Both Linode and DO use a variety of CPUs, and make upgrades all the time for their host machines, and your individual speed can vary as other VMs on the host use more and less CPU power.
That being said, Linode gives you access to as many cores as available on the host. In my case, I have 8 cores available, while DO restricts the number of cores available to guests based on plans (starting at 1 core).
Another thing to consider is: If your jobs are typically CPU-limited, it's probably not best to use virtual hosting at all. Dedicated machines would be far more economical for you.
The blog mentions that these $10 plans are on the "new" hardware, which, AFAICT, doesn't allow access to shared [unused] cores on the host anymore, so you really do have only 1 core max. FWIW. They're said to be nice speedy cores, though I've never tried one myself.
Anyway, it's nice to see linode finally come down in their price point, thank goodness for competition, they're obviously responding to DO with this move. Unfortunately the $5 DO is good enough for me [SSD makes is so that swap time is less painful if I temporarily max out the RAM] so, alas, will be sticking with DO for now :|
How might the performance of the $5 DO or either of the $10 from Linode/DO compare to what I get from my ~$10 shared hosting? I'm probably going to try a VPS at some point, but was just curious about if I could get rid of the shared and move my sites over too.
From my experience $5 DO is more robust than most shared plans. However the trade off is that you have to setup and maintain everything yourself including security.
Yeah for me my $5 DO beats the heck [for a rails app] out of having to use fcgi and have them constantly shutting down my processes, (in this case--bluehost) disabling my account for having too many files, etc. It is much faster.
Linode CPU cores are aligned with plan sizes.[1] The last generation of plans offered 8 cores across the board.[2] The hosts have more than 8 cores.[3]
