We've used Rackspace Cloud and Linode for several years and found Rackspace Cloud performance to be significantly worse than Linode for CPU and IO. Like, not even close. Prices are about the same. Support experiences are also similar (quick, competent responses from both sides).
The only reason we keep the Rackspace stuff around is because we want to have a relatively wide separation between our production webservices and our website / monitoring so that if one goes down that we can announce / detect that from a wholly separate network.
I'd second this. Particularly CPU performance on Rackspace has been hugely worse than Linode on comparatively sized instances. To the point I've had to use 8GB instances on Rackspace for CPU bound tasks which are fine on 1 or 2GB Linode instances.
We're currently considering a migration from Rackspace to Linode for this very reason so we'll temporarily be running a complete version of our infrastructure on both and replaying traffic on both.
Once we've done this I'll try and post some detailed benchmarks.
I use both Rackspace and Linode. Both have been pretty good but Rackspace has been phenomenally reliable - I'm talking 100% uptime for the past couple of years (according to Pingdom) for my main service. Linode has been less reliable, though not bad by industry standards. I am planning to launch a new product next year. Will definitely be using Rackspace for it - that reliability is worth the extra expense and lower spec.
We've used Rackspace Cloud and Linode for several years and found Rackspace Cloud performance to be significantly worse than Linode for CPU and IO. Like, not even close. Prices are about the same. Support experiences are also similar (quick, competent responses from both sides).
The only reason we keep the Rackspace stuff around is because we want to have a relatively wide separation between our production webservices and our website / monitoring so that if one goes down that we can announce / detect that from a wholly separate network.