Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not the only ones. I consider myself up to date, and I had no idea Linode was in the VPS business. If I had to guess their mission, it sounds like Tailscale. [1] I've used Digital Ocean and all the big cloud providers. Vercel, Netlify, Heroku. Haven't touched Akamai, but I certainly know of it. [1] https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/
Linode, Slicehost, MediaTemple and a few others I'm forgetting belong to a declining generation of hosting businesses that used to be popular in their hey days.
I just remembered Engine Yard. Like the others, Engine Yard is another notable one from that era that is still around (but their focus then was on RoR, IIRC).