Do you know how many "dime-store VPS providers" there are, and how many of them have existed as long as Linode and longer? Linode provides a valuable, quality service, and has lots of extras that you may not need.

Some VPS providers specialize and have a good history of both uptime and support, and provide it for less than the big-name competitors. I've found many to be exceptionally reliable with good support, and there are communities where you can find reviews and status on such providers to back up their claims.

And in the end, realistically, if you're doing small scaling by the hour you probably don't need the biggest providers in the game. A small service provider for a small company is often a great fit.

You can check out reviews on http://www.lowendbox.com/ and http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and compare prices, services and reputation. In general, a standard small-sized VPS will be half the cost of Linode, meaning you can buy double the VPS's (on different providers, for example) and get double the capacity and redundancy for the same cost. If you spread them out by region you can implement cheap software GeoIP load-balancing and serve the content by servers closest to your users.