Adavntages: it's a bloody good server with one of the world's top hosting companies (look up LiquidWeb if you haven't heard of them). It's currently only burning up ten percent of the monthly bandwidth cap, even though it's carrying three other sites along with ours, so there's a lot of room for growth. It could easily carry the main CEMB site as well if necessary. The server is stable. They tend to deteriorate with age. This one is in good condition so no problems there.
We're already paid up for a year so moving now without a damned good reason would be silly. Matt is sysadmin for the server as a whole and he's good at it, so that's another bonus. LiquidWeb provide excellent support, unlike some companies.
Another relevant point: most hosting packages are on shared servers anyway. If you want your own, dedicated server it will cost a lot more than the bargain basement hosting packages that are advertised everywhere. Most of those have hidden, fine print conditions and cannot deliver what they are advertised as delivering. Which reminds me: if you know of anyone looking for hosting and who is about to get sucked in by ads I'd advise them to look around carefully. The support is often crap on cheap packages. In fact if anyone wants private opinions on hosting based on what I've learned over the past 18 months send me a pm about it.
Disadvantages: mainly technical, due to the way Matt has set the server up. My job is a pain in the arse in some respects due to restricted permissions and also due to the server config being slightly incompatible with our SMF software. I would dearly love to reconfigure the bastard and am working on sorting something out. So yeah, in some ways I'd love to be on a different server just to make some aspects of my job a lot easier but I can probably improve the current setup.
Thanks, Oz - everything you've done and continue to do is much appreciated