GoDaddy buys Media Temple!!!

Sounds like an issue of not using the right tool for the right job. If you don't understand the difference between hosting offerings you probably should hire someone who does.

You can't know what the right tool is when a company misleads about their offerings. The same situation is true of someone for choosing Heroku when they specifically misrepresented how their routing worked for Rails. If you look at the webhost ratings, MT hangs around with companies like BlueHost and HostGator which are half the price or less of MT's Grid Service.

I mean look at these VPS prices: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/vps/developer/

Linode is less and provides SSDs with much better uptime and support. Digital Ocean is less than half the price and has similar to uptime and ALL the machines are SSD. It's not that MT is a bad service, it's fine, but for the price it's a bad deal. You're getting a nice brand name and I'm not sure what else.

In my experience only sales people talk about SSDs or hardware in general. Most websites on shared hosting/VPS plans are not IOBound so SSDs don't decrease page load times.

This thread has some interesting thoughts on the matter

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1257140

Personally I'd recommend either A Small Orange or Liquid Web.

Obviously YMMV depending on your application, but I mostly share cached assets so disk I/O is usually the bottleneck in performance. Will it make a difference to users? Depends on how many are hitting the site. For me it often does not make a difference since I'm rarely hit the disk but most people running say, WP, WOULD actually get a huge boost from SSD not because of speed of serving files but because they're hitting their databases on disk all the time. I've found this to be the case with two large Joomla installs I had moved over to Linode's new SSD servers and they improved request-to-drawing time in tests by about 30%.

I don't quite get why developers would use shared hosting when VPS are so cheap. It's not like I trust host X to be more secure than a default Ubuntu box and if you're on shared services, it's exponentially less so. Setting up a LAMP stack on Ubuntu is a matter of checking one box, then you can install Webmin and you have 99% of what you'd get on a shared host with an admin panel. In terms of difficulty, I feel that if you can install WP, you can probably handle installing a LAMP box from scratch. Modern Linux installers are cake and with something like Linode, you can just grab a pre-configured Linux and install that.

There's certainly a class of site owners that need the expanded support a host would provide and in those cases, something like A Small Orange is good. I'd also recommend A2Hosting out in California as they have a boatload of options and excellent support. But for developers, forget it. Run your own thing. Then you don't have to go begging when you need a Rubygem installed on your server or worry about your neighbor's poorly written WP theme taking down the entire box. You'll also develop incredibly valuable career skills when you understand the basics of Linux administration that could easily mean the difference between a 40K job and a 60K job.