How widely used is VPS hosting for personal sites?

My VPS has given me the chance to experiment with new server software. I started on the usual apache2+mod_php setup, but now I have nginx+php-fpm with a proxy back to some legacy apache2+mod_php sites. I'm also running (and tuning) APC, memcached, and mysqld.

If you're just going to run a few sites, and performance is good on your shared host, I would stay put. If you're going to excercise your right to root, a VPS is a great economical way to try new things.

I don't know how widely used it is, but I can say it's a very good option if you don't mind the additional cost. Generally speaking, you get more space, better performance, the ability to install your own software.

If you've only got a few photos on your personal blog, a shared plan is probably your best bet. But if you have GBs of photos and videos you want to share, maybe host sites for several family members/friends, maybe setup OpenVPN for securing your hotspot wifi access (yay starbucks free wifi!), maybe run some other software like an SVN, or want to test our software on a non-critical machine then a VPS is a great way to go.

I use VPS hosting for my personal sites. It was a bit of effort to set up, but I love the control I have over it';s configuration. I'd suggest that if you're a reasonably competent sysadmin you might want to go that way, but for the majority of people a VPS is a bit more expensive and the extra control isn't hugely beneficial. If I was starting again today, I'd probably still go the VPS route, but if a friend or family member came to me wanting to set up a web site I'd probably push them towards shared hosting.