[itsgettingcold]

In my experience, Linode is the best roll-your-own you-are-on-your-own cloud provider. Obviously they are aimed at the savvy but it's reliable, cheap while being easy to estimate costs, simple to configure and expand, pretty good documentation, plus it doesn't have the learning curve or linguistic peculiarities of Amazon.

Regarding Rackspace, I've had good experience with them when working at mid-size and larger companies. Unfortunately I've had the opposite experience when functioning as a freelancer, working with startups, or as an entrepreneur myself. Rackspace didn't even respond to sales inquiries. Initially I figured this was a strangely repeated fluke, but other small companies and entrepreneurs I've spoken to have reported the exact same thing, where they send an inquiry to Rackspace or ask to speak with a sales engineer, and they get no response. Nothing, zip, nada. I find that very strange, and am speculating RS no longer wants to deal with the growing pains and frequent support requests of startups, but it certainly makes the decision to stick with Linode or EC2 much easier.

I don't have much experience with dedicated anymore, but have repeatedly heard good things about ServInt and SingleHop. Have also heard good things about Firehost for a managed cloud provider. I would love to hear others opinion and experience on any of the aforementioned companies though.

[taligent]

I really do not understand why people keep recommending Linode on here. Apart from their woeful and disgraceful security policies some of their data centres e.g. Fremont is very unreliable.

I would recommend http://www.webhostingtalk.com as you will find out much better options for your specific needs.

[thaumaturgy]

I defended you the last time this came up; this time I think you're being wholly unfair. A single incident -- severe though it was -- does not make "woeful and disgraceful security policies". And the only data center that they have that has occasional issues, as far as I know, is Fremont, and it's worth pointing out that Fremont has had less downtime than AWS this year.

I use their Dallas and Newark data centers currently. I have had zero downtime this year, which puts Linode at the head of the pack in terms of reliability.

So if you don't understand why people keep recommending Linode, it's because:

1. The prices are fair;

2. The service is as reliable as anything else out there, and in some cases, far more reliable;

3. The performance is good;

4. The support is blow-you-out-of-the-water fantastic;

5. The software (their management console) is pretty good;

6. There are very very few complaints overall, other than their handling of the Bitcoin incident.

I agree that they should have handled that incident differently, and that they still haven't taken proper care of it. However, you're being otherwise dishonest in your portrayal of Linode.

[tedchs]

Linode also offers native IPv6 support, and they will route you a /64 on request.