I run about 15 Wordpress sites on the cheapest Linode package, using nginx and php-fpm.

Of course, all of these are very low traffic sites.

There was definitely a learning curve, especially with nginx and Wordpress. I'm much more of a web developer than a server admin, but once everything got up and running, there's very, very little in terms of day to day maintenance.

I used to be on a shared host but also ran into issues with memory and general downtime. Not to mention there is something liberating about having your own (virtual) box.