I'm hoping this means they will finally build a cloud product that can compete, but if the same management is there, probably not. What a sad product lineup and UX. DO, Hetzner, etc have much better products. But nerds love pushing buttons and looking at stats, so somehow Linode's limited functionality and constant maintenance-induced downtime don't seem to faze them. Brands are so weird.
If they wanted to, they could automate OpenStack clusters, give people admin over a fully featured open source private cloud, and charge per hour. A few providers (mostly in Europe) have done it and it's an amazing experience. But I guess nobody thinks there's a market for an AWS/GCP/Azure competitor, and charging for a month at a time is more stable money.
I always thought they seemed pretty much equivalent for both price and features (though Linode did take an age to implement cloud firewalls).
I’ve personally hosted about 30 servers with them for about 15 years, did look at DO a few times but it didn’t seem worthwhile to migrate everything over (and I preferred that Linode were privately owned vs the VC backed DO).
DO has had both an app platform and serverless functions for a while, and Linode has neither (they have edge computing which is similar but different to serverless)
DO has managed website hosting, Linode doesn't (they just explain to you how to create a website, which is still you managing it)
DO gives you VPCs out of the box, but Linode basically doesn't, requiring clunky and limited custom networking configuration. VPCs are table stakes at this point.
DO has been offering K8s for years, while for Linode it's been sort of an experiment. (Even Linode's pricing for K8s was hidden for a while)
DO has had managed databases for a long time, Linode only recently
DO has provided object storage for a long time, Linode only recently
DO has the most amazing documentation and community forums of any cloud service provider. Linode has a fraction of the guides and very limited docs. They dump you into this doc wasteland which doesn't explain things.
DO products are intuitive, simple and easy, and just work. Linode on the other hand feels like it was designed by somebody's little cousin in 2003 (even after the redesigns, somehow the UX got worse). Doing basic things like configuring your VM's networking has a horrible UX, with stuff just not working at all with no explanation why (last time I used it).
For the people who never touch their VMs and never use new features, of course Linode seems fine. For people who want a better experience, DO blows them out of the water completely. And you don't get VMs constantly having maintenance windows with DO, or entire data centers constantly losing connectivity.
If they wanted to, they could automate OpenStack clusters, give people admin over a fully featured open source private cloud, and charge per hour. A few providers (mostly in Europe) have done it and it's an amazing experience. But I guess nobody thinks there's a market for an AWS/GCP/Azure competitor, and charging for a month at a time is more stable money.