I've had a Linode for 3 years and love it, too. I spend about $240/year for a node with 512 MB of memory. But EC2 is more economical, providing 3x the memory for nearly the same price, plus much more CPU power and great disk IO performance.
I'm not sure EC2 is more economical in terms of CPU power, as I think Linode gives you access to up to 4 Xeon cores depending on load (which is generally quite low) so you probably get more raw performance from a Linode instance despite having less memory.
