The way it's behaving it's as if it was acquired and kept on life-support.
We are currently considering moving to dedicated machines but only because of 2), otherwise we would happily be their customer for life.
Even when it was hacked multiple times and customer VPSs compromised e.g.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-worth-22800...
Nothing is worse than spending weeks securing every aspect of your VPS only to have incidents like this appear. And worst of all ? To this day Linode never clearly said what happened or what they did to prevent it happening again.
I do remember it being quite lacking back in the day.
I've recently switched from DO to Scaleway and would never go back.
It was literally 10x slower than Linode even after playing around with Go's concurrency level to find the fastest runtime, and even with the dataset in memory. :( ARM just wasn't the right arch for what I was doing.
I ended up going with Vultr because it has the $5 pricepoint for hosting tiny websites and tons of datacenter locations. Their CPU performance and network speed were great in my tests.
[1] https://github.com/robinsonstrategy/go_backtesting_simulator...
If GitHub had never improved their site since they launched it would be awful. Every time they move things forward I'm happier to be a paying customer. With Linode I reluctantly use them, but for new projects I'm using other services that work better.
Perhaps users mostly want performance and value which have been greatly improved by their substantial infrastructure upgrades?
Their IP Failover is really badly documented and hard to work with.
Their Nodebalancers are noticeably slow, the interface is alright, but you are better off setting up your own loadbalancer.
I feel that static networking could be made easier, and more automatic when I am adding a new node.
Their stackscripts should be able to receive parameters for when it is running, and the error-reporting should be better. I had issues where my scripts wouldn't run and I had no idea why.
Other than that, I am a happy customer.
I'd love to see them offer a storage solution as other commenters have mentioned.
I know Digital Ocean's control panel has improved several times since their launch, and their ability to launch instances with a complete stack is extremely useful. Linode has done nothing here. They point to their badly documented StackScripts system and shrug.
There's a hundred things Linode could do to make user's lives easier and they've done maybe two or three of them.
I didn't really need anything shinier. Is it super-cloudy? Not so much, but also nice that you don't have to think about it.
Would you rather eat in a restaurant where all the chairs are creaky, where the tables are wobbly, and where the wait staff is doing their best to get by with broken equipment, or would you instead visit down the street to a place where everything may not be new but it's well maintained? If the food quality was the same, why would you insist on going to the place with crappy, broken stuff?
Linode just doesn't seem to care about their site at all. If they did they'd listen to user feedback and improve things once in a while. You know, like at least once every six years.
Their one page instance creator where you pick size, location, and distribution is extremely convenient. This is three separate steps with Linode that happens over the course of six screens, plus two more if you want to enable private networking.
Eight steps vs. one.
They also don't offer the ability to install a system with an SSH key pre-installed avoiding the need for password authentication when bootstrapping your system. Even on a technical level Linode is way behind here.