Price is one thing. Availability and service is another thing.
For example, if your node goes down on a friday evening, will there be staff to get it back up before monday morning? Perhaps you even run other stuff on that VPS/dedi, like a homepage or other services.
Geographical location is another issue. In the US, prices are low, because of very high competition between datacenters and hosting companies. In addition, it must be assumed that the NSA eavesdrop on all communications on US soil, if you bought a VPS with your cc, the NSA knows your home ip (they derive it from the connections you make to that VPS), they know the ip of your node, and they also most likely know all the other purchases you've done with that cc. Ie. you're operating in bright daylight in sight of everyone.
If for whatever reason, there was a crackdown in the US on bitcoin, it would not be unlikely that all dedi and VPS'es running a bitcoin node in the US would be shut down. In addition your cc might be blocked, and you might get a visit of a 3-letter agency. I'm not saying this is going to happen, I'm just saying it
might happen.
In such a situation, it's important that there's plenty of nodes outside the US. For that very reason, it's good for node-operators to operate nodes outside the US. To aid in more decentralization and robustness for the network.
As for Linode, please do not forget the bitcoin businesses that were the victims of their poor security practices.
infamous Linode hackSecurity is our number one priority and has been for over eight years. We depend on and value the trust our customers have placed in us. Yet, one of their web-based systems was compromised, with the result of a large stash of bitcoins vanishing.
Relevant read:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=73640One could however argue that it was stupid to keep bitcoins on those servers in the first place, and I agree - but the treatment from Linode's side was less than stellar imo.
