Hosting? WP Engine vs VPS?

Anyone out there tried both WP Engine and VPS? Or is there something better out there? I’m getting close to launching my site. Of course I’m expecting only a little traffic at first, but I would still like for my site to be as fast as possible at launch. I mean, who wants to refer a friend to a slow site, right?

I still have a few minor things left to optimize on my end, but I’m getting an average load time of 3-4 seconds (between 600ms-2seconds after the first hit) and that’s on a shared hosting.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! ??

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