I think there are good hosting options out there, if you choose the right one for your application. For hosting small, mostly-static sites with very little traffic, you can't beat hosts with unlimited plans (space, domains, bandwidth) for $5-10/mo. Of course they aren't truly unlimited, but as long as you aren't putting too much load on the servers, they don't hassle you.
Where you run into trouble is when one of those sites gets too much traffic, or you try to run a resource-intensive site like a forum or CMS. This is where I think the hosting market has a hole. There are plenty of options for high-traffic, resource-hungry sites/apps if you want to get your hands dirty with server/network admin. There is no limit to what you could do on AWS or RackSpace, but for the non sysadmin who just has a high traffic site and wants ease-of-use, redundancy, caching, and backups, there aren't many options in between cheap shared hosting and complex cloud or dedicated setups.
There is the VPS route, but depending on the provider, redundancy may be an issue. There are VPS plans that include cPanel, so the ease of use is there.
I've often wondered why there weren't more managed CMS hosting providers out there. There is WPEngine for WordPress, and I think they do a great job of making it plug an play while offering advanced features (static caching, CDN), but shouldn't there be others like them for Drupal, Joomla, vBulletin, PhpBB? Or even for generic sites, shouldn't there be a shared host that offers separate machines for database, web, memcache, and Varnish, with automatic CDN integration, and hourly snapshots?
Where you run into trouble is when one of those sites gets too much traffic, or you try to run a resource-intensive site like a forum or CMS. This is where I think the hosting market has a hole. There are plenty of options for high-traffic, resource-hungry sites/apps if you want to get your hands dirty with server/network admin. There is no limit to what you could do on AWS or RackSpace, but for the non sysadmin who just has a high traffic site and wants ease-of-use, redundancy, caching, and backups, there aren't many options in between cheap shared hosting and complex cloud or dedicated setups.
There is the VPS route, but depending on the provider, redundancy may be an issue. There are VPS plans that include cPanel, so the ease of use is there.
I've often wondered why there weren't more managed CMS hosting providers out there. There is WPEngine for WordPress, and I think they do a great job of making it plug an play while offering advanced features (static caching, CDN), but shouldn't there be others like them for Drupal, Joomla, vBulletin, PhpBB? Or even for generic sites, shouldn't there be a shared host that offers separate machines for database, web, memcache, and Varnish, with automatic CDN integration, and hourly snapshots?