Linode vs DigitalOcean: Beginner-Friendly Cloud Hosting (2023)

Linode Analysis

Linode makes it incredibly easy to deploy a Linux virtual server and manage it with its Linode Manager. All you need to do is pick a plan, distribution, and location. In addition to Linode Manager, you can also manage your Linodes using Linode CLI, a simple command-line interface to the Linode platform. When worse comes to worst and you mess up something so badly that you lose access into your Linode, you can obtain out-of-band console access with the Linode Shell (Lish) and perform actions like rebooting a Linode or switching to a different configuration profile.

If you often need to create servers with the same distribution and identical configuration, you can take advantage of StackScripts, which provide a flexible way to customize Linode’s distribution templates. There are StackScripts that accomplish everything from installing a ready-to-rock version of WordPress, a fully functioning LAMP stack, or the latest version of cPanel—all with just a couple of clicks.

Alternatively, you can clone an entire configuration to another Linode and potentially combine Linode cloning with the IP failover feature to create a high-availability cluster. It’s also possible to preserve your disk’s fully prepared software environment by creating images with paths, files, boot information, and filesystem details, which makes subsequent replication a breeze.

By default, all Linode accounts require two authentication methods. By enforcing mandatory two-factor authentication, Linode hopes to prevent security incidents caused by customers not securing their login information. While not Linode’s fault, such incidents damage its reputation and overwhelm its customer support staff.

Linode offers a premium backup service that starts at $2 a month and can be activated instantly with any plan. The service provides four backup slots, three of which are executed and rotated automatically: a daily backup, a 2-7-day old backup, and an 8-14-day old backup. The remaining slot is reserved for on-demand backups, which can be created with a single click.

Linode customers who rely on multiple backend Linodes are encouraged to purchase NodeBalancers, which are highly available, managed, cloud-based, load balancers as a service that intelligently route incoming requests when coping with heavy load. NodeBalancers cost $10 a month, and they support up to 10,000 concurrent connections.

To gain insight into the performance of your Linode cloud-based servers, you can use Longview to collect system-level metrics and displays them in an interactive, easy-to-read graphic interface. This value-added feature is available for free with certain limitations, but there’s also a paid version with unlimited historical data and a 60-second resolution.

Last but not least, Linode offers a managed option where you pay the company to manage your infrastructure on your behalf so that you can fully focus on your business and leave the technical stuff to professionals. The managed option includes the Linode Backup Service and two complimentary, standard site migrations performed by our Professional Services team.

DigitalOcean Analysis

DigitalOcean virtual servers are called Droplets, and it’s possible to provision as much as several thousand of them in seconds. You can either pick a standard distribution, such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, or CoreOS, or you can upload your own customized operating system and get it running in no time. If you don’t care as much about the distribution itself as you do about the software running on it, you can deploy a droplet using 1-Click Apps to save time when setting up everything from Docker to the LAMP stack to MySQL or Node.js.

DigitalOcean has a whole suite of free tools that makes it simple to collaborate, secure, monitor, and backup Droplets, allowing you to effortlessly manage your infrastructure at no additional cost. Managing thousands of Droplets and resources in a programmatic way is easy thanks to DigitalOcean’s RESTful API, which is well documented and extremely comprehensive.

To scale your growing application or website, all you need to do is attach more storage to your Droplet with Block Storage for $0.10 per gigabyte per month. All storage provided by DigitalOcean is SSD-based, highly available, replicated multiple times across different racks, encrypted at rest, and transmitted to individual Droplets over isolated networks.

In addition to Block Storage, DigitalOcean also offers S3-compatible object storage with a built-in CDN, called Spaces. This storage option is very cost-effective and perfect for videos, images, and other web content that is often called upon by apps or websites.

Just like Linode, DigitalOcean has its own highly available, managed, cloud-based, load balancers as a service, called simply Load Balancers. It costs $10 a month to deploy a Load Balancer, and it comes with automatic Let’s Encrypt SSL provisioning and renewal and support for HTTP/2. Load Balancers can be controlled programmatically using DigitalOcean’s API, an indispensable feature when creating a large number of highly available setups.

DigitalOcean customers can obtain a Floating IP, a publicly-accessible static IP address, and assign it to any Droplet without replacing its original public IP address. Floating IPs come in handy when redirecting network traffic between Droplets within the same data center, and they can also be used for application upgrades, among other things.

Kubernetes, a portable, extensible, open-source platform for automating Linux container operations, is one of the hottest topics these days because it eliminates much of the tedious manual processes involved in deploying and scaling containerized applications. With DigitalOcean, you can provision and deploy to your Kubernetes cluster in minutes, and enjoy high availability, excellent resource efficiency, and seamless application releases.

Linode vs DigitalOcean: Performance Review

Before we start throwing performance metrics at you, we think that it’s appropriate to compare Linode vs DigitalOcean service level agreement (SLA):

DigitalOcean’s SLA: “DigitalOcean provides a 99.99% Uptime SLA for both Droplet and Block Storage. Lost time is refunded back to your account at the hourly rate incurred.”

Linode’s SLA: “Linode.com provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee on all Linode hardware, and on network connectivity. In any given month, if your Linode is down for more than 0.1%, you may request a pro-rated credit for the down-time.”

It seems that DigitalOcean is slightly more confident in the performance and stability of its infrastructure, but the real question is whether the confidence is justified.

DigitalOcean’s data centers are in the following locations:

• New York City, United States
• Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• San Francisco, United States
• Singapore, Asia
• London, United Kingdom
• Frankfurt, Germany
• Toronto, Canada
• Bangalore, India

Linode’s data centers are in the following locations:

• Newark, New Jersey
• Fremont in California
• Atlanta, Georgia
• Dallas, Texas
• London, Great Britain
• Singapore, Asia
• Frankfurt, Germany
• Tokyo, Japan

Considering what a huge market India is, it would be nice to see Linode build a data center in the country. DigitalOcean could use a data center in Japan, but that’s where the differences between the two cloud hosting providers more or less end when it comes to their global coverage.

According to an independent performance comparison by Josh Sherman, a senior engineer and emoji specialist at Mailshake and content writer for Alligator.io, Linode outperforms DigitalOcean in requests per second, time per request, and transfer rate. After all, Linode has been around for much longer than DigitalOcean, and it had plenty of time to grow and optimize its infrastructure.

However, the difference between the performance of the two cloud hosting services is so small that we wouldn’t give it much weight. Large enterprise customers could perhaps notice some difference in certain situations, but that’s about it.