This may be good advise to help you save some money (which you could invest in advertising or something else). Perhpas you should start up on a shared hosting plan with a provider that can make it easy for you to upgrade down the road to a VPS/dedicated server?

Correct start cheap upgrade as you grow don't jump the gun and buy a vps right now.

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I suggest starting with HostGator and then upgrading to VPS once your site grows. HostGator has excellent customer support and they really help a lot with upgrades and stuff

hostgator or godaddy would be good choice... they are reliable.

Reliable they are both, at least in my experience, but only one of them is slow (GD).

Depending on what you need, which I'm guessing you are starting from 100% scratch, I think that Shared Hosting will be fine. Check out some companies and see what will do it for you. You can always upgrade later too!

Managing your own VPS is much more like being a sysadmin with your own hardware than it is like being a shared hosting client. The prices on shared and low-scale VPS are not that different. It may be a good idea to move to a VPS sooner than later. That way the change will be less stressful.

Once your site takes off, you can either scale the VPS with your hosing provider or easily switch to one that will. Since you've already had experience provisioning a VPS with your first VPS host, the learning curve won't be so bad as when you're coming from shared hosting.