That's the thing - they're not trying to compete with GoDaddy hosting and offshore WP stock template design firms, or to sell to personal bloggers with a cpanel account and "Teach yourself Wordpress in 21 days" books.

They're offering a reasonably priced service to people who've tried that route and found it enough grief that it's worth a few grand for a decent web design and Wordpress config/integration, and $30/month to host it.

If a business can't justify those sorts of numbers on 20,000 visits a month, they probably need to rethink their whole web strategy.

If I may answer that with a link, this is why we start at $29/mo (and most people pay us more), and why we're not trying to compete with the $5-$10/mo type hosts:

http://wpengine.com/special/

25,000 might sound like a lot of visits, but I have been beyond that in mere hours with a single slashdotting.

Well, that was in 2004 when /. was big. Today, I would fear the Reddit frontpage.

The next step up? Going from $29/mo. to $99/mo.

I might just not be their target customer.

If you spike, we don't care and we don't charge you extra. We only care if you're consistently significantly over the limit month over month.