I particularly like this nugget: > Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
What if the person doesn't know exactly what it is that they need? I know a lot of people who know software but aren't as solid on knowing how to scale the hardware side. For those people a table isn't really helpful. That said however, it should be an option to have that access. I personally prefer Joyent as a web host. They've shown really solid I/O numbers via their benchmarking. I've been a happy customer since i…
If they don't know what they need, then the answer to the above question is 'no', and hence doesn't apply. In that case, you might consider asking the provider to recommend what sort of setup "solution" you require. But I wouldn't want to do that through a sales guy, especially someone working on commission. I'd rather get some advice from a disinterested 3rd party (even if it's just asking on StackOverflow/ServerFault or whatever) and then look for suppliers offering what I need.