My point is they will offer the refund pointing toward their TOS even if in reality they are in violation.

In violation of what, exactly? If they are upholding their SLA, how can they be in violation of it?

No one will see anything more than that without a lawsuit and 99% of the smaller customers simply don't have the means to do anything more than grin and bear it.

I propose that companies either uphold the guarantees they make to customers or go away so that companies that can and will take their place. Their is simply too little recourse for these types of incidents.

Are you suggesting that companies who experience more than 45 minutes of downtime file lawsuits against their service providers? Honestly? Not withstanding the fact that the providers SLA's and terms and conditions typically protect them against lawsuits related to downtime, at no point do these providers (or Linode) ever offer 100% uptime and/or a 100% fault free service. For good reason. Such a service is practically impossible to provide, and unreasonable to expect, especially at Linode's prices.

If your service is that important to you that 100% uptime (or as close as you can muster) is critical, chances are you aren't using Linode at all. Or maybe you're using Linode, but you have a very well designed HA/failover implementation involving multiple providers, multiple networks and multiple geographical locations in order to reduce your risk of downtime. Even with all that, you probably still couldn't guarantee 100% availability.

All the above said, I still don't understand your responses in relation to Linode here. They offer an SLA, they provide the SLA. What exactly is it you think they are not doing?