If you're actually running a business, then redundancy is the way to go, not spending more on real hardware. With a VPS, you're able to achieve redundancy fairly easily, provided you have multiple datacenters available (Linode does). Without some sort of failover, a dead server means downtime whether you're dedicated or VPS.

Also, Linode's SLA may be 99.9%, but I've experienced with two businesses, using Linode over the course of four years, about 45 minutes total of downtime (on any given server, not our entire infrastructure). I'd much sooner take years of past experience showing incredibly good uptime over a piece of paper meant to limit liability.

I believe Linode is an excellent choice for small-medium sized online companies.