It is a lot of money, and it is possible to cut costs, but I think the current setup takes into account the future of the site more than cutting costs would. My reasoning from my own experience is below.
- Shared hosting puts you at the mercy of the other clients on the machine, and overselling by the host.
- It is better to have too much power and too much memory than too little. Mine is less by quite a bit (~$1200 a year at this point), and I run into problems if I attempt to use simple modern technologies they tend to bog down. An example is when I attempted to install Ghost, the server bogged down from the use of memory by node.js.
- The policy of the site is to try to host as much of the site as possible- including developer downloads and images. This is so that parts of the site do not become inaccessible based on outside problems, i.e. the other sites being down or the developer becoming unable to keep the files available. This increases not only storage requirements, but bandwidth requirements.
Because of my own experiences with clients and my own sites and the frustrations associated with server administration, I totally get where mouser's head is, and where he's coming from. "You get what you pay for" is definitely true in regards to hosts, and though something may not go wrong with your servers, when it does, it's a real pain and having that support from people that know what they're doing and you can actually talk to rather than just e-mailing is a great boon.
If the money isn't there, that's a different problem, and loss of extra business is one of the reasons I'm on a VM now instead of a dedicated server. But if I had the extra funds, you can bet I'd be upgrading to a dedicated server again (though in all honesty, the VM isn't bad).
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