I have always hosted my own websites on my own hardware, this includes WordPress. I always see on shared hosting sites “WordPress Hosting” which looks to be the exact same as their regular hosting plan.
Am I missing something, or is there a difference, and how can I optimize my servers for WordPress?
Of course you can optimize your servers like the hosting companies do, it just depends on how much skill you have and how much effort you want to take on. Here’s a community wiki that might give you an idea of what to consider doing:
One thing that comes to mind as a great feature is to use nginx as a caching proxy server.
I think it is safe to say that 95% of hosting is marketing.
What it comes down to is what would you do to optimize a server running WordPress that you normally wouldn’t do on a server running anything else? Not much.
There really isn’t much other than pre-installing WordPress and a few plugins for you. Maybe they could provide some custom hosting features or proprietary plugins as well. Just about any other optimization, backup, security, caching, or other enhancements are things you would do anyway and would benefit any web server application.
I’m sure there are plenty of “WordPress Optimized” hosting companies that do nothing more than pre-install WordPress for you.
On the other hand, it could be that the hosting company has a very good knowledge of WordPress and knows how to address common issues and provide good customer support. That is certainly something for which it would be worth paying extra.