to play around and Linode are better for when you want something more than that or want to push something to prod. edit: now that I think of it, DO developed a reputation for terminating VMs with no notice if you violate their terms or do other things. I personally had my VMs terminated because I signed up for 2 accounts with the same IP. Imagine if I was hosting production content on there....