When you sign up for linode its not glaring what ISPs are supplying what locations...

http://www.linode.com/avail/

Its represented as linodes... as well as support will always tell you "all data centers are equal".

I'm ashamed we stayed @ Fremont as long as we did, but honestly, I trusted in linode too much to have some pull at HE.net or know more about THEIR/linodes provider than I do... since really I'm a customer of Linode, not HE.net

2GB Linode on 24-month term (safe since you can cancel at any time): $67.96

Price of 1.7GB EC2 instance with equivalent storage/bandwidth, 3-year reserved instance to be fair:
Monthly cost (reservation): $9.72
Monthly cost (instance): $21.60
Bandwidth: $96.00
Total: $127.32

In order to break even, average monthly bandwidth usage must be no more than 305 GB.

Downsides: EC2 instance has 85% the RAM, ~60% the guaranteed CPU power*, and ~13% the burst CPU power*.

Upside: EC2 instance has 200% the local storage space, potential cost savings if bandwidth usage is under 305 GB per month.

*: This is a guesstimate based on the following assumptions:
1) Linode hosts have 20GB of instance RAM, meaning 10x 2048 linodes per host machine
2) Linode host machines have two quad-core modern Xeon processors, for an equivalent 16 EC2 compute units per host, based on Amazon's estimate that a compute unit is equivalent to 1.0-1.2 GHz of a 2007 Xeon.
3) Guaranteed compute on a 2048 linode is 1.6 compute units
4) Burst compute on a 2048 linode is 8.0 compute units

Anyhow, knowing all this, I'd pick the Linode any day, but for very low bandwidth and CPU usage, the Amazon instance could come out cheaper.

Perhaps. But performance isn't. And I'm sure support, at least in my experience, definitely isn't, ie. Linode has vastly superior support.