I'm still shocked nobody has figured out how to turnkey self hosting. I mean I understand how complicated it is, given the range of options, but it seems like it's tractable.
Maybe if AWS/Azure etc... had some kind of sign up API that would make it possible.
My DreamHost shared hosting WordPress is pretty turnkey. It's not the most user-friendly UI, but it really is as simple as "register domain" on one page, "install WordPress" on another, and then setup my admin account. After that, they keep the software up to date and email me to let me know when I need to click the link to upgrade the database (very infrequent).
I'd imagine there are hosts that are more turnkey than that (wordpress.com, likely).
I wonder if it's really the case that people just don't want to pay.
It's true, there aren't any that I've seen that are more turnkey, but that's not self hosting.
I'm thinking something like Medium, where you enter your name/contact info etc... on one page and a CC and that's it.
A back end process registers the URL/whois, sets up a cloud host account, pushes a default package to the host (maybe even WP), then sends your email the key/login for the front end and the cloud host login.
So it's a one page setup for something that you can either use as a default Medium like site or SSH into and do whatever you want. You pay the monthly EC2 account, a yearly maintenance with a DNS Registry etc... like you would had you set everything up individually.
The only thing you can't currently automate is setting up people's accounts on cloud providers. I don't see that changing but would be interesting if you could.
Dreamhost is pretty close to self-hosting. I can SSH in. I can download all of the files in my Wordpress installation, copy them elsewhere, dump my MySQL db, copy that elsewhere and have it running on another machine. The only way it differs from a VM is that I don't have root.
Dreamhost actually does, iirc, allow me to get the same experience with a VM.
Really, I'd argue that anyone offering Wordpress in such a way that you can easily download all of your data and put it somewhere else is fine on the self hosting axis.
And lots of people do pay for hosting, but there are millions more who won't pay even $1/month.
Maybe if AWS/Azure etc... had some kind of sign up API that would make it possible.