Comment Roll your own VPS (Score 1) 75
Definitely if you want to develop anything that is more than trivial, you need to understand the hosting anyway. So roll your own VPS. I just was forced to change providers (the old one closed shop) and settled on http://serveraxis.com/ - Cheap SSD based VPS (2GB RAM, 16 GB disk, 2 TB bandwith - $28/mo no contract) and reasonable VPS with large disks, like +1 TB. Although for the large disk the default bandwidth is not adequate I think. I just can't think of any system that would need that much data but only have a monthly bandwidth allocation equal the disk size.