@Jeffro -

I know you have a big hate stick for shared webhosts ....

Jeff, I think that it is unfair and, if you don't mind my being blunt, self-deceptive of you to write off what I am saying as some sort of personal vendetta that I have against shared hosting, just because you have made a financial decision to build your business upon a shared environment.

My "big hate stick" is for ANY product that deliberately gives customers a false impression about what they are actually buying and, yeah, shared hosting is a fundamentally scammy, high-profit industry designed to harvest people who either don't care or don't understand what they're getting.

... but it’s not like some of the problems you mention do not effect other types of hosting services as well

Actually, the key problem I identified was that being at the mercy of other people's decisions is always a bad idea and, 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.

I understand the risks involved with shared hosting but in reality, my two years with AnHosting were pretty much trouble free. I had a great experience with them. Now I’m on HostGator and so far, so good.

Weren't you down for quite a few days recently? Actually, didn't you have a couple of longish outages over the last couple of months? I'm not keeping track, I just remember getting quite a few 404s when trying to visit your site. Keeping a WordPress site up and running shouldn't be rocket science, I would not describe prolonged outages as being "pretty much trouble free" or "a great experience". I'm just saying.

I don’t think you can accurately have a blanket statement that all shared webhosting providers are bad. Many are bad but not all of them.

I did not say that all shared providers are bad, you are completely misrepresenting what I said. Despite the entire concept of shared hosting being shaky, I am sure that some companies do a better job than others or, at least, are luckier than others, in the same way that some time-share apartments are prettier than others.

What I said was that being at the mercy of other people's decisions is always a bad idea, even if you get lucky and disaster doesn't strike immediately. The point is that you can be rolling along nicely for quite a while but, unless you have done the security checks yourself (and, seriously, that is nowhere near as hard as it sounds), you will never know quite when your hard work and reputation might get flushed.

My "big hate stick" for shared hosting has including me saying that it is fine for the 99% of WordPress sites for whom downtime is not a big deal. I even suggested a rule of thumb: if you consider your site to be important and regularly invest time and energy into it, if you are trying to build community around what you do, then, yes, sure, uptime becomes important and needlessly relying upon someone else to keep your server secure is a dumb way to save money but, again, far fewer than 1% of WordPress sites fall into that category.

What I'm saying is fairly measured and essentially correct, you shouldn't be taking it personally.