Virtual servers and speed
 

How much slower are virtual servers than shared and dedicated servers? Are they appropriate for galleries? I assume that blogs would not be a problem. You really don't want to use a server that is so slow, surfers will back button out before your pages are done loading.

Virtual servers do not have to be slow. http://www.pradult.com/ is on a virtual server and if you scroll to the bottom of the page you can see the speed. However, if you are getting a lot of gallery traffic you could end up using too many resources and could risk having your site suspended, or worse.

You might start off with a virtual server, but as your traffic grows you should probably consider upgrading to VPS or dedicated.

don't automatically assume that blogs won't be a problem

wordpress is notoriously inefficient with resources

It really depends on what you are running on a v, and what performance the hoster allows.
Before booking a v you should talk to the hoster about user_beancounters (on a linux). This file is a nice overview on i think virtuozzo what the v can handle.
Mostly such things like open files (This is not the real count of open files) or tcp/other sockets are extremely limited, which can be very bad if you need many files.

One big thing is, that most of these default installations are only for the trash bin. For example my site (see signature) is running on a v, too.

Now in production after doing my own installation and throwing bad bad things away like confixx or plesk i have a usage of the resources like directly after the installation without running anything. Please note that the crawler and the database do run on this host, too.

bad times ;)

run a query on my and take a look at the speeds (Full Text) it is displayed on the left of the search field.

I've had pretty bad experiences with VPS services from a variety of providers. I'm not sure why, maybe it was the node I was on or something, I always had juiced out plans too... then recently I just moved my shit back to a shared host and I haven't had a problem since... weird eh?

There's definitely the flexibility of having your own vps but if want 100% resources of the machine you're using, get a dedicated or if you need less, get shared hosting, you'll save a fuck load of money.