I got sick of my VPS costing more and more and shared hosting was just annoying the shit out of me.
A lot of hosting sites offer dirt cheap Virtual Private Servers or VPS. It’s sort of a gateway drug. It’s a great deal too until you try to work with it. You got a VPS with 300 megs of ram for under $20 a month, you’re running a simple web site so you can have it all for you and not share with those other jerks. But with only 300 megs you cannot run apache and mysql on the same system without it running over 300 megs. You can just keep your database where it is now with your shared host or double the size of your VPS to 600 megs. That will only cost you about $30 a month now but what if you use wordpress, drupal or joomla? That’ll cost more if you use plugins. A standard install of wordpress with just plugins for Google Analytics, and OpenID plugin for commenters taxes the system for almost 250megs of ram if you only have a few dozen viewers a day. If you become popular you’re done for. But with your awesome VPS you can just scale up a little more to 1gig for about $50 a month or a second processor for about $100 a month.
So for personal use a VPS is just a pain because there is always a need for more power. You can easily setup a server at home from an old box and with ISP options like Comcast Business Class you don’t have to worry about bandwith limits, down time or ports being blocked.