@Kevin Muldoon - totally agree on WiredTree, love that company, but my experience with ServInt was highly variable. The problem is that hosting is extremely cyclical, in every sense: companies overstaff when trying to build their reputation, then coast for years on that reputation; good staff move on, standards slip, the sense of mission fades, the installed base of clients starts to get milked.

My point is not that WP Engine won't have problems - as a relatively new company, they haven't proved anything yet - but their positioning makes sense: they are explicitly focused upon WordPress hosting and are charging a sufficient amount that it is reasonable to presume that maintaining a knowledgeable staff will be possible.

With $5 hosting, by contrast, it is not reasonable to assume that the staff will be knowledgeable. You can get lucky, sure, and I always appreciate my good fortune when I deal with someone who knows their stuff and is willing to go beyond the usual limits of their support policy, but I don't expect it. WiredTree are patient, obliging guys but, ultimately, the written contract I have with them clearly defines the limits of what they have to do, I cannot base my business decisions upon the assumption that they will continue to exceed those limits, I certainly wouldn't recommend that any of my clients rely upon that assumption.

Suggesting that a busy, non-technical person get a $50 VPS, even a "fully-managed" one, is madness, just knowing what to order requires a certain amount of expertise. Hell, even knowing which VPS providers are currently good requires expertise or dozens of hours wasted soliciting advice on forums, and then you've got all the overhead of running a VPS, keeping it secure, etc. No, that's a terrible idea for most regular human beings.

My rule of thumb is that any working professional's time is worth at least $100 per hour, probably more in most cases. I don't advise that any consumer remain wilfully ignorant of the products and services they buy, natural curiosity should compel them to at least understand the basics, but we need more services like WP Engine and Page.ly and all the other services that will emerge to astonish us with their seemingly insane prices but which, ultimately, will empower their customers to get more done in the limited time available to them. We need evermore value-added services because this is how quality takes true root, how a market evolves upwards from bare considerations of cost and raw specifications, this is how good service and real knowledge start to get their just reward.

Rejoice, equally, at the fact that Automattic are now charging Webhosts $250,000 per year for what is, effectively, partial access to one WordPress expert, because it is planting a flag which suggests that all this stuff we know, all this expertise we've accumulated over years of mucking around with WordPress, is truly valuable.

I've always been a little reticent about charging my clients because, I guess, secretly I don't feel like WordPress stuff is work, I don't feel that it's fair to charge $120 an hour for stuff that I enjoy talking about anyway but I came to realize that, actually, you can save people so much wasted time, effort, frustration and thousands of dollars by giving them the right information at the right time. My guilty conscience says "C'mon, they could easily learn all this stuff for themselves, it's not Rocket Science" but, actually, it may as well be Rocket Science if the information they need right now and is not already in their heads.

So, yeah, while I find WP Engine's pageview limits a tad cynical and the jump to $199 alarming, I don't have any argument against the principal that serious, specific expertise from WordPress guys like us is worth far more than the cost of silicon, metal and electricity.