I don't know if this is still true, but when I started using Linode some years ago, Fremont was easily their worst datacenter. I've been in Newark without issue for some time now and I heard most of the other datacenters are pretty solid also.

Regarding their support, I've submitted tickets at sometimes very odd hours and gotten responses back within minutes.

What I really find amusing though is that you follow up your complaint of "completely absent during outage" with a reference to Amazon.