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I really loved this post. I agree completely with simplicity. Offerings of hosting companies (and most online services) continue to become more and more bloated. Long charts of features should be done away with, it just doesn't make sense any longer.

I think for consumers, looking through a super long features chart is kind of like going to IKEA and coming home with an all purpose kit. You can theoretically use it to build absolutely anything. Unfortunately, not all the parts work together, and you may or may not need everything in the kit. Would site owners be happier if we kept adding even more stuff to the kit? Or might they already be overloaded?

Great post! Maybe a better system would be to do a tag based system and then some front pages that group it together by blog or photo album as you say. Last night I was chatting with someone who just wants a mailman mailing setup but at his current host they won't help him with mailman even though its a listed feature, maybe general hosts have just got too many features to actually specialize any one feature.

Thanks for the mention Isabel!! Love reading your blog ;)

I think there's a distinction between "specification" and "check list of features".

I agree that it is all too confusing to present a list of open source apps that come pre-installed on Fantastico or whatever one-click installers, or every possible features, especially on a shared hosting plan. However it can also be annoying when the provider does not even list some basic specification (like shopping for a VPS but amount of RAM is not specified). If I need to chat with a sales person when I shop, I won't do it online :)

Then again I think shared hosting providers should definitely make their plans simpler. Consumers today won't get too excited when they see a big list of items with FREE* next to them. There are also way too many parameters for them to think about (how many domains, how many emails, how many databases, how many FTP accounts, etc). They just need to know how much space they've got, and a statement declaring "do whatever you want with them".

Amy - the BlogSTARS rock! :)

Scott - I spent some time tinkering with Google Apps for Domains earlier. I've built a few simple websites for friends on GoDaddy's $3/month accounts, and I think those could easily be recreated with the Google Pages site builder. In fact, the average consumer/small business would have an easier time managing a Google Apps site. There's no mention of bandwidth/disk space anywhere, and no feature list at all. And yet it works. So I think that's the level of simplicity low end shared hosting providers should aim for.

Developers are a totally different story. They do need detailed technical specs - and they might benefit from more community features. For instance, I like http://www.textsnippets.com/ from Joyent and Amazon's developer solutions catalog. A co-branded version of a code search tool like Krugle.com would be cool too.