Honestly, startups here referring to themselves as profitable that aren't paying salaries rubs me the wrong way. Salaries are the major cost in a startup. Up until that point you're just finding ways to not lose money on your hobby.
In bricks-and-mortar businesses that have real overheads (rents, wages, taxes, utility bills) and need real customers paying real money in order to sustain them, you could never say you were profitable unless your balance sheet is consistently in the black (otherwise your bank/accountant/CFO will disagree and you would be out of business).
As I work on my startup, I would never call it profitable until the total income it produces exceeds the outings and includes payment for the time I spent working on it at market rates (i.e. remuneration if I had been contracting/working for others, or a realistic payday at the end of it).
I appreciate for many, doing a startup is a passion and they work insane hours (as do I) and anything that gets publicity is good (hence, saying I earnt X in Y or was profitable after Z days/months to seek attention), but want to see people be more realistic about what being profitable actually is.
If your startup is a hobby and something you’d do anyway that generates some spare cash, then fair enough. However if you are looking at it as a serious business model, and something you want to do full time, then you should account for the time spent on it.
Can you sustain your family on the income you generate? Can you grow the business using the cash flow it creates? If not, then you are not profitable. Sorry.
Yeah, we've had more problems, than I'd like. (I'd say we get great load times 80% of the time. the rest of the time it can be a little slow.) We're currently with Dreamhost, eying Media Temple.
Media Temple Grid Server had uncomfortably high latency for me. Really terrible latency, in fact.
Go VPS and never look back: Slicehost.com (best service/documentation/been on the same virtualization architecture longer than linode) or linode.com (also very highly recommended and slightly cheaper than slicehost)
Maybe its because the site is so simple, but I would find it hard to believe ANY successful startup could be ran on shared hosting, never mind Dreamhost.
But a nice performance boost from shared hosting would be a 256 VPS from Slicehost ($20/mo), then you can scale up to more ram/CPU as you need it... :)
We use Mediatemple and they are great. If you want a contact, email me at shafqat at newscred.com and I can put you in touch with someone to get a discount.
(I have no affiliation with them, nor do I make any money - they've simply been good to us)
