Yeah I remember from back in the day. The Linode offering (assuming it works) gives some degree of confidence if a key person or two are out of action, you still can get back online if it's something not app related. And it's almost always the stupid stuff or an Apache reboot to get back online. For the money is worth that initial peace of mind.
In that awkward in-between phase of starting to grow and not quite there yet for another set of back-end hands :)
I found that if you were even a bit off the beaten path they didn’t do much more than reboot and check if the disks had filled up.