Well firstly the OP would be crazy to go with Linode. Secondly there is actually little difference between the amount of time spent managing a VPS versus a ded

Well firstly the OP would be crazy to go with Linode. Secondly there is actually little difference between the amount of time spent managing a VPS versus a dedicated or colo. Hardware failures aren't going to be your biggest concern. It's going to be services going down, database misbehaving, OS misconfigurations, general scaling issues, network dropping out etc e.g. witness all of the AWS/Linode outages almost all of which are due to DC power/networking. And the fact is that my Mac Mini has an equivalent Unixbench/disk test as the Linode instances + AWS m1.xlarge. So it gives you an idea of how much better performance and value you will get from a dedicated or colo.