All of the UK-endpoint VPN providers I considered were sketchy in one way or another, and most of them had very poor speeds from the UK to the US. A VPN connection usually bypasses your local firewall too, depending on configuration, which means you really, really have to trust the people running your VPN service, and trust that they isolated their customers from each other. Linode, on the other hand, is a well-respected company with extremely good connectivity (I get 160ms pings from San Diego, CA and more than 30mbit/s transfer). And I know the guy who is running my VPN service on Linode: me.
If you're the kind of person who gladly exchanges security and privacy for $10 to $15, then those other options are for you.
