Whether you decide to purchase a VPS plan or not depends on your needs. Do you have a very busy website? I guess the answer to that is relative. Do you have thousands of visitors visit your website every day and do you end up requiring a gig of transfer or more per day?

If you do indeed have thousands of unique visitors to your website every day and if you do have a graphic-intensive or media-intensive website then perhaps you should consider purchasing a VPS hosting account. The main differences between a VPS and shared hosting environment is that you are typically guaranteed a set amount of resources in your VPS plan. These guaranteed resources are RAM (memory), hard disk space, processor power and bandwidth. In addition to these resources, you have access to your own virtual environment, as if you have your own server. You typically don't have to worry about other people hosting on the same server and messing things up; in a shared environment, when that happens it theoretically effects everybody (though it doesn't happen too often) and a reset to the server affects everybody on that shared server. So on your own VPS plan, if your site is buggy, you can reset it on your own. It does typically involve a little more work on your end as far as maintenance and management and of course since you have more resources allocated to yourself, it comes with a heftier price tag.

The VPS test: start with a shared hosting environment, especially if you are starting a new website. Then see how things are running. If your site frequently freezes, goes down, or cannot handle the amount of traffic your website gets, then that is a sign that you may need to upgrade to a VPS account.

Conclusion: If you have a very busy website that doesn't perform on a shared hosting environment then perhaps you could benefit from a VPS hosting solution. If you need it, then you need it. But why pay up to hundreds or thousands of dollars more (as you may over the course of a year) if you don't need it? As always, buy what you need and don't waste money on what you don't. You can never go wrong with trying a shared hosting plan first, it's cheap and is the best possible deal if you develop your website and use it, and you will never lose too much money on it if you don't.