Hi there, I'm excited to have found this community because I have not been able to find solid, knowledgeable recommendations on web hosting in the past.

Here is my situation. I am a .NET developer and am working on an ASP 3.5 AJAX enabled website with the potential for high traffic and space requirements. Development bandwidth from testing alone (no users) last month was 300MB. I am going to be switching from my current shared plan because they do not enable IIS HTTP compression on their shared plans. I am unsure if I should look for a better shared host, or a vps. My budget for hosting can go up to $30-$40 month initially. Depending on the success of the site, I would likely be looking for an upgrade path possibly even to a dedicated server. I store a lot of data in the MySQL databases and various log files on the site. Also am running a phpBB3 forum tied into the site.

So the big question is shared hosting or managed VPS? If the answer is shared, can anyone recommend a host that enables the HTTP compression? That piece is a dealbreaker.

Thanks.