I was in the same position not too long ago. While I don't think I can make any real recommendations because I don't know your specific requirements, I highly suggest checking out Hetzner and OVH dedicated servers. I found that the ping time from hetzner to customers in the US did not make a difference for my purposes, and I can get a much much beefier server at hetzner than linode.

To be fair, the negatives I have experienced so far are: hetzner's management console is pretty poor compared to linode's (but it gets the job done), and linode is a self-serve almost instant provisioning while hetzner seems to take about 12 hours.