I don’t know what to say, I’m not using it, but it’s been the most praised compared to others, especially vs DO and Vultur (the former which has been plagued with data leakage and security vulnerabilities).
There are some things that Linode provides that seems to make it easier for people to start their own services (usually the marketplace), but for some reason I really hate that. I can’t explain it, but I think the problem with the marketplace offerings is that you can’t modify stuff once they get deployed, like you can when you deploy your own using scripts (or manually, I won’t judge).
But it really does seem like Linode is probably in the best position to compete with Amazon and I think Cloudflare (they have their own reverse proxies from what I recall, that you can use to protect your server and as caching servers). I am slightly rooting for them, especially because they took the side of running open source software and have open APIs (do correct my if I’m wrong, but I think their APIs don’t lock you in like AWS does).
Documentation on Linode is really good though, they even have stuff for LXD, which not many places do.
With that said, I can’t really recommend Linode, because I’m not one of their customers, but what I can do if someone is debating whether to choose between Linode, Digital Ocean and Vultr is to pick Linode. If the question is between AWS and Linode, I would ask if they want to pay a premium for AWS and risk a vendor lock-in, or if they want to pay cheaper prices, but are ok not having all the services that AWS has (well, technically you can use both, but it may be more costly to jump between data centers, like connecting a website from linode on an RDS instance on AWS).
AWS is catering more to enterprise customers nowadays, they have the fastest servers, the availability zones and more, but you need dedicated people to analyze the costs and take decision based on the services you run, like if you need a scaling instance, or if a normal one works, if you need more IOPS and so on.
If you only need a few VMs in a VPS, then it makes sense to use something like Linode, but if you want to run many services, making your own infrastructure is a better idea, because in the long run it will cost you less. You may still use 1 VM from a VPS for a static IPv4, but if you can get away with only using IPv6, then I’d keep it fully in-house. Oh, lord, IPv4 can’t die fast enough, so we can finally get people to work on fixing some IPv6 software (the routing part is fine, the problem is most software is still written with ipv4 in mind).
What? What buyout?