@David Coveney - great insight into the actual experience of using VP and you hit the nail on the head, knowledge costs money.

@Chip Bennett - Absolutely agree, in a heartbeat, I was genuinely shocked when VP announced their multisite pricing, with such a massive variation in the size of WP sites it is crazy to treat them all the same. It would not matter if large networks of small WordPress sites were an edge case but, as we see the stats creep up towards half of all websites running on WP, I believe that networks account for most of the growth and are an almost unimaginably massive market.

I understand that services such as VP and ManageWP don't want to cannibalize the perceived per-site value of their service but it seems foolish not to completely abandon such a large potential market.

I would argue that the difference between a huge single-site install and a network of 100 hundred tiny niche sites is artificial construct, and illusion, that if the bandwidth and CPU burden is the same but you want to charge 100 times more, your pricing is broken.

I would also argue that if you don't have some sort of cap or sliding scale built into your pricing, and using your service would cost that network owner the same as actually hiring a fulltime engineer, your pricing is broken.

Surely there has to be some midway point at which such services could address the massive market of micro-site networks and offer them a package that isn't so ridiculously expensive that everyone has to go and learn to do it all themselves? What a waste of human effort when these services could so easily save all those man-hours while making money they would not otherwise get.