really? I've noticed an increase in maintenance with Linode recently but they've always been really great with notice, so much so I am consistently surprised. If there is ever going to be planned downtime I've got an email at least a week in advance and it gives me the option to migrate my linode to another server at my own convenience if their schedule isn't compatible with my needs. Do you not get these emails and options?
For the scheduled ones, I think I did receive some prior notice, I might have gotten particularly unlucky with a bunch of emergency/network/etc. maintenance affecting many of my servers simultaneously.
My problem with them is they don't provide RFOs (Request for outage) because they can't give away any of the "propitiatory secretes" about their setup. I'd like to know what happened when it effects me. Also when it comes to replacing hardware or preforming maintenance, their priorities wont always line up with mine.
Interesting. We moved away from VPS.net for a similar reason. There were multiple occasions where hosts got shut down and support couldn't tell us the reason for it. Since we're using hand-rolled virtualization on top of a few rented servers, we're basically problem-free.
If you use DNS round robin, then you pretty much guarantee that everyone will be affected if just one hosting company is down. DNS round robin is not the tool for this job.