Hi Jeffro,

Just wanted to pitch in here and follow-up on Steven's comment (thanks for sharing about us and your experience btw!).

Our business model is perfectly sustainable... we've been profitable since about 2~3 weeks after we started. Managing sites at $0.36 each per month while wont make us millionaires, works fine. We offer a great base service that scales well. We have addons (clone + backup) with more on the way that will help us scale even more.

Frankly, we're banking on our WorpDrive backup service which is really starting to take off in the last couple of months - people are starting to realise you don't need to pay $15/month per site to the likes of VaultPress to have reliable backups.

VP only does certain data (http://help.vaultpress.com/get-to-know/). We do it all and the kitchen sink.

If you're serious about protecting your sites, you need to have a reliable backup system that doesn't fail because of your web host's PHP and security restrictions - all our backups are effectively full, even while they are differential every day, and they are available right back to day 1 - not just 30 days.

AND, every WorpDrive license includes the iControlWP management license.

It's viable because it works, and it's automated (and it's not free). We reduce our support costs by taking the time to build a system that works and is reliable. Do we have problems? Of course, it's amazing the sheer diversity of web hosts - but once we work around 1 little web hosting quirk, it works for all clients with the same setup going forward. Thereby reducing our tech support costs as our backup system is centralized on our servers, not yours.

We have a compatibility test which means you can never activate WorpDrive on a site that doesn't mean our basic requirements - with time we'll remove most of those requirements (like exec() ), and then we'll have 1 of the only backup systems (in the world) that can run on any web host that has PHP (5+) as a minimum requirement - 99% of all WordPress sites meet that.

Anyway, I've laboured on this enough - your best bet is to try us out and see what you think - there are always other options than the big names.

If you have any questions, grab me on the chat on our website, or on twitter (@paulgoodchild)
Cheers (for reading this far ;) !
Paul.