this is going to happen no matter what - the rate of consolidation in my opinion is actually accelerating. despite what anyone says, the vast majority of peopl

this is going to happen no matter what - the rate of consolidation in my opinion is actually accelerating. despite what anyone says, the vast majority of people choose their hosting provider in order to "not get fired", i.e. they are extremely risk-averse, to the point of irrationality, even when presented with massive savings, better service, better underlying hardware and network, and more transparency. most of the time they are spending someone else's money, also. you should see some of the deals that have come across my desk. the 'big names' can literally charge 2-5x more than a competitive quote and get away with it, oftentimes with worse deliverables (i.e. long stretches of downtime that somehow get a pass from their customers). at the end of the day it's a server sitting in a rack in a datacenter, connected to ethernet. beyond a certain level of quality (tier 3 dc, server class hardware, an enterprise quality network) it's really all the same. people should choose their hosting provider on 1. quality of implementation 2. price and 3. whether or not the provider actually gives a shit about you and your account, but they usually just go with the name, like many other markets.