Aaaand we're back.

My experience is that everything is zoomier after you take a "free upgrade" (aka "please for the love of god let us put you on a non-ancient host server") from Linode, not that we were experiencing any real slowness before.

Linode's been a pretty great host all along. I moved my smaller projects at work to AWS Amazon Lightsail because of Linode's very occasional outages; Lightsail is Amazon's Linode / Digital Ocean clone, so moving to Lightsail allowed us to say to customers "you're hosted with AWS" while doing a more Linode-like amount of work. They also took care to set the pricing to be competitive. But I do like Linode and now that they are nestled within Akamai I see no reason not to expect them to continue to be a reliable choice for many years.