I've never had problems with linode... yes there are the occasional hardware problems that require restarts, but certainly better than AWS in uptime. For a while my VMs were going on a year+ of uptime. What issues did you see?
To start? Customer data exfiltration, credential compromise, mandatory kernels (security problems), system downtime, network issues, ddos, and unusual performance problems. They may have a couple lower cost options now, but you'll probably still pay out the nose to upgrade them as before.
