I’m a long time listener, first time commenter (from Romania). While I don’t always like the way you present things (your voice reminds of the sales guys who try to convince you of different things – to which I have a very low tolerance), I can certainly appreciate your enthusiasm.

One thing I wanted to add to the discussion about dedicated server is that one **big** reason to go with a dedicated server (or at least VPS) is security. If multiple people are sharing the same environment, any compromise of their scripts can mean a compromise of your scripts or even worse they can deliberately steal information from you relatively easily. To see an example what I’m talking about just look at the vulnerabilities published in the Month of PHP bugs. Many (almost all) of them can be mitigated by disabling parts of PHP, which is easy to do if you are along on the system, but in a shared environment you would have probably a very hard time to convince the sysadmin to change the global settings.

On the flipside, you must really know what you’re doing on a dedicated box, or even better, hire somebody who does.

Best regards,
Cd-MaN