On June 2, 2010 my previous host told me that I was using too many resources. The way they told me was they suspended the service at 2 am, and when I called the person I spoke with told me that no one I could reach by phone could reinstate, and no one who could reinstate could be reached by phone(!). They did offer to transfer me to a private server for $150/month. Ouch.
I then happily stumbled across Media Temple. They have 5 levels of service, I chose the bottom: Grid-Service ($20/month), which is cluster-based and “designed for burstability.”
The offer is 100GB storage, 1TB network transfer, 100 domains, 1K email accounts, MySql, Urchin and Rails and Django containers.. but most important, your max allocation each month is 1,000 GPUs (Grid Performance Units) per month. The GPU is essentially a measure of CPU usage, and they claim that 99.7% of their customers never exceed the 1K GPU allocation but if you do, (a) they send you an email saying you’re trending that way, and then (b) rather than shutting you down they just charge you for the excess GPUs. ($.10/GPU). This makes so much sense it hurts. In addition, they do not prorate your GPU usage; you are perfectly free to use .6 GPUs one day and 1.4 the next.
[ For the geeks among us, a GPU = 7.24% of a cpu/hour and an allocation of 1K GPU means you can use 1.38 GPUs /hour (= 9.99K GPU) and stay within budget. And if you're not a Geek, forgive me but what are you doing here?? ]
Set up and transfer of WordPress was painless (so far!) and they have the best documentation I’ve seen on any host, ever.
