It's a shame that Softlayer bought The Planet. I used to host with the The Planet at their bargain brand Servermatrix and they used to have some very good deals, these days Softlayer is charging higher and higher prices, pricing them out of my range.
I wish I could find a good DC that sold me unmanaged servers for cheap. I just need someone to keep the power on, the BW flowing (preferably no Cogent) and when hardware breaks to replace it. I'll take care of the rest.
managed generally means that the datacenter/provider also takes care of OS upgrades, installing patches, installing software as required. unmanaged generally means hands off except for hardware related tasks, and generally if it is the fault of the sys-admin then they might charge and hourly fee for it.
So can it be possible that some providers use these terms interchangeably? One says "it's managed because we take care of the hardware", the other says "it's unmanaged because we don't take care of the software." Seems confusing to me.
I definitely understand why you would want to take responsibility for OS upgrades and the like.
If I am leasing the machine I expect it to be "managed" in that someone takes care of the hardware. I expect it to be unmanaged when it comes to OS, software and all that fun stuff.
This seems to be fairly standard throughout the industry, when you look at unmanaged hosting you get no OS support but do get hardware support. And when leasing a server that is what I expect.
Yes, there are interesting aspects to AWS. But I could host servers at SoftLayer with 10x more power than AWS instances at a 5-10x price reduction.
Even hosting at an overpriced "managed" dedicated provider like Rackspace would run you less than AWS.