I'm also a happy customer and want to address a few of these points.
> It is too hard to figure out that you offer hourly billing, I found it by accident, and a year too late.
It's still a pretty new feature, only about 18 months old, and their price sheet has clearly listed e.g. ".06/hr to $40/mo" for quite a while now. I vaguely remember getting an email and seeing a blog post about it when it was announced...
> When I pay for a dedicated loadbalancers, I would expect it to be top-tuned from your side.
I think it is top-tuned, but only on $20/month worth of hardware and networking. ;-) They explicitly say in some blog posts to add more NB and scale out if you need more concurrent connections. I agree that this is a little alarming, and I'd be willing to pay more for beefier NBs—just like I do with regular nodes. Building out your own HAproxy nodes is a fine solution and what I plan to do if this becomes an issue for us.
> Your API is a mess... It also seems strange that to emulate one or two clicks in the interface, needs 11 requests through the API.
It's not the greatest API in the history of computers but it gets the job done and I found the documentation to be more than adequate. It's bare-bones and you're going to want an abstraction over it, whether you write your own (like I did), use their CLI, or use Salt or Knife or what have you. Whether it's one API call or 100 doesn't matter if all you have to do on a regular basis is `linode-create foo` or `ansible-playbook create-linode.yml bar`.
Anyway, I just ran through a quick build using the web interface and it takes like 10+ clicks to build a node with the default disks, no private interface, no label, no forward or reverse DNS, not booted, etc. For this to take four API calls to allocate the node, create root and swap volumes, and build the config doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Tack on another four API calls to set the label and display group, set the DNS, add a private IP, and boot the node. I'm not seeing the problem here.
> Lack of an object store
I mean, sure, Linode lacks a lot of the things that AWS provides. They also don't provide a database aaS or a queue aaS or a CDN aaS or... you get the idea. I don't think they're trying to compete with Amazon at this level. Where do you draw the line between IaaS and PaaS? Can you implement your own object store using some open source software just like you run your own HAproxy and database instances?
> Can I setup a Linode through the API with private networking enabled?
Yes, but it's a separate API call. :-) https://www.linode.com/api/linode/linode.ip.addprivate
> I am a happy customer, and I loved your KVM upgrade, I love your prices, and I love your service. But it would be nice to see more innovations happening.
Agreed on all points. My innovation wishlist includes VPC (I really just want my own private VLAN) and more flexible node configurations (another commentor mentioned that you can't add disk without adding CPU and RAM—and vice-versa—and this is a huge pain point). I haven't had to deal (yet) with IP swapping and anycast but I can see those becoming issues for us in the future. And I actually do agree that Linode should implement some kind of a object store to compete with S3... I would categorize that as IaaS, not PaaS, and it's the most glaring hole in Linode's offering right now.