I am designing a website and am debating if I should go with rails or django, my preference leans towards django but the fact that heroku makes deployment and sys admin tasks very easy I might go with rails+heorku. Can linode provide a nice platform that is easy to maintain and scale for uploading django projects? I am able to use linux effeciently but would like to focus more on the software aspects as opposed to hardware/server stuff.
I've heard some bad things about app engine and have decided not to bother with it.
I have been using linode for almost 4 years now and I have tried a variety of solutions like Amazon EC2, Heroku and MediaTemple.
You are on your own if you go for Amazon EC2 and the performance isn't as good as Linode's. Heroku is great if you don't want to customize your kernel or worry too much about distro level library installs, but that also means that there's some limitation on what you can do on Heroku - you don't have access to the filesystem for example.
I don't really like Mediatemple that much but that's just my experience with them.
Linode's technical support is unbeatable.
For "one-click installs", and if you don't mind shared hosting, webfaction is the solution.
If you want to automate your server set-up on linode.com, you can consider stackscripts as mentioned by @eakron above. Or you can write your own fabric scripts. See http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.4.1/index.html