Shared hosting V's dedicated

So here you are, your site is down again, or crawling along - getting real pi**ed off, no response from your host and customers complaining they cant see the site.
What do you do ?
Great idea!! lets get a dedicated server so there is no problem with other sharing bandwidth or resources

Wrong!!!
firstly the cost difference between a dedicated and shared hosting is great, so you need to be able to justify these costs, so what do you do - of course you source out the cheapest solution ;-)

Secondly, the vast majority of people running websites cannot administer a dedicated server so security and reliability goes out the window and you find yourself hacked and a server running at a snails pace and no better off
But hey you have 5Tb of bandwidth and you wont run out of that - hee hee, the majority of cheap dedicated servers are on contended ports meaning you are sharing your port speed with someone else, sure you may find that you wont run out of bandwidth mostly because you cant put enough through the pipe.

OK decided a Dedicated is not for you - so you decide on a Virtual private server ( VPS) this is a server split in several "private servers" where you have a share of the resources at your disposal but also have root access to your share of the server, Ideal eh!! well except that again you need to know exactly how to administer a server and operate a security system or you will be hacked within hours, next point is VPS only guarantees you a share of the resources of the server so if all users are using full capacity then you are very limited in how much CPU and memory you can access and you find your site running slow again - been here before eh! The crux of the matter here is knowing who else you are sharing a server with, couple of porn sites or teen file sharing sites and you are screwed.

What I am trying to get at is people sign up to cheap hosts with over populated servers and "assume" all hosts are the same, so they see their site running like a dogs breakfast and decide they need to go it alone to solve the issue, this is not the case where there are a multitude of hosts selling hosting on a pile it high sell it cheap platform there are others that provide a shared hosting experience equal to and better than any self managed dedicated for a fraction of the price.

One of the largest hosts on the planet is rackspace - also one of the most expensive but their servers are not filled up with kiddie sites draining resources - not that I am recommending rackspace just trying to highlight that there are service providers that make sure they provide the service requested and not just the cheapest price.

Overall if you are not competent on server administration and server security look to other solutions for your hosting if running into consistent issues ( I use consistent as all hosts without fail will have problems from time to time )