Best Affordable VPS?

Cheapest=No but been using http://www.LiquidWeb.com for many years. They own the data centers so no middlemen calling or traveling to a data center to fix anything if it does come up they are there on location 24/7/365. I've forgotten what downtime is. I manage mine myself but they are fully managed if ya need help with anything 24/7 phone/ticket support. Few other common ones off the top of my head but no experience with them...

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Generally yes as you are splitting a server into a handful of users instead of hundreds. Sure there will be an oddball shared server here or there that runs better than a VPS based on being amped up, tweaked, with barely any customers on it but eventually they fill up as ya can't turn a profit on $3-$5 shared accounts without jamming a shit ton of customers on it so most cheap shared hosts oversell their servers.

The issue with moving from shared hosting to a VPS is that you'll probably need to manage the VPS yourself. With shared hosting the host takes care of the OS, web server config, security updates etc... with a VPS you will likely have to do this yourself.

Never heard of a FULLY MANAGED VPS? A lot of hosts offer it.

Take a look at https://www.wiredtree.com/, Liquidweb should be very good too.

You should try DigitalOcean they are good I used them in the last 2 years without any problem ! And yes sites are running faster on VPS than on shared !

Oh, so it's been done?

I guess I got fixated on "affordable" in the OP - hosts like digitalocean are cheap, but almost completely hands off.

M3Server for sure.