I doubt that's true. More likely it's because lower tier users are almost always disproportionally more demanding of help than higher tier ones. If you're going to make, for example, $1,000/m you're better off getting it from two competent, $500/m customers that don't need much help, rather than 100 $10/m customers who all need their hands held constantly. In Linode's case fewer users also makes contention less of an issue - the fewer VPSs per physical box, the better.

> I doubt that's true. More likely it's because lower tier users are almost always disproportionally more demanding of help than higher tier ones.

it's called "skin in the game", and those with very little skin in the game do not truly give a shit about their own problems, so they expect others to give a shit for them.

every business learns this lesson at some point. basically all these cheap hosting providers are trying to make money by automating the problem away - we'll see how it works in the long run for hosting. the jury is still out if you ask me.

This is not true.

Linode allow you to attach additional IPs to your Linode at $1/month, for example, I have one Linode which has 6 IPs attached for only $25/month. I still can't find a company has this kind of flexibility.

Bytemark, based in the UK, with their cloud product Bigv (http://bigv.io/)

Right, but they provide additional IP addresses only if you can provide evidence that you need them (e.g., SSL certs).

Don't almost all web servers/browsers use SNI now? I don't see why you'd need multiple IPs for running multiple SSL sites nowadays. I have done multiple SSL sites on one IP for years.

IE on XP and Android 2.x are the notable things that don't support SNI. Some people still care about these.

what are the range of ip addresses like? are they just like

    23.23.23.24
    23.23.23.25
    23.23.23.26

$2 boxes are ripe for abuse and billing fraud.