Ask HN: When to colocate/VPS/etc.

In another article linked there was a discussion about hosting your own website to maintain your online presence. This is always something I have felt was important --- as evidenced by attempt #29 of getting up a somewhat good looking personal site.

I have always hosted my website and e-mail at home on a simple "server" box. With the minute loads I have at present this works fine --- and I don't foresee any problems in the near future --- but the minute you start getting any kind of load (which is bound to happen sooner or later if the site isn't utterly superfluous) an itty-bitty ADSL link will be maxed in no time.

Which leads me to the question, when do you move to a more professional hosting solution? And which hosting solution then? The main alternatives seem to be colocating and VPS, but each have significant pros and cons (especially for poor students like me).

Colocating, pros: - Resources are cheap (sticking in a few hundred GB of disk space costs next to nothing) - Full control over the hardware and OS

Colocating, cons: - High up-front cost (server and for a lot of colocating deals set-up cost) - Your problem when stuff breaks - Not always accessible 24/7 (especially cheaper hosting)

VPS, pros: - No costs upfront - No worrying about hardware failure - More common/low budget hosting

VPS, cons: - Less control over OS (for example mostly linux based, FreeBSD hosts seem few and far between) - Low cost version usually have very little memory/disk space limits

Now I guess you could say "Just learn linux then!" to take 1 VPS con away, but I just don't feel comfortable working on linux machines. I've grown to like FreeBSD and I have no intention of ditching it.

So HN tell me, when did you change to "professional" hosting (or did you start there immediately), which route did you go and how did you arrive at your decision?