From a customer's point of view, what would be your ideal choice in hosting? Would it be shared, reseller, vps, dedicated or some other technological advancement in the hosting field such as cloud.

Personally, I'm a VPS guy now that they are getting less and less expensive. I blame Virtuozzo for the high prices but I digress. More power, more functionality then traditional hosting. Can't beat it for the price range. Plus, I never know when I'm going to create a new project so having the room for a big one is good.

Personally i am also a VPS guy. I like SolusVM running xen. Has been working great since I changed to that from OpenVZ.

Strictly in terms of numbers, shared and reseller accounts are probably the most popular (and ideal).

Agreed with Steve, the shared and reseller are very popular.
Also it totally depends on one's requirements.

Well it's not about everyone's top choice, just yours. Like infusion above, I am a fan of SolusVM and Xen. Excellent stuff.

This is a very broad question as everyone has different needs. Are you trying to pose this question to a particular market?

For me, I like to have a sense of control of our hosting environment, and the VPS platform is the best fit for my personal projects.

VPS is always good but for low traffic/processing websites. VPS gives you a feel of a Dedicated server and you are free to implement various things on it.

BTW, it also depends on ones requirement.

I too think shared is good.... it is cheap also.

I think that any high availability hosting account hosted in a clustered infrastructure and managed as Shared Hosting is best for consumers. No one wants to pay for software licenses and system administration unless necessary.

No Sean, it was just to everyone in general based on the fact that everyone has different needs and it'd be interesting to see what they want, and why because some of the answers are pretty unique.

I' ll personally prefer, VPS and dedicated.

Regards,
Raicol

I'm a big fan of VPS hosting but it will greatly depend on your needs as to what is the best. I would imagine that 90% of websites would not need anything other than shared hosting.

Regards,
Jack

I'd say it all depends on your budget and needs. If I can afford it, a dedicated server is always welcome. But shared hosting can be the best for you also.

I think it all depends on what the customer needs/wants.

If they want to run their own small hosting company, then reseller, vps or dedi is the only way to go.

If the customer wants to host his/hers poetry blog. Then a shared is more than enough.