@donnacha | WordSkill - I'm not taking anything personally, it's just that whenever a discussion pops up regarding webhosting, I always remember you showing up and bashing the entire idea of shared hosting. This has lead me to believe that you don't like the idea or business practice at all, even if there are a few companies doing things the right way. So perhaps that is an assumption and not the truth for which I apologize for.

The Tavern site was only down thanks to a DDoS attack that apparently, my shared webhosting provider didn't seem to involved to help me with. After two years, I thought they would have helped me in a more personal way. Oh well, I packed my bags and moved.

yes, the main advantage of a dedicated server or, to a lesser extent, a VPS is that you have more control over your security, you can do the simple things that need to be done and know that responsibility for it isn’t being outsourced to some clueless, underpaid kid who knows that no-one is ever going to check his work or, if problems do crop up, knows he can blame it on WordPress.

That underpaid clueless kid would most likely be me and I wouldn't know half of what that kid would know. My business is not in managing a server whether it's a VPS or a dedicated box. I don't have time for all that and so I would need for something like that to be managed. Managed costs money and yet, if I'm serious about the Tavern being a source of income, I would invest the cash into something like that but as I feel and see it, the site is not ready to make that kind of move both financially and overall, resource usage wise.

I wholeheartedly agree with you regarding the chain syndrome where the more links in the chain, the more of a chance of encountering issues. The less links the better. But right now, shared webhosting fits the Tavern community quite nicely and has not yet reached the stage to move on to something bigger and better. That's why I'll continue to use shared hosting until I feel the time is right. The other stuff that comes with shared webhosting is just part of the package and stuff I'll just have to deal with.

To be honest, I don't think I'd be any better off security wise doing everything myself versus shared hosting. I'd probably be in much worst shape with some sort of terrorist group continuously defacing my page lol