I’m just giving advice from my past experience. I’ve dealt in the front-end of the web since 1995 and many companies that came to us for services had the same question…should we host our own site. The clear and obvious question was no for the small to mid-sized business. For a Fortune 500 retailer we worked with, they definitely needed their own solution, but they also spent millions of dollars on their site.
Today it is much easier to do, as you have pointed out. I don’t really understand what you would be gaining by doing it since it probably nets out to be more time-consuming and more expensive than using a shared hosting solution. This industry is really time-consuming outside of the technical issues, so you may want to think about saving yourself some time. Maybe you have some complex technical plans for running your site that a basic shared solution wouldn’t accommodate. That’s certainly your deal, and you sound like you know what you are doing.
For any other newbies that come across this thread who are less technically astute, my advice stands. Go with a professional hosting solution.