Different from the "extremely questionable" web host I once worked for, the "old fashioned" web host that interviewed me for a system administrator job and decided that they wanted a PHP developer instead, and the "slightly less questionable" web host I ran, these companies are run by smart people.

How smart? They're leveraging virtual hosting, hardware clustering, and reliable open source software with smart developers writing custom backends that glue these systems together to produce elegant, robust, scalable hosting for people that can't be assed to do these things themselves. This shit is exciting to me. This shit makes me want to go back to school and get educated enough to get in on it.

These companies are slowly chipping into the very foundation of the old ways: fading away is the assumption that simply throwing an Apache httpd server up on some linux or bsd machines, overloading it with virtualhosts, overselling your capacity on the assumption that 80% of your users will only use 20% of your resources, and slapping a third-party commercial control panel up to gloss over the fact that your infrastructure is unreliable and brutish in its approach will make you "some of that inner-net money".

These people are showing you that how you host web sites isn't good enough for the 21st century.