Thank you very much for a very useful post, as this is what I call a good personal recommendation. I realise that once I have a fully functioned Moodle site active with It must be stable with one host, and not be chopping and changing with different hosts etc. TMD does appear to be a good host, and I will give them another try on application to see I reach the same figure you have. I must have selected the wrong package deal.
Yes most definitely I do read the other posts here about their problems on upgrading, and that's what scares me. There are many of them, and they will continue to post here I'm sure.
I've tried bitnami earlier on, but their downloads failed to install on my ubuntu 14.04. I'll give it another try by checking out the Ubuntu forums. Normally I can find an answer there without even posting.