Nothing is worse than spending weeks securing every aspect of your VPS only to have incidents like this appear. And worst of all ? To this day Linode never clearly said what happened or what they did to prevent it happening again.
I chose vultr over DO because DO used so many external web services to run their site. Every new page at their site required me to turn on 5 more domains in NoScript. Vultr only required me to enable their site. The performance at vultr was also very good for what I needed: test servers.
Actually, I did try Scaleway when I saw them on HN like 9 months ago! I recompiled a Go program I was working on [1] for ARM and benched it against Linode.
It was literally 10x slower than Linode even after playing around with Go's concurrency level to find the fastest runtime, and even with the dataset in memory. :( ARM just wasn't the right arch for what I was doing.
I ended up going with Vultr because it has the $5 pricepoint for hosting tiny websites and tons of datacenter locations. Their CPU performance and network speed were great in my tests.
Even when it was hacked multiple times and customer VPSs compromised e.g.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-worth-22800...
Nothing is worse than spending weeks securing every aspect of your VPS only to have incidents like this appear. And worst of all ? To this day Linode never clearly said what happened or what they did to prevent it happening again.