[ohashi]

You can up the performance pretty significantly with caching at various levels. My experience was the plugins don't do as much as something like putting nginx in front. http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2013/08/29/reverse-proxy-and-ca... what I put in front of it, handles reddit/hn/digg whatever just fine as far as I can tell.

Caching somewhere above WordPress seems to do wonders, things like Memcache, Varnish, etc.

Also, some of the companies I was comparing are charging <$10/month and outperforming some of the bigger brand names like WPEngine (SiteGround and GoDaddy for instance). I suspect if they gain traction with their products, they could push the price down on entry level managed wordpress hosting.