Linode, LLC is an American cloud hosting subsidiary of Akamai Technologies that provides virtual private servers. It is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I personally love the predictability of cost you get with a VPS. Indeed, it doesn't "auto-magically" scale to infinity, but neither does your monthly invoice.
Linode was one of the first providers I used for my VPS. The prices have always been good, the performance is excellent even for the small VPSs and the network performance has never disappointed me. Linode was one of the first providers to move to KVM virtualization to give their users maximum performance while making efficient use of hardware resources and being environmentally friendly. I have been with Linode for over 10 years and see no reason to use any other provider.