In reply to donnacha.

Your article makes some good points and maybe Google, Amazon, Digital Ocean, and friends are starting to 'democratize' hosting the way WordPress is democratizing web publishing. However, your answer to Paul seems incomplete.

While I think that Linode is a great platform and if one is interested I think that 'diving in' is a good way to experiment and learn, it seems like you are minimizing some of the dimensions of being a server admin, which is the role you take on when you administer a Linode VPS.

Installing a linux image and Webuzo is only part of the picture. Linode backups (not site backups) are an extra cost and Webuzo for WordPress is not free. Webuzo does not provide an interface for OS updates and administration. You are running a server on the Internet. Are you confident that you have setup IP Tables, Fail2Ban, TripWire, SSL cert etc correctly? There are guides for these things, but it is not a 3 hour task, it is journey that can take months or longer to master.

If those things are something that you want to do then you will feel empowered and it a joy. If you just want to blog or focus on your website then those things are a pain.