I have been Linode customer since sometime 2008 I think till last month, when I fully migrated to Digital Ocean to two, individually better instances for half the price than my one box at Linode.
I was running Gentoo at London DC without any issues, my major gripes with Linode was how hard was it to get additional IPv4 addresses without lying about your reasons - i.e running services on different IP addresses or separating your business/personal websites (and very easy if you lied, I know someone who did). Another thing was that I paid them by a virtual CC and always put there just enough money for transaction every month, it's dedicated for internet pay only and prevents cc fraud, but every now and then they'd get the card declined at the beginning of the month cause I didn't put the money in yet, like 2nd or 3rd day and always always there was this template threatening ticket put in by a person in my account. I was paying them every month for years, so what if I have outstanding balance on the 2nd or 3rd, is that the reason to threat deleting my stuff? That felt really alienating.
Digital Ocean, while don't hand out IP addresses at all, costs so little that it's $1 + damn good reason at Linode or $5 and a VPS on top for the IP at DO.
The support at DO is nor fast, nor technical, I had issues with my Gentoo builds basically where after reboot /dev/null would come up being a text file with junk in it, you can mknod it but it wouldn't survive reboot. I've raised a ticket and they've removed Gentoo from selection, but I doubt it's fixed and and I'll have to work some ugly hacks to work around this if it happens again.
They use a kernel loaded from below, so you won't really have latest and greatest Arch if you use that, kernel upgrades are in pkg ignore list and even if upgraded it won't load.
I might return to Linode sometime in the future if DO messes up my Gentoos again and Linode does better at matching DO's offer.
At the moment, if you don't need to scale a lot (it's not as convenient at Linode, $20 vs $5 starts to hurt as the number of boxes go up, also Linode doesn't bill you by the our) and just want a personal server for your website I'd still go with Linode, especially after increased transfer quotas.
I was running Gentoo at London DC without any issues, my major gripes with Linode was how hard was it to get additional IPv4 addresses without lying about your reasons - i.e running services on different IP addresses or separating your business/personal websites (and very easy if you lied, I know someone who did). Another thing was that I paid them by a virtual CC and always put there just enough money for transaction every month, it's dedicated for internet pay only and prevents cc fraud, but every now and then they'd get the card declined at the beginning of the month cause I didn't put the money in yet, like 2nd or 3rd day and always always there was this template threatening ticket put in by a person in my account. I was paying them every month for years, so what if I have outstanding balance on the 2nd or 3rd, is that the reason to threat deleting my stuff? That felt really alienating.
Digital Ocean, while don't hand out IP addresses at all, costs so little that it's $1 + damn good reason at Linode or $5 and a VPS on top for the IP at DO.
The support at DO is nor fast, nor technical, I had issues with my Gentoo builds basically where after reboot /dev/null would come up being a text file with junk in it, you can mknod it but it wouldn't survive reboot. I've raised a ticket and they've removed Gentoo from selection, but I doubt it's fixed and and I'll have to work some ugly hacks to work around this if it happens again.
They use a kernel loaded from below, so you won't really have latest and greatest Arch if you use that, kernel upgrades are in pkg ignore list and even if upgraded it won't load.
I might return to Linode sometime in the future if DO messes up my Gentoos again and Linode does better at matching DO's offer.
At the moment, if you don't need to scale a lot (it's not as convenient at Linode, $20 vs $5 starts to hurt as the number of boxes go up, also Linode doesn't bill you by the our) and just want a personal server for your website I'd still go with Linode, especially after increased transfer quotas.