@redwall_hp - I agree with your sentiments on shared hosting. I've had my fair share of horrific experiences with shared hosting but for the past few years, I guess I would consider myself lucky with HostGator. Outside of yesterday, I've experienced little in the way of issues with them. I pay about $120 a year for my hosting plan. Meanwhile, you're talking about $70 bucks a year. However, that little bit of Linux knowledge needed is a barrier. I went down the VPS road awhile ago but all that ended up happening is the box became compromised soon after it went online because I had no clue as to what I was doing. I learned that if whatever I'm using is not managed, I don't want to mess with it.

@Victor R. Volkman - I'm curious as to which plugins you've been using? Plugins are one of the reasons why so many people love using WordPress so it sucks to you subject yourself to the inability to extend your installation. When you say wrecked, what happened?

@Mark - I use a couple of commercial plugins here on this site but I also use about 20-25 free ones. In the past few years, I've not had any issues thanks to automatic plugin updates when a security issue is discovered.