That's the problem; hosting is a commodity these days. 90% of people who want hosting only compare based on price. It's hard to justify paying "real staff" high wages when the margins are razor thin.

Big hosts can survive by essentially offloading support, and making as much as possible self-managed by the end-user.

The non-technical people who just want "a server that works" won't, broadly speaking, pay a premium for that. They're non-technical and will eat up support-hours too, asking questions about setting file permissions on Wordpress.

this seems like ... race to the bottom perhaps? or prisoner's dilemma? or some other catchphrase to describe a common market problem.

If everyone just charged some basic $ for support, it would generally get better. I'm perplexed and sometimes shocked how much 'free support' people expect - and often "get" to some degree - by cheap hosts. I'm in some WP support forums on facebook and... man - what people expect for $10/month is crazy. And... the amount of bs misinformation and half-truths being spread by 'experts' in those forums in crazy too.

Add in 'authoritative' sites and experts 'recommending' (via affiliate links) bluehost/godaddy/siteground on a recurring basis, and we've got this... again(?) - race to the bottom?

People will post how 'awesome' the support is because some remote people spent 15 minutes walking them through file permission setup amazes me.

Oh... and "free migrations" between hosts. Then when there's a real issue - like 6 of the 38 plugins don't actually work on the new host, and the new host says "this will be $75 to make it all work" people are outraged! and publicly slam everywhere they can. Then someone else promises unlimited XYZ, they move, and the cycle starts again.

Finally... liar/cheats/scumbags who intentionally rip people off on top of all that (I think some of the ripping off isn't always intentional, just misinformed) makes people even more wary of trusting genuine people.

I may have just described half of the history of human society, unrelated to hosting, but.... I've watch this market grow over the past 20+ years, and it's just so... weird.

You could say it's a 'lemon market' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ).

A lemon market is when the buyer doesn't have enough information to tell the difference between a good product (peach) and a bad one (lemon). Since the buyer can't tell the difference, the price he is willing to pay will end up somewhere between the value of the peach (more expensive) and the value of the lemon (cheaper). What happens then is that the sellers of lemons thrive while the the sellers of peaches end up leaving the market. This lowers the average price and creates a cycle where the price decreases which drive even more sellers of quality products to leave the market which lowers the price further...

Thanks!

Not the catchphrase but real definitions:

Commoditization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoditization

Economies of scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

Tyranny of the minimum viable user. Or in this case, enterprise client.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

A Gresham's Law dynamic.

I don't think so, there is aws and then there is "host super cheap"

Rackspace might have had a chance, but it is gone now..

I think there are companies like this, but they are focused on a niche (wpengine, Pantheon) rather than being for general purpose hosting.

It used to be them. We used them for a decade and up until a few years ago they were great. You could call and get someone competent in an emergency as an adjunct to your in house talent. It let us punch way above our weight.

That is dead and buried now though. There may still be some good people there but their products are dated 'also ran' knockoffs of AWS services and I don't trust them within an inch of our environments anymore.

If you just want a “managed server”, how much cheaper is Rackspace than AWS’s reserves prices for dedicated hosts?

Managed servers are very different from just dedicated hardware.

AWS is basically the definition of managed services. You can either go all in on AWS’s Manager Services, used dedicated hosts or stay somewhere in between.

But sometimes what you need is a managed server rather than a managed service.

Serious question what part of your server do you need managed besides the hardware? AWS would be doing that with a dedicated host.

With Rackspace you used to be able to get support with things like OS upgrades and security patches; network troubleshooting; firewall setup; filesystem issues; and the like. Systems administration, basically.

Depending on the level and type of support you need, you can either go for AWS’s business support plan (10% of your bill with $100 minimum) but they won’t do anything involving anything hosted on your actual VM besides maybe help you with one of their software agents. On the other hand, you can always pay a manager service provider to pick up the slack if you don’t have the expertise in house.

The skill and experience is not in the company anymore as such the promise they make to customers can not be met. They are currently building support teams in India