I've had my Linode account for 3 years this month, with server instances from all of their U.S. datacenters. Before I sing their praises, I have to describe how

I've had my Linode account for 3 years this month, with server instances from all of their U.S. datacenters. Before I sing their praises, I have to describe how hard it is for me to be a fan of just about anything. I'm a pretty grumpy dude and I think everything's crap. But not Linode. They are really, really great. 1. Great support. I'm an experienced sysadmin but I still occasionally run in to things that make me scratch my head. When I do, Linode support is the last place I turn to, but when I do turn to them, they respond within a few minutes and almost always with the right answer. They should be held up as a model of perfect customer service right alongside Zappos and Amazon and Nordstrom. 2. No I/O issues so far, for me. One of the concerns of a VPS is that you can get strange issues caused by other VPS instances running on the same hardware where everything will be sluggish but iostat and its brethren will you tell you everything's fine. I haven't seen this on any of my Linodes so far. 3. No other performance issues so far. Similar to above; the only time my instance feels icky is when I've crapped on it somehow. Near as I can tell, nobody else is using the same hardware I am. 4. Pretty good uptime. Unfortunately, not perfect -- if you insist on 100% uptime, you'll have to get clever with redundancies between datacenters -- but it's been pretty good overall. They're pretty open about problems as they happen, check http://status.linode.com http://status.linode.com. There were repeat problems with their Fremont datacenter about a year ago, so I moved everything out of it, but it's probably OK now. 5. A pretty nice management interface. I did like their previous version a little better, but the current one is OK. You can still do pretty much anything you need to do from it. 6. No stupid password requirements. My main Linode password is a string of line noise. It works. 'Nuff said. (Also: you can make their interface block logins from IPs you haven't logged in from before; attempted login attempts from unknown IPs will result in an email to you with a link to allow that IP.) 7. They like to give their customers gifts. Really, about twice a year they'll say, "thanks for being our customer!" by handing out free memory upgrades or other awesomeness. How cool is that? Some criticisms: 1. Disk space seems pretty expensive right now. That might be a lingering side-effect of the mass destruction of HD manufacturers early this year. I'm not yet feeling like the disk space is completely inadequate, but it is more of a problem than RAM (for me). 2. Security. They had two incidents in the last year, IIRC; one caused by an ex-employee who compromised a bunch of Linodes running Bitcoin-related stuff, and one caused by a Xen vulnerability. Linode was pretty tight-lipped about both of those, and I don't like that. Hope this helps.