The per-hour prices are actually very competitive with DigitalOcean if you're after compute power. All Linodes have access to 8 CPUs. So for $0.12 an hour you get 4GiB RAM and access to 8 CPUs on Linode, vs 8GiB RAM and 4 CPUs on DigitalOcean. Of course right now you're often on a server with very light utilisation meaning you get much more burst access than you're paying for on Linode. Presumably the hourly instances will be on different servers to the monthly and you're much likely to have neighbours who are actually doing something rather than idling and serving a page through nginx every half hour.