I have zero first hand knowledge of the hosting market, but as a developer I think there's still a very legitimate market for smaller hosting companies out ther

I have zero first hand knowledge of the hosting market, but as a developer I think there's still a very legitimate market for smaller hosting companies out there. While small companies may not be able to compete with Amazon on the ability to offer numerous features or scale out rapidly with massive numbers of machines, they can compete on things like price and customer service. While many developers use Amazon seemingly by default without considering alternatives, many developers also realize that you can often pay much less for greater performance by relying on smaller hosting companies.