I currently have a shared hosting plan with Dreamhost. I know there are some people who absolutely hate Dreamhost, but I've had a good experience with them. The point being that their basic shared hosting plan has enough juice to serve the (very) small sites that I run. Unfortunately for Dreamhost, I'm a tinkerer and really like to be able to have full control over whatever projects I'm working on and Dreamhost isn't always flexible with custom stuff. Therefore when I read Damage's latest Etc. post where he mentioned that TR switched to Linode, I checked them out again. Their prices have apparently dropped and now the lowest tier VPS with Linode is the same price as Dreamhost's shared plan so I'm going to switch.
I'm planning on running Nginx as the server on the VPS, but I'm wondering with the differences in architecture between Apache and Nginx and the fact that the low tier VPS only has one core, is it worth switching server software? Also, for you folks who have done this more than I, is it worth segregating the web server from other services I might run with a chroot jail, docker container, etc, or is running it all directly sufficient?