In reply to donnacha.

Donnacha,
Great post, this is very timely for me. Most of my work has been on CPanel types of hosts in the past. I was just asked to work on a site on one of these "super duper WP-specific" hosts. With just a bit of sleuthing I discovered that it was on Linode, so it was exactly as you said.

The experience was mostly OK. They have a staging area, which is handy, even though there are odd little things, such as uploaded files that don't load in the staging site even though I can see them in the file system and permissions were good. And the truth is, I can get by with the limited number of tools they offer because I'm very self-sufficient. Interestingly, I found that performance was good, but just as many slow times as regular hosts. I suppose it's possible that staging gets less juice than production.

I definitely agree with you that they will grow and threaten non-cloud hosting companies, now that cloud hosting is more reliable. It's true that support will be a key factor, although I usually don't find myself using it my travels.

They will be sufficient for mildly technically skilled users who don't want much customization. But those who love to tinker beyond their enormous WP theme admin panels will still need to hire help, just as before.

Thanks for writing this!
Dave