Thanks for the good counter-points, but I'd like to disagree. :-) First, without using an nginx + fastcgi/Apache/whatever front-end it's not true that just ru

Thanks for the good counter-points, but I'd like to disagree. :-) First, without using an nginx + fastcgi/Apache/whatever front-end it's not true that just running W3TC scales your site. I was doing that for my own blog and whenever I hit the top of HackerNews my site would go down anyway because Apache is still a beast and you need the proxy to move bytes. Second, getting a sensible configuration of W3TC including e.g. memcached instead of the file cache is not trivial. Third, it's not true that a "commodity VPS" server will match our speed. We found that hard drive speed and processors (e.g. Intel Xeon not AMD crap you get at some hosting providers, Amazon AWS included) together made a 2x difference in page-load speed in our tests of various VPS providers. Fourth, none of that helps you with security. You still have to be on top of which plugins are secure, which patches are faulty, file permissions. Among the obvious security measures, we also have HARDWARE security devices (e.g. DoS and obvious hacking signatures) in front of our servers -- something you'd have to pay a lot for at MT (if you can do it at all). Fifth, we have awesome WordPress-specific tech support from true experts, something that I'm sure you'll admit you don't get at MT or VPS providers like Rackspace and Amazon. However I DO AGREE WITH YOU that anyone who is technical and wants to do the tests and research absolutely can produce a system reasonably close to ours. However wouldn't YOU agree that most WordPress users either aren't that technical or -- like me -- simply don't want to deal with it? That's where we come in.