I 'upgraded' to using VPS', mostly Digital Ocean and Hetzner a few years ago. But before that I relied on shared hosting. I constantly experienced the following:
- use shared hosting provider <x> because they're affordable and support is great.
- lots of people start using <x>
- support degrades, uptime is affected, and the whole thing goes to shit.
- check various subreddits and forums to figure out what the current 'good' host is.
- go through the trouble of moving my sites (and, early on, DNS) to the new great solution.
- rinse, repeat.
My experience with VPS providers has been less unstable. I mostly moved from DO to Hetzner because the latter is cheaper and still good enough for my use-cases. But the time I've been with DO is multiples of how long I stuck with a shared hosting provider until they went to shit.
(I think HostGator was the last straw for me, iirc)
But, before I knew how to manage my own server, I used https://dathorn.com/. They were the absolute greatest shared host that I have ever used. The guy running it is extremely responsive, and I never had any issues.
If you're looking for shared hosting, I can't recommend them enough. I'm not affiliated, I just hope they never gets put under by big hosting companies.