[phkn1]

Likewise, though my specific concerns were around a suspiciously large volume of inbound traffic that appeared to be maliciously probing for open services, and in particular a lack of any sort of upstream mitigation (to paraphrase their response, "can't help you, try Cloudflare".

Of course, Digital Ocean has had its own problems lately with not properly scrubbing decommissioned VPS containers... so to some degree, data security is not a Linode specific problem. And for that matter it is not just because someone is recycling passwords (bad), but because it is by nature one of the most fundamental and pervasive security challenges with any VPS hosting. Your AWS node might be perfectly secure, but it might be sharing a physical rack with a Russian botnet and you'd have no way to know.

Bottom line, if you are using a shared environment there is always some risk of having bad neighbors, experiencing disruption at the supervisory layer or of your data bleeding over into an untrusted location. Your application security design should be planned accordingly, and the choice of VPS host is only one part of that equation.