[tripzilch]

A bank or safe deposit box business will most definitely have clear terms about how liable they are for if something gets stolen.

For a hosting company this is different. Especially because--it's hard to draw a line but I feel it's there--there's a difference between storing sensitive data and storing (what are practically) valuables/money.

I wonder though, I'm not clear on his set up (or business, even), but basically he was literally storing his bitcoin money on a Linode server? Since they're not a bank, nor a safe-deposit service, or are in the business of storing valuables (as opposed to sensitive data). I can't come up with a realworld analogy (they usually break down anyway), but wouldn't you want to wrap this data in an extra layer of encryption or something? It's not that hard to come up with some scheme so that people with root access to the Linode server can't do anything with it either. Since this is about (almost) real money, that's what I'd do.