Well, the good solutions still cost a fair amount of money, that's my thinking. It's easy to forget, for instance, how expensive our software offerings are. They're FREE of course, GPL-free, but they're also expensive ... VC capital expensive for the aD-designed part, AOL-profit expensive for the AOLserver part, etc etc.
You're going to get, within reason, what you pay for with hosting.
On the other hand, I'm somewhat curious about your experiences co-locating. How much time does it take? I have a couple of simple sites on my co-located server and I only touch it every three or more months. I did my first panic reboot (i.e. kernel panicked) ever a few weeks ago ... first time I had to reboot the server to recover from a problem (in like 5-6 years).
If you've had problems, it might relate to some degree to the traffic you're running vs. your server, or network connectivity.
Where are you located?
