Yes, differential pricing can be a boon to buyer and seller alike. If the seller could offer their product only at a single price point, they'd be forced to price it out of the range of some customers while leaving money on the floor from other customers for whom the expense is trivial. I get all that.
But no-one likes to feel like a chump being sized up by a con artist. Not even people with money to burn. When the default price is marked up so excessively, you're being taken for a ride, plain and simple. You should be boycotting them, not praising them. There's plenty of opportunity for differential pricing in the hosting space by offering a sliding scale of service-level agreements, higher resource limits, priority tech support, and other special features. Let's keep the douche bag negotiating tactics confined to the used car dealership lot.
Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
When comparing between hosting providers, most lack the time and resources to negotiate with each provider to find out what the "real" rate is. Hosting should be a commodity, providers should treat it as such. I think there are probably good opportunities for hosting providers that provide an honest rate.