Is this a bold move by Linode, or am I the only Linode customer (7 years going) who chose them in part because they steered clear of the bottom of the market?
I'm sorry, but this pricing doesn't put them anywhere near the bottom of the market. As someone that has been buying from the VPS market for almost twenty years now, Linode cannot in any reasonable verbiage be lumped in with the riffraff crap vendors at the bottom. I could rattle off a dozen or more companies run by thugs and thieves that truly define "bottom of the market" for VPS, and Linode, DO, Ramnode aren't even on the same planet.
I know that I switched to Ramnode when I had problems with another VPS provider back in 2013 or so when one of the Admin panels was hacked across a large number of VPS providers. Ramnode was down for a few hours, the other VPS was down for a few days.
I think it makes good business sense. It comes less than a year after they bumped the $10/mo instance to 2 GB RAM. They must have realized they were losing market share just by dint of there being no $5/mo option to compete with DO. Even though this is the bottom of the market, as you say, some of those "one-and-done" projects must hang around and need to scale eventually, and it's clearly easier to scale up on an existing platform than migrate to another. I know this takes away one of the two or three big reasons I ever have for using DO instead of Linode!
