Shared hosting did not work for me. I found that even though I was using nowhere near using the bandwidth I was to receive with my shared hosting account I would be shut down daily. It seems that whenever the server would get overloaded they would just shut down the biggest consumer of cpu power which was me. There is no talk about using cpu power when signing up for shared hosting.
Virtual Private Servers (VPS) present a similar problem for me. I recently had a situation where I moved to a VPS on a hosting company and paid for what I thought was an upgrade in service (more ram, etc.) from my old host. Immediately I began having problems - which again was related to the usage of CPU power.
The amount of kernel memory you are alloted is set when they first set up the VPS and is often the same for every plan the host sells. So if you sign up for the cheapest plan or the most expensive plan - you end up with the same outage problem. The tech support will keep telling you the problem is related to your not having enough ram and try to get you to move up to a more expensive plan however.
Really what you you need to do when checking out VPS providers is ask them all how much "kmemsize" you would get and then compare. There are other settings that may be problematic too but for my average-traffic board it was the "kmemsize". The type of control panel you get with the VPS also impacts this - so it is not an exact science.
I was lucky that I only paid for a month and did not opt for the attractive yearly option so I could easily exit the poorly performing VPS and move back to my old one - I would recommend that anyone considering a VPS do this as well and consider a month payment as a "try before you buy" and don't close the door at your old host until you are sure the new one can handle your board.
Sorry, I can't recommend a good host for you as the VPS that was not working for me seems to work well for others - so every situation will be different.
