I recently built a project (http://www.coatapp.com - A simple weather forecast application with clothing suggestions) on Linode and couldn't be happier. The disk speeds are very impressive, and super useful for apps that deal with large amounts of data that gets updated frequently (i.e. weather data).

This previously posted benchmark shows some of the difference between Linode and a few other providers (from 2009): http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison