Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

I am running two servers that are my own plus some shared space.
With that I never had any trouble.

I think you should consider the following:
SHARED HOSTING
YES if you have static content mostly
YES if your provider gives you all the features you want (PHP, MysQl, Python, Imagemagick, whatever)
YES if he's flexible enough to install them for you if they are not here (mostly smaller companies do that)
NO if you have REALLY hungry apps or you need lots of space/bandwidth

VPS:
It is really a lot ike shared hosting in that you totally depend on how many people share a machine.
with the exceptiin that you have control over the software running

ROOT SERVER:
If you are a control freak this is for you.
But You should really think about security.
Are you capable and willing to spend a lot of time to keep your system up to date and protect it against hacker kiddies?
Do you want to mess with complicated backup strategies to have everything there when yu need it?
I'm talking out of experience here.
I am a control freak and I pay for it..

Moneywise:
Think about it.
You can get a good shared hosting pack for abround 8 EUR/month
For 19 you can get a VPS
For less than 40 you get a root server.

It only matters what you do there and if it's worth it.
With some google ads you can pay even the root server, that should be no limitation.

And don't think too much about CPU power.
We have lots of apps running, some of them are very busy, we have also a number of quite frequented sites up, and all this now runs on a machine that is now 6 years old.
Better invest in a RAID system and a considerable amount of memory than into a super duper turbo CPU.
Your apps won't need it as much.

Sure they will run a bit faster, bt you won't really need it.
From my experience a good debugging session in your apps gives you more speed than a brand new dual processor

I guess you make the best choice for you then.
I just moved all my accounts from my dirt-cheap-but-no-real-service Rootserver because I was tired of having to be paranoid 24/7. Then yesterday, I had *just* finished, the HD crashed for the 3rd time in 2 years. Luky me
I just want to say:
Unless you are a unix god or unless you don't really mind reinstalling your complete once in a while for various reasons - stay away from root servers.
Yes, they are cheap, yes, they give you incredible amounts of free traffic - but you pay in working hours and nerves...

But even a good VPS means that you have to e extremely careful with your setup, keep *everything* current and so on.

On more thing to consider:
Most hosters offer backup which is normally an incremental backup, one version only.
So if anybody manages to install a rootkit on your machine, be it virtual or not, and you find out after 2 weeks you have no clean backup to install.
At least yuo should keep versions for 2-4 weeks on your HD. A HD crash AND a rootkit install is possible but not s likely..

I took the plunge and moved my domains to a hosting provider.

Started the move yesterday morning and I'm already done. A total of 6 domains and over a Gigabyte of files moved up. Everything is working great and I'm very happy with the speed and service.

What I liked about this hosting plan is that I get unlimited domains, unlimited MySQL databases, 12Gb of disk space and 150Gb of bandwidth a month. So I have plenty of room to grow as I add new domains in the future.

The plan is called the 'True MultiSite Plan' at Site5.com

This has a lot to do with file permissions.

Most good hosting providers require your files to be set at certain permissions, where only the owner of the web space, which is you, has write permissions. Of course some directories need more permissions to be set in order to store cache files, images and such but at least your scripts can't be harmed.

The best advice it to backup on a regular basis, I keep copies of all my sites on my local machine just in case.

Just a FYI... site5.com runs PHP as CGI (phpsuexec) on their servers. Which means that you can chmod 600 all your PHP files (especially config files) and you're neighbours can't access them.

I have my server running on FreeBSD and it's really a good thing to do I guess.
BSD is hell when you want to have an X/Desktop-system but for a server it's just a bit more work than linux.
The main adavantage is the same that Linux has over Windows:
Since there are not so many BSD servers out there there are not as many discovered and exploited security holes. It's just not as interesting.

plus it is really stable, never had a kernel panic or such, and I do bad things to the poor little machine sometimes....