and if there were an extant distribution that took some of the pain away I would be on top of it

The problem isn't that there isn't someone out there that would be happy to sell you "scaling in a box". The problem is that scaling is not a generic problem. You can't sell scaling in a box. Your application has to be built to scale, or it will not scale.

Tuning MySQL is trivial. Adding sharding to your application is the hard part, and no automated solution will know how to do that. The Django, RoR, and Catalyst/DBIx folks are all thinking about the problem, and they may be able to do something about it. Replication probably could be made easier. But it's a far less useful solution than it seems on the surface--if there were no latency, you could just use replication. But there is latency, and so you still need application level support to insure you don't ask for data that doesn't exist yet.

Basic webhosting has things like webmin or (yech!) Ensim

I'm really glad there was no "yech!" for Webmin, as I take that sort of thing personally. (Check my profile for why. And, we are thinking about these sorts of problems, and we're addressing the ones that can logically be addressed in a reasonably generic way.)

But managing a heterogeneous network of webservers and databases is still more difficult than it ought to be.

We're working on this, too (as are a couple dozen of our competitors). But scaling your application is still your problem to solve. While one could build (and Jamie and I are building) an application to manage multi-server deployments, no product can generically make an app scale.

Thanks for the considered answer. I don't think anyone was thinking that this was a viable business; more just people wishing there were a solution to the problems they are dealing with.

My feeling is that it's coming at it from way off in the wrong direction (another niche Linux distro...again, just couldn't be a dumber idea), not that there won't be money spent on scaling issues and multiple server related issues. I'll also point out that from where I sit (which I humbly submit is a position of reasonable knowledge of the industry) scaling is not the biggest problem facing hosting providers--not even close. They simply are not being asked to solve scaling problems--us nerds love to talk about scaling. It feels good to think about all those millions of requests that we'll be serving when we can scale up (ah, those magic words!), but in reality, the average website gets a handful of visitors a day and the average webserver could host 250 average websites without breaking a sweat.

But, a side effect of all of the work that is going into more efficiently making use of all the machines in a data center is that a few scaling problems will go away or be mitigated. Ramping up new "servers" in a cloud environment becomes trivial enough to do on-demand--when you need ten servers, you ask for them, and when you don't need them anymore, you drop them. Databases are getting more "cloud" oriented. SimpleDB, Hadoop, BigTable, CouchDB, are all looking at the database problem from a functional zero-side effects perspective, and the end result is a system where related queries can be made in parallel and sane results can be expected.

So, there are solutions to a lot of these kinds of problems coming...but they aren't what you expect (or even know you want yet) and they aren't drop-in "MySQL now goes ten times faster" solutions (nor are they, "every new MySQL server linearly increases my apps performance and I didn't have to do anything to my app"). Those kinds of silver bullets just do not exist, and won't exist.