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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 fairl

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.

jackowayed 14y ago
It depends on the stage of the business. For a small business that might be running off of one or two VPS's, you're probably much better off paying a few hundred dollars a month for a machine that is up 99.99% of the time instead of 99.9% of the time than to spend significant engineering time trying to setup database replication and failover (and either relaxing consistency or adding significant latency to your site) in the hopes of getting an 99.999%. This is especially true given that more often than not, within the first 5 times you use it, you'll experience some bug in your HA setup that leads to some complicated, slow-to-diagnose-and-fix failure.