[drzaiusapelord]

Not to mention, my physical servers take ages to reboot considering all the BIOS and RAID checking they do. My Linodes, being VMs, literally boot in like 10 or 15 seconds. Maybe less. That's really minor downtime. My HP DL380s take several minutes.

You can't migrate to a new kernel on Linode without a reboot anyway, so if you're proud of a 12+ month uptime, you're running a vulernable kernel.

[kbar13]

yep. Plus, if you're doing vms correctly, you should be able to spin up new ones quickly to cover ones that go down.