Performance wise, Linode trashes DO in most benchmark (try the storage for example). AWS doesn't perform great. I don't use Linode anymore as I switched to dedicated to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware... but I used them for many years and I found their support to be among the best I have tried. Shame they suffered that big DDoS recently...
Oh I completely agree with that. DigitalOcean's performance is pretty poor, especially on disk IO (which is crazy considering they use SSDs - no SAN though, just local disks).
Also worth mentioning - I found with DigitalOcean that if you wget a large file to /dev/null you can genuinely cause them to automatically nullroute your server - they assume if you're pulling any real amount of data at all then clearly you're under attack or just generally abusive.
Thing is with Linode, it's not that they received the DDoS - it's how unprofessionally they handled it, especially when it came to light that they'd been leaking customer data for a long time prior to it (and that those events are what lead to some upset script kiddies packeting them). Security really seems like a low priority to them so I'm really reluctant to use them again, despite having generally positively experiences.
If you're curious about the fun events, see the posts on Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170
That and, perhaps it's just me, but I can't help but feel that their general stability / uptime and support have declined lately - the last few tickets I've submitted took over an hour to get a response, and it would generally be an unhelpful one, which is worrying when the tickets are concerning the fact that the host node is down. Fortunately, in these instances, I can usually just fire up a new virtual machine much quicker than any host issues will be resolved.