High performance, flexible compute at an affordable price

The cloud compute marketplace is increasingly crowded, and results are not always consistent - low-cost offerings can look appealing, but my experience of using Linode is that they provide consistently great performance at a price point others can't match. Their portfolio of products is ever-expanding, and yet they are really focussing on being good at a few things rather than blurring heavily into the SaaS approach. I love using Linode for my ephemeral compute requirements, especially when prototyping or performing research and development.

This is difficult to quantify at this time, but as someone who has been highly dependent on building flexible architectures for product demos, proof of concepts, and for learning purposes, Linode has reduced my requirements for hardware, which incurs both a capital cost and then costs in terms of running, maintenance, support agreements and so on.

I have personally had no issues with Linode, and find their infrastructure to be very reliable. Of course, this is something that you probably only notice when it actually goes wrong, but so far I've had no issues with Linode which I think reflects very highly on the quality of their offering and services.