I'm about to launch a startup site I've been working on for some time, and I'm just now looking over hosting plans. The site's main feature is fairly processor-heavy (a lot of text processing), so I probably need something other then shared hosting to ensure I don't get shut down for overusing resources.
I would like to spend as little as possible on hosting until the site starts generating income, so under-$60/mo is my goal. One caveat is that I need a Windows box for this particular site, so it's harder to get a good deal. For that price, I can either get a bottom-tier dedicated (2gigs ram, pentium 4) or a middle-tier VPS (3gb RAM, a bit more traffic and HD) for a few bucks more per month.
I had a bad experience with a low-end VPS a few months ago, so making sure that whatever I get can handle the basic traffic of a website as well as giving me what I need (extra processing power) is essential. Do you have any suggestions as to which way to go, or a certain hosting company you've worked with that you can recommend?