The difference is $12 for a 256MB slice. What if you start to grow and need 5 1GB slices? That is a $250/month difference.

as your traffic grows, so should your revenue.

I've observed hosting costs to grow faster than revenue :-(

You may be in the wrong business :)

really? i think with today's hardware/bandwidth prices, it's perfectly reasonable to setup a fairly busy site and not worry about revenue at all. If it only sets you back a few dollars a month, it might make sense for you to build something popular for the experience and the social capital.

It might only be $12 but it's also a 150% increase. I think when you're comparing apples and apples (as in two products that have roughly the same features-- not a Rolls Royce and moped even though they share a basic function) there are going to be very few situations where a 150% increase is justified.

I'm on Slicehost, with about a $100 a month bill. Given my technology needs, that is overpaying -- both for the number of servers I bought (I could consolidate to save) and the price per server.

And I just couldn't care less. That's like one night's worth of sales. I've (hopefully) got better things to do with my time than spending it preparing for a migration and inevitable breakage in the interests of saving myself an hour's salary a month.

How are you measuring quality? I can think of:

* Memory

* CPU

* Storage

* Bandwidth

* Service - which is hard to measure, but also a very important metric.