Linode is a new breed of Linux hosting providers. It takes the best parts of cloud hosting providers such as Amazon EC2 and combines it with the cheapness of traditional VPS providers.
I have been a happy customer of WebFaction for quite some time, as it provided decent shell access as well as loads of handy "one click" installers for most typical scenarios such as Wordpress and Drupal.
The major disadvantage to WebFaction is the lack of "root" access. Although it was possible to download applications and run them in your home folder, I could not take advantage of "apt-get" and other administration technologies.
However, about a week ago, I stumbled across a Reddit entry for Linode, and I thought I'd have a look. They offer Xen based virtual servers (with "root" access) and provide an excellent web configuration interface that allows the management of virtual disks, virtual machines and full DNS management.
I purchased the smallest instance they had which provides 16GB disk space and 360MB RAM for approximately $20 (£15) per month. Once my account was activated, I was able to create a virtual boot drive (4GB) and a virtual data drive (4GB) as well as the obligatory swap drive (256MB). These were created and ready to use in under a minute, so I then decided to deploy Debian Lenny. Again, this process took seconds, and then I got to boot my instance.
Once booted, I had a fresh Debian server onto which I installed Apache, MySQL and the other usual suspects. I installed Drupal, configured Apache, and here we are. A full migration from WebFaction to Linode in about four hours.
To conclude, I will say that I really like Linode especially its Xen virtualisation roots, and with this comes the flexibility I've come to expect from web hosts, having used Amazon EC2 for professional/commercial reasons. The combination of this excellent infrastructure, advanced functionality and good value for money makes Linode a hosting force to be reckoned with (especially for Linux users).
UPDATE:
Linode recently opened a UK data centre in London, so I decided to relocate my Linode from their Dallas location to London. The process was absolutely seamless and so quick. I created a support case, and within 2 minutes received some simple instructions. After shutting down my Linode, it automatically transferred my disk images and settings to the new data centre. This entire process took about 5 minutes (not bad, considering almost 9GB of data was transferred). When the transfer finished, I started up my Linode, and the process was complete.
To be fair, I had to reconfigure my DNS settings to the new IP address, but I don't use Linode's DNS manager, which would have managed this for me.
