there are dozens, if not hundreds of smaller TRUE managed hosting providers popping up to service these kinds of accounts. that's what my startup does. we routinely steal large $5k-50k/month accounts from AWS and rackspace and softlayer (IBM) and the like. they just do a shitty job for an exorbitant price, plain and simple.

folks... NOBODY gives a fuck about you at those companies, and you better believe it. not the account manager, not the engineer working on your 5 day old ticket, not the sales guy who probably isn't even paid a decent commission, and certainly not the executive management who is pulling down 300k+/year annual salaries plus huge stock grants and bonuses (check out the SEC filings!)

a well managed cluster of computing equipment running baremetal operating systems, hypervisors of your choice, and maybe something like openstack or docker is both profitable for the vendor and a MASSIVE price reduction for the customer.

if you know what you're doing, you're spending $10k/month for $100k/month worth of equivalent amazon services. yes, you heard me right. it is an order of magnitude of cost savings. once you scale past $10k/month, using amazon for all your needs is an INCREDIBLY STUPID business decision.

the genius of AWS, of course, is that they disguise all their marketing as technical spec sheets and deliberately design their collateral and sales process to appeal to the "engineer" types with acronyms, numbers, and highly specific jargon.

it's quite clever. but not clever enough to fool everyone. and those that are fooled, learn eventually that maybe paying 300% more than you should isn't that smart.