Check out my WordCamp Atalanta presentation giving pointers on why your web host is important and when you should consider different types of hosting.

1. Hosting Showdown
Shared, Dedicated, VPS or Managed
What makes the most sense for you?

2. Source: rollitup.org ಠ_ಠ

3. Shared IP addresses
Spam sites
Malware sites
Even dedicated IP addresses
may not protect you
Bad Neighborhoods

4. Security matters
Hidden links
Replaced content
Malware distribution
On-Page Content

5. Directly affects search ranking
Affects your costs to manage
your site
User experience issue
40% of your visitors abandon
after 3 seconds of load time
pagespeed.googlelabs.com
wpspeedometer.com
tools.pingdom.com/fpt
Page load time

6. Wasted ad spend
Risk of being de-indexed
Penalties & trust
siteuptime.com
Pingdom.com
Site24x7.com
Downtime

7. New site, little budget
Uptime and site speed less
important
Very little technical knowledge
Personal or test website
Traditional Shared

8. Optimize the operating system
& server software
Experienced staff or support
capable of managing a VPS
Flexibility for “quickly” scaling
resources up and down
Multiple sites from the same
server using different platforms
(e.g. WordPress, Magento,
Drupal, Custom Applications,
etc.)
Virtual Private Server (VPS)

9. Everything from VPS
Security needs which require a
separate server
Specific hardware requirements
Your own network and/or
security infrastructure
High performance website
You need diversity / cost
savings with Internet providers
Dedicated Servers

10. Single platform (e.g. WordPress)
No in-house experts on server
administration
You want your host to optimize
for your platform (e.g.
WordPress).
You need your site to be easily
scalable
You need platform level support
Managed Hosting

11. David Vogelpohl
david@marketingclique.com
@davidvmc