Long-time Linode user, and always recommend it

Their customer support and more generally how they stand behind their service is the number one reason for my recommendation.

They answer the phone nearly immediately, reply to tickets quickly, and most importantly the first contact is always with a knowledgeable, helpful support engineer. They either fix the issues right away, answer your questions on first contact, or at least can give you an immediate and credible acknowledgment of the issues they're facing (as opposed to pretending they never heard of an outstanding issue, or walking you through useless troubleshooting and unrelated steps).

I've never seen anything close to the level of competence among support staff at other hosting providers.

Linode has been great for web hosting, database hosting, and general virtual servers. I've appreciated that they haven't tried to be AWS in the past (i.e. API services rather than simple virtual servers), though perhaps that's the way they're heading now and if so, I can't necessarily recommend that since I've only used servers. Great service for virtual servers.