Real world benefits of switching to VPS

[CK]

Okay so I'm with Vidahost on a shared plan at the moment (have to say they're excellent by the way), so good in fact if you PM I'll reply back with a 10% coupon code

Anyway I've been with them for 3 years now and as I've learnt more I've started to outgrow the shared hosting that I have, in short there are limitations to what I can do with my space. For example I would like to swap in digital point's sphynx search and like to try some form of caching too.

So what I want to know before I really consider switching from them is, is it really worth it.

At the moment I get 25Gb/Files, 100GB/Bandwidth, One2One support R1 Soft backup every 4 hours with a 2 week history. In the last year I can hand on heart say that I've had total downtime of less than 20 minutes. That's pretty good huh especially at £9.99, VPS minimum I can see is at about £15 starting but I'm not sure what specs I should go for.

Help please.