With any shared hosting, there are trade offs that need to be made. Some shared hosts limit the amount of resources you can have while others are a little more flexible. Fortunately for us, Cloud Sites is one of the flexible ones. Cloud Sites has boosting capabilities, DDoS protection, and a bunch of other cool things that make sites secure and run as smoothly as possible.
Planning
When installing any CMS software, this simple reality is easily forgotten. Like a kid with a new toy, many people install Drupal -- really install Drupal and about 90,000 contributed modules they don't need. Sure, the functionality sounds great, but do you absolutely need it? In most cases, probably not.
Updates
Another thing that tends to get a reasonably low status is maintenance. Every software package requires updates from time to time and you shouldn't let your Drupal installation fall behind.
Boost
SysLog vs. Database Logging
DB Module
Mod_Deflate
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript
Fast 404
CDN
Memcache
Whoa, memcache on a shared system?! One of the most powerful things Cloud Sites can do is access remote servers and resources