Here's something a bit jaw-dropping.

A 6 minute screencast from WebFaction showing how to set-up popular web-application frameworks using their control panel.

WebFaction are a hosting company who specialize in providing the cool frameworks and tools like Rails, Django, Turbogears, Trac, WordPress etc. Looks like for 15 dollars a month you can run several different applications based on these frameworks.

I am sorely tempted. This is way beyond what I'm getting from my current hosting company for roughly the same price. No wonder all the kids are creating cool web 2.0 startups when it's this easy to get and manage server space.

I wonder how typical WebFaction are. A lot of people in the comments want the cool control panel, which suggests it's a bit out of the ordinary. But I imagine that other hosting sites will have to catch up.

Clearly this is a hosting platform that WebFaction have built. They don't want to see it commoditized. In all the discussion about web-apps, and software as a service, and the browser essentially commoditizing the client, I haven't seen much about hosting companies like WebFaction. But might the conservation of modularity be bringing decommoditization to this area?

PS : and, yeah, I am digging the new JotSpot. Update : although it's slooooow