Ever since I started doing my own personal website back in aught-four, I've been on a shared hosting service. You pay a few bucks a month and you get some server space. And for my old Wordpress site, and until recently my Drupal sites have done fairly well on the shared hosting.

But I'm a bit of a control freak (which might explain why I have to have my own website). And my latest hosting company, Site 5, recently tweaked their servers and broke some functionality on one of my websites. Now there's nothing wrong in anything they did -- indeed not worrying about server upgrades is one of the benefits with shared hosting. But it offended my inner control freak, so something had to be done.

And that something is getting a Virtual Private Server (VPS). I went with Slicehost and for $38 a month I get a Linux box with an IP address, 20GB storage, 200GB bandwidth, and 512 MB of RAM. And that's it. Everything else -- Apache, PHP, MySQL -- I had to install by my lonesome. But not too lonesome, they have a robust set of tutorials to guide a VPS newbie such as me through the process.

It hasn't been all easy, but I've learned a lot and I now have a much greater control over my web servers. For instance, I've improved my web page performance to be over ten times faster. And going forward, I'll be able to play with the Solr search functionality with Drupal.

In short, it's worth the pain.