I benchmarked aws, linode and digitalocean about a year ago.
Since a few weeks Linode changed their offering to SSD, faster CPUs, double Ram but you get strict core isolation now. You now get 2 cores for $20 instead of 8. So I upgraded (?) my linode servers and did the test again:
| test | Req/sec | Time/req | transferrate | max load | |
| linode | -n 500 -c 10 | 26,59 | 376 | 516 | |
| linode | -n 100 -c 10 | 23,77 | 420 | 497 | |
| linode | -n 100 -c 10 | 24,10 | 414 | 468 | |
| linode | -n 500 -c 10 | 22,20 | 450 | 430 | |
| linode | -n 100 -c 10 | 25,51 | 392 | 495 | |
| linode | -n 1000 -c 20 | 24,98 | 801 | 485 | 10,12 |
| linode | -n 2000 -c 40 | 22,13 | 1807 | 430 | 16,12 |
The previous linode machine had far better result, just because they did not have strict isolation. I just took over the whole machine and became a “noisy neighbour” for my fellow tenants as Evan pointed out (see comments). The test is now more realistic, and the linode results are now comparable with digitalocean. But still amazon is the slow kid on the block. I agree that amazon has a lot to offer, but their offerings are overpriced. And while linode upgrades their hardware at a pace of about once a year (the $20 offering went from 512Mb to 1G to 2G, got SSD and new CPUs the last 2 years), Amazon is still using the same hardware that they offered years ago. Did they lose their edge to innovate?