I ran a managed hosting company (dedicated servers and colo) for 6 years. Because of that, I'm pretty picky about where I host. I currently have my sites at S

I ran a managed hosting company (dedicated servers and colo) for 6 years. Because of that, I'm pretty picky about where I host. I currently have my sites at ServInt on 2 VPSes (a Signature VPS for my production sites and an Essential VPS for testing my new startup company.) The primary VPS serves about 2,000 pageviews per day with no complaints. My advice, having been in the industry for many years: 1) NEVER use shared hosting for a startup company. I would always budget and start with a VPS...even a small one. Shared hosting is likely to fall over at random times and it often fails at the worst times--when you launch a product and get a ton of visitors, for instance. Shared hosting is fine for things like small company blogs, etc. But not for a scalable business. 2) Go managed, unless you want to wear a sysadmin hat as well as a developer hat (hint: you probably don't.) I recommend letting the hosting company do updates while you focus on writing code and testing. 3) DON'T cheap out! Hosting is not a place to save money. $50/month for a managed VPS is completely reasonable and is well worth the extra $40 over shared hosting if you need to scale. You do not want to have to move your hosting when you're in the middle of a really good run with clients. I picked ServInt because they have been in business since 1995 and they host some pretty large sites. Their reviews are overwhelmingly good and their prices are reasonable. Their support responds quickly. I recently put in a ticket asking for server monitoring to be installed. I know this would have taken 1 hour+ of my time (and I used to admin servers for a living!) They not only responded to the ticket within a few minutes, but had monitoring installed quickly. I cannot stress enough that it is worth the extra money to go with a higher-end hosting solution. Yes, inevitably there will be "But shared hosting works for me!" replies. It works...until it doesn't. You get an Alexa top 10,000 site, and even with good caching, your site doesn't work so well with shared hosting--then you have to scramble around and muck with switching providers when you should be working with your new customers and working on your product. That's why I don't even recommend starting with shared.