fancy said:
What makes wordpress hosting so special anyway? They charge tonnes of money (some even by pageviews) but look like normal hosting.
Are they just a scam? How do they optimize for wordpress hosting?(or maybe I should ask, what they can optimize/improve that a normal VPS cannot do?
The thing here is that Wordpress is a widely popular generic CMS (Content Management System). If you add to that the fact that it's an open-source project (i.e. anyone can look at the source code of it) then you can easily figure out what can go wrong with hosting web sites based on it.
In short, its popularity reflects the easiness with which basically anyone can install one which puts it within the reach of total newbies and a vast array of web masters too lazy or, may be, just too incompetent security-wise to have any regards of what entails to have an online website with a code base that is known by basically anyone who bother to read it in order to wreak havoc in otherwise peaceful hosting servers like this one.
Now, why Wordpress hosting servers are charging tonnes of money?..
First, I don't use CMSes (I generally use what I code) so I'm not aware of the available services that are out there. But since you affirm their existence then may be
they have built their business model on M$'s golden premise which is to generally assume that users are dumb, and in that case they are willing to take the obvious risk of hosting WP sites and be more proactive security-wise (automatically patching various vulnerabilities) on behalf of the assumed dumb user/webmaster.
That was long... but I hope the message is clear: people who are charging you a hefty some of money to host your WP are implicitly telling you that your an incompetent webmaster and that they will be looking after you as a result, otherwise that service is not for you.
