I've been with Linode for almost two years now and I believe that represents more than a sufficient period to have a reliable opinion on the service, and after switching from a number of (well known) VPS providers on the market.

In one word: excellent!

In a few more words: The Linode service is reliable, serious, competent, affordable, stable and fair.

In almost two years we had very, very few outages and those were due to failures that can happen to ANY provider, anywhere. Even so, those were resolved transparently (Linode Status Blog) and quickly. The support is competent, knows what they're doing and talking about, and the problems are resolved as fast as humanely possible.

The servers are fast and connection stable. Administration via SSH is clean and smooth, even across the Atlantic (our servers are in the Newark DC, we're in Europe).

The price has stayed the same, but the resources have only gone up: RAM has been increased and recently we got 25% disk space upgrade. Linode staff is aware of the changes on teh market and is, in my opinion, balancing that with what they can honestly support.

They're not overselling anything and they're not jumping to every customer whim or desire, nor offering every buzzword currently in the Web 3.0 dictionary. They know what they're capable of and ARE in fact extending and evolving their -- primarily unmanaged VPS -- service, but at the pace they can support.

They stay in touch with the community, they're transparent about network failures and issues (to the extent possible without revealing trade secrets or security sensitive information) and I have no intention to switch elsewhere for my unmanaged VPS hosting needs.

Highly recommended.