After procrastinating for a couples months now I have gone ahead with my plan to move the site. Actually, I moved all my sites from a dedicated server to shared hosting. It wasn’t a quality of service issue that forced the change, xlhost.com is an excellent dedicated provider and I’d use them again.
The main reason for the change is fiscal, 80% to 90% reduction in costs for my on-line presence. The big trade off’s are control, resources, and bandwidth, however there are some benefits. No responsibility for the servers administration is a big one.
I’ve been a consumer of dedicated server services since 2003 and was with xlhost 2 1/2 years, moving away from a dedicated wasn’t easy. xlhost has good hardware and a fast network. Never once did my server go down and 11-12mb was common. The same could not be said of my previous dedicated provider. The price was also excellent.
Shared hosting! Limited control and resources the order of the day, but you can’t beat the price. The fact is a dedicated server was (almost) always overkill for my needs. Horsepower and bandwidth I never fully utilized or had the a real need for. This new home should be a better fit for my needs and although I’ve never been a fan of server GUI tools it does make configuration and administration quick and easy.
I originally planned to make the move on the 20th but keep dragging until I finally started the process on the 30th (the last minute ). Overall the transition went smoother than I expected it would. I had everything configured with DB and site files uploaded in about 30 -45 minutes. The DNS started to work within an hour and had propagated completely after 24 hours.
It’s been 5 days now and so far so good. It is to early to speak regarding the quality of service, time will tell with that. One of the things I like is the “control panel”, it’s nice, doesn’t lack for features and is easy to use. Here’s to hoping I don’t move again unless it’s back to a dedicated server 
.