I've used Linode for many years and have always been pleased with their service.

Comparison between Slicehost, Linode, Prgmr, Rackspace, Amazon: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

My personal hope, now that I'm almost finished transferring my main site to linode, is that they reject buy-outs and play to win. HostGator has done this, and they seem to be doing extremely well. If they had offered VPS when I was with them, I would still be a HostGator customer. I would love to be able to stick with a host for more than ~18 months. With linode's flexibility, this seems like a strong possibility.

There are so many reasons I am glad I started and stayed with linode for a VPS. All I hear about slicehost anymore is that they fall under linode in benchmarks, they require 64bit OSs (don't know if this has changed), and they fail to meet other VPS offers.

Personal experience: Linode move from a linode 360 to a linode 540 took under 15 minutes from time submitting support ticket to resizing and rebooting, pro rating pricing is very awesome

After being with Slicehost for about a year I was really hoping they would at least keep up with Linode.

Linode eventually sold me on their new datacenter in London.