There are managed solutions which wouldn't rip a hole in your pocket. It's much easier to work with 5 different yet well setup VPS's then it is with 50 different hosting accounts. There are many solutions there, ever heard of mirroring or redundant hosting?
It doesn't have to be difficult to manage. I just have to upload my framework, possibly update some paths in the single config file, and away I go; uploads are all done via a simple php wrapper script (around the ncftpput unix command) so user / pass / ftp host / ftp path info is all stored in a text file - so using different hosts is completely transparent and it's all braindead simple and doesn't require me to remember anything or constantly go looking stuff up. All of my sites are also stored on my main dedi (which doesn't serve any sites, it's for running my blackhat scripts) and so can easily be uploaded to different hosting accounts at data centre speeds; then all I have to do is switch the DNS over, and I have imacros to do that at all my registrars (plus a simple php script to generate the imacros that fills in the domain names and new DNS info). Emails to catchall email domains are all forwarded to a single mailbox at the provider where I host all my email; admin or contact emails for all domains are forwarded to another account, so I only have to check a couple of mailboxes. Apache logs are downloaded and collated automagically every day by my main dedi for creating traffic reports; the same happens every day for my click counter, so keeping an eye on the health of the network isn't too difficult.
I'm not a huge fan of VPSs because they tend to be a bit underwhelming in terms of specs compared to even a shitty dedi; and also although you might be sandboxed to some extent from other users in terms of cpu / memory / disk usage (disk not so much if someone is running disk heavy scripts), if the traffic is still going through a single network card on the machine then to some extent you're still at the mercy of DDOS, mail bombs, other people's traffic spikes etc. Dedicated prices have come down so much that you can get a cheap dedi for not much more than the cost of a VPS...
Anyway I have been using some variant of this system since before VPSs were a thing (i.e. before virtualization became robust and efficient enough to be offered commercially) so it's what I'm used to and it works fine, but YMMV. Yes there are some issues you have to work around and debateably a cost advantage to using fewer hosts. But it doesn't matter if it's 5 virtuals, 5 VPSs or 5 dedis - if you're pushing some volume then IMHO five points of failure is just not enough in case someone comes after you seriously for your blackhat bidness.
In case anyone is interested, I use fake whois info for all my domains (but it still looks real, e.g. the addresses all exist, the phone numbers have the right area code and format etc.). I use whois protection as well if it's free but otherwise I don't bother. I don't worry about IPs, if you're using enough hosts then you'll get a mix of unique and shared IPs by default, depending on what each host offers.
