The VPS industry is pretty young. I've been dealing with Shared hosting for a long time and just recently got the bug and have been giving a few different VPS's a twirl.

So far things look promising and I have to say I am very impressed with VPS's, and also agree with others that it's a great upgrade from shared. Just be careful because sometimes there are things that you need a dedicated server for, like extremely high cpu usage (game server types) applications.