> Our longest outage by far... can be directly attributed to frequent breakdowns in communication

I have direct experience with Linode staff breakdowns in communication because of a security problem before the December attacks.

The problem affected many Linode customers and included risks to confidential information such as billing.

The Linode staff communication was terrible. The problem was severe and ended up with Linode on a blacklist of companies that are not suitable for hosting.

I have to agree with tptacek: do not use Linode for anything, and if you do now, make plans to switch to a new provider.

To end on a happy note, I migrated the project to Rackspace, and the Rackspace staff communication is excellent.