A client of mine has used Linode for several years, increasing from 2 low end VMs when I first started with them, to the current 8 machines (well technically it's 13 right now but the 5 extras are because of their network migration breaking stuff and us needing to setup new VMs)
Not completely because of, but definitely somewhat because of the buyout, my client has agreed they should diversify and we're going to adapt it from a fault-tolerant single location (i.e. right now there are no SPOFs for them except the DC itself going dark), to three independent locations, with less fault tolerance per DC, but greater overall resilience.
One location will probably stay with Linode, but the other two definitely won't be Linode (they'll almost certainly each be a different vendor).
The benefit for us is that adopting multiple (individually) lower-resilience locations means we can be less picky about the host for a given location, because we're not using as many "advanced" features at each location, due to the vastly reduced complexity at the individual DCs.
Vultr and Digital Ocean *seem* like the obvious "Linode type services but not Linode" vendors, but neither seem to have a fantastic reputation from what I've seen.
OVH and Hetzner seem like two alternatives that may be worth checking out more, but they both seem to have an almost-intentionally complex service offering list, and it's hard to tell if some fairly basic things are available with plain VPS services (e.g. private IP addresses).