I think that answer is generally a good one. But when you're simply doing development and haven't launched yet, a hosted developer account can take a lot of headache out of hosting.

I don't want to be the UNIX admin for my VPS when I'm focused on development. So a REALLY important feature of any hosting provider for me is the ability to start on a $5 shared server account, and eventually ramp it to a 1024MB VPS, painlessly.