I think OVH had a similar issue back when they were giving away test servers. I wasn't on the list, but I heard from several people that the official question/reply address would send emails to everyone on the list. Needless to say, with several thousand people on there, it got spammy fast.
And why would they get a Linode when they can get a VPS from another provider for much, much cheaper? They don't bring much to the table for the price that a cheaper provider can't offer.
Features? Performance? A lot of people have benchmarked various cloud providers and Linode consistently gets high marks on CPU and disk IO. That particular $15/month dedicated gets you a single-core (!!!) Atom/Celeron processor. Who knows what hard drive they put on there. At $15 a month for a slot on the rack, I doubt it's any good.
For the longest time I lived on a single 512 linode, and ran 6 mid sized Django sites, all with postgres and redis on the same machine. I knew how to keep lean (taking advantage of varnish, nginx, uwsgi) and even used that linode for a ongoing mumble server and irc. I've since got more Linodes (grew with more sites) and split up the responsibilities, but I still remember getting a lot of performance out of that one little instance.
Also, Linode brings other features to the table, like a great API, easy to use dashboard, free nameserver, and availability in various geographic locations. Granted, my opinion is biased - I'm a really happy customer there. But I have had experience managing other machines on Slicehost (horrible experience) and EC2 (decent enough, but doesn't make me smile).
I have a BuyVM VPS, even with the filtered IP addon it's still under 1/2 the cost of a Linode with inferior allocations of disk and bandwidth. According to ServerBear, it has a (much) higher overall score, slightly worse average network/unixbench performance, and MUCH better disk performance. It's a great little VPS, and the only issues I've had were sub-par routing to some places for a few months (fixed completely when they bought a new router for SJC — now it maxes out my home line and does great in overall network performance). I've had my VPS for almost 12 months now, and I would never go to Linode...
An API sounds cool, but I have no use for that. The control panel is excellent, I have no reason to use Linode instead. BuyVM has free DNS (and 5GB of free backup space), so no reason to use Linode over them. BuyVM has SJC and Buffalo locations, sure, they could use more, but I don't need multiple servers. I've stuffed quite a bit of stuff onto my VPS, and performance has been amazing. They've even absorbed large DRDoS attacks for me with the filtered IPs, and were willing to accommodate my unusual situation (the DRDoS source slaves didn't realize the source IP was spoofed, and sent abuse reports to my provider, which were useless as they were the ones attacking me) — after explaining the situation to them, they agreed to ignore any further reports from said network. I currently have three low end virtual servers for (a lot) of things, and my favorite out of all of them is the BuyVM VPS. So, at least in my case, I can see no possible reason I'd want to go with a provider that is 2x the cost, has historic security issues, has been reported to be unwilling to deal with any sort of DDoS attack whatsoever beyond a nullroute, and offers inferior performance and resources.
I actually don't like the idea of getting a OVH budget dedi over a VPS for any type of production site, it's just not as stable.
Let's start with point #1. You're paying $1000 upfront. With a VPS, you can pay a few bucks per month to get very decent performance (assuming you go with a LEB instead of a overpriced Linode). You assume that you could use your home internet, but the reality of that is that almost every consumer ISP on the face of the earth won't allow customers to run servers. Can you get away with it? Usually, yes. Is it a good idea? Not at all.
Why spend the equivalent of $50/mo? You can get budget dedicated servers for that price range, with a heck of a lot better network resources, and no need to maintain your own hardware.
Really, there's a ridiculously long list of reasons that running any public-facing server from your home is a horrible idea. Take the game server I used to run as an example — I'd be completely and utterly screwed if my home connection was getting 4Gbps DDoS attacks, yet with it being on a remote server, I have options to mitigate it or even ignore it (nullroute, yay).
Edit: There's a ridiculously long list of reasons why home-hosting is bad.
IIRC the janitors have very few powers, similar to forum moderators on most forums. I suppose you could claim the admins are helping, but personally, I'd only consider people who directly work on the site's backend/frontend management and development, not unpaid community managers.
Janitors do have very few powers. Yet it turns out to be an awful lot of work to moderate a site as open and popular as 4chan.org. Without janitors, you can be sure that the site would consist of predominantly spam & child porn, and probably couldn't continue to exist, for reasons legal or otherwise. But you're right; creatively speaking, the entity is "run" by Poole and probably a handful of contractors.
Well, you could say the same of any forum. I volunteer as a moderator on a rather large forum, it's not quite as large as 4chan but it's among the largest on the internet... It's a lot of work, but we're not the ones running the site itself, we're just volunteers who help out with community moderation. And the work is spread among a lot of volunteers.
