what really made me move away from linode is really their inability to accept paypal.
Luckily, digitalocean accepted paypal. Also their $5 servers cannot be beat.
Sure, linode has some good panels but it was more than I can chew and more than I needed. Digitalocean also had a good amount of docmentation to do everything I needed without filing a ticket.
How could this affect a VPS provider? Say a customer hosts a porn site, or a gun-selling site, or something else PayPal disagrees with. PayPal shuts the merchant's account down for it. Now the merchant's funds are frozen for an indeterminate amount of time till the issue can be resolved, if at all, and there's nothing they can do about it short of appealing to PayPal.
I am very sympathetic to anyone not wanting to use paypal for these reasons.
It is too big a risk, especially for something like a VPS provider that needs the recurring payments.