But to each his own. Again, my whole argument is not about elastic or scaling apps (where I totally get the value), it's about their non-elastic intro package and the value you would get from it (no scaling and limitations on what you can do compared to your own vanilla dedicated box) versus a dedicated cloud server that costs 1/3 of the price.
If they want to bring in customers initially onto their platform (which makes it way easier to upsell to the elastic service when the time comes), they might need to adjust their base pricing a bit to be competitive with similar (non-scaling) offerings.
I say this because unlike other application stacks like Rails, setting up a proper basic hosting stack in PHP is dead simple for a lot of people, so the bar is a lot lower than rolling you own for those other stacks.
but don't you think that paying the extra $18/mo might be worth paying if it means that your server "just works" and you don't have to deal with it? even a LAMP-ish stack has its headaches during setup and (especially) high growth.
And I don't have ssh access. And I can't install my own extensions. And if I want to run cron jobs, it costs more. And if I want to run MongoDB, it costs more. And if I want to use Memcached, it costs more.
So while I get the convenience, "doing it myself" is super simple for PHP stacks, and the costs of using their basic non-elastic add up fast when you are hosting lots of sites, and it actually gives me less, not more.
When you say it isn't meant for people who want to do it themselves, I would agree on the elastic plans (running an auto-scaling setup correctly is not easy), but their basic plan really doesn't offer anything compelling for what I consider to be a relatively high price.
The whole scaling argument is great and if that's a real concern for your project, then services like Orchestra.io are awesome, but I think a lot of people over-provision and plan for scaling prematurely, and pay the price for it unnecessarily.
My sites don't have millions of users, but some of them have up to 10k registered active users and with some smart caching and setup, run just fine on the aforementioned 12$/month servers.
Anyways, I think I've made my point here. I wish these guys the best and I'm happy to see people offering these kinds of services in the (admittedly un-sexy but still very popular) PHP space, and I will definitely follow their progress on the scaling offerings.
2) your setup is the more common one, using services like this are less common. i have my own cheap servers that host multiple pages, as well, and i'm not going to switch them over. but i also have some apps that i might, because they're a headache to manage. but i think we agree -- this isn't something you're interested in because its not really for people in your situation.