Thanks. That's actually more than enough to help me understand and compare. For completeness you may want to mention in your original review that you used a default wordpress install for the tests which is ~250-500kB downloaded and listed as "Bytes In" in a webpagetest.org result. Maybe you did and I missed it.
I started my tests with a default install too, but found that the actual sites I deal with are in the 1-2MB range so I imported "dummy content" I found somewhere to get more representative data and test different stacks of my own creation.
I decided to go with a $40/mo un-managed VPS 6 months ago partly because managed would have been hundreds of dollars more per month and partly because I wanted to learn how to do it myself. After approx 6mo of testing and optimizing various stacks with similar results to these managed hosts I have to say they represent a tremendous value. Configuration management, back ups, maintenance, security and disaster recovery of a high performance stack is a lot of work and I am not sure if I want to keep doing it.
That said, I could probably start my own managed hosting company that would compete well at this point!
