I've been using Linode for about the past 4 months. I was previously using HostMonster for all of my hosting, while I would recommend them 80% of the time, Linode and the nature of a VPS allows many things you cannot do with shared hosting.

I was looking around for some recommendations on how to deal with user accounts and permissions and ran across this great article that has almost every piece of information you need to get your server from nothing to deployed.

Linode allows you complete control over your VPS which, for beginners (like me when I started with Linode), difficult to get started with. Just follow this guide and you'll be good to go.