Just wanted to offer my opinion. I spent a good few weeks searching various options for VPS / dedicated servers etc. I viewed many budget hosts and some direct competitors of Linode. Some had better pricing, some had nicer web sites.

Ultimately though I settled on Linode due to the shear number of positive reviews that can be found everywhere vs the quite mixed to very negative reviews of the competitors. I also like that honest pricing structure vs the $2 a month for 300000000000^10 terrabytes a month data limits which are impossible to offer.

Having only used the service for 48 hours I am extremely happy with my choice.

Setup - particularly the control panel - is very slick. Included DNS management is a bonus. I opted for a London VPS as I'm in the UK. I have a ping time to google.co.uk of 17ms and bbc.co.uk of 12ms. I was very chuffed at the 9-11ms ping to my VPS.

The server is operating well, specs are as stated.

For beginners to Linux servers it's worth noting that there is a significant amount of resources across the Linode forums and Wiki.

Very chuffed! Well done to Linode.