Amazon AWS has the best security of any virtual server provider I've seen, by miles. There might be specialty providers (e.g. FireHost) which are good dedicated server offerings, too, but I haven't evaluated them -- it usually is "AWS, is it good enough?" and then if no, directly to a cage, do not pass go, do not collect $50k.
AWS also has the best first and second derivative on everything related to product; they were essentially crippled crap in 2006, and have turned into a viable option over the past years, without slowing down. Compared to the level of innovation in colo/dedicated hosting (~zero per year) and openstack, AWS is amazing.
It's still inferior to a good on-premises or colocated environment (mainly due to technical limitations in the virtualized environment; AWS's policy is top-notch commercial standard), but that may not matter for you. AWS pricing and performance is also worse in a lot of ways than dedicated hardware, but may also not matter to you.
A lot of the big cloud/dedicated hosting companies have decent security (SoftLayer, Rackspace), but aren't as good at AWS at policy or technical security. The sketchy VPS providers are miles below the middling standard set by companies like Rackspace.
Linode is solidly in the "sketchy VPS provider" realm. A bit better for availability, and not likely to actually be attacking you themselves, but not a responsible choice for anyone who cares about security from everything I've seen.
PaaS, in practice, is also a good solution if you care about security but have no skills or budget. While Heroku has its own set of problems around price, performance, and availability, it's more secure out of the box than a badly configured/maintained AWS deployment of your own, or a badly configured on-premises/colocated cage or dedicated servers.
How about for those that just want a small instance system. I just do the smallest linode setup for some personal projects. From my understanding, AWS is expensive for that type of use case?
I second that question, and expand it a little. AWS is likely a more secure and trustworthy option given the recent controversy, but it really is comparing apples to oranges; they're both hosting solutions (fruit), but fundamentally very different.
Is there any service close to Linode that provides a similar service for a similar price? I know of DigitalOcean, but their CPUs are very underpowered in each plan compared to Linode's (especially after recent upgrades).
AWS also has the best first and second derivative on everything related to product; they were essentially crippled crap in 2006, and have turned into a viable option over the past years, without slowing down. Compared to the level of innovation in colo/dedicated hosting (~zero per year) and openstack, AWS is amazing.
It's still inferior to a good on-premises or colocated environment (mainly due to technical limitations in the virtualized environment; AWS's policy is top-notch commercial standard), but that may not matter for you. AWS pricing and performance is also worse in a lot of ways than dedicated hardware, but may also not matter to you.
A lot of the big cloud/dedicated hosting companies have decent security (SoftLayer, Rackspace), but aren't as good at AWS at policy or technical security. The sketchy VPS providers are miles below the middling standard set by companies like Rackspace.
Linode is solidly in the "sketchy VPS provider" realm. A bit better for availability, and not likely to actually be attacking you themselves, but not a responsible choice for anyone who cares about security from everything I've seen.
PaaS, in practice, is also a good solution if you care about security but have no skills or budget. While Heroku has its own set of problems around price, performance, and availability, it's more secure out of the box than a badly configured/maintained AWS deployment of your own, or a badly configured on-premises/colocated cage or dedicated servers.