Agree. If growth is (reasonably) predictable I think dedicated is a great way to go. Surely if you are aiming for an MVP, you don't want to be worrying about managing multiple boxes and adjusting the amount of RAM, CPU and diskspace they have access to. Better to slightly over provision with a cheap dedicated server then expand when you have a feel for the requirements of the project.

Definitely a good point, however Linode don't offer dedi's and it didn't make sense from a time investment point of view to move away from them until this point.