You seem to be brushing off the fact that the vast majority of even the tech-savvy market simply doesn't require the flexibility of AWS and will happily go get

You seem to be brushing off the fact that the vast majority of even the tech-savvy market simply doesn't require the flexibility of AWS and will happily go get better perf (CPU, disk), and more memory and transfer, at a fraction of the cost elsewhere. The nano doesn't tempt me to move any of the half dozen or so VPS's I have running to AWS in the slightest. I'll stick to vendors who answer support tickets from the little guys, oversell fairly, and don't have a ridiculously complex pricing structure. And shared hosting isn't dead. Plenty of small businesses still pay good money for managed shared hosting to run their webpages etc, instead of paying a wannabe-sysadmin who probably doesn't even shell-in to the VPS once a month. My uncle runs a small business and pays his webmaster around $30/month for a website running off an IP that hosts at least 3,300 other domains...most of them small businesses just like his. Someone is making a mint on that box.