>It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled the hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without scaling the other. It was ridiculous.

You can easily scale hard drive space independently of RAM by buying block storage separately and then mounting it on your Linode.

I think every VPS provider I have looked at any time recently (and I have been moving things in the last few weeks) offers some option for block storage separate from compute. Most offer an object storage option too.