Best practice to host several websites

I have a promising niche which I promote specific affiliate programs in. some of the websites are quite simple with only several pages and other are a bit more dynamic and even require users to log in for commenting, voting etc.

Which setup do you think will be best cost/easy setup/performance wise?

For example, I can use a VPS which is cheap but lacks in performance.

I can use a dedicated server, but that's expensive and requires a lot of setup to get decent performance, like load balancers, CDNS etc..

I can try Cloud hosting with Amazon AWS or Google app engine, but it's hard to figure which one is cheaper.

I'm assuming I'll get some answers like start cheap and scale up when you have more traffic, but in this case you have to remember we are talking about at least ten websites or so and considering how much credit google gives to fast web sites on it's ppc programs and search engine I'd rather have the fastest best architecture to scale up from.

Also give your input and best practices regarding the CMS or any other method your using to create the websites with. For example I've found quite some years ago that hosting a drupal website on a cheap shared bluehost account
is quite useless.

I think a best practice use with examples of BHW users can really assist a lot of us here.

Cheers

Dude, why you are thinking too much.

Get a reseller / shared hosting and Just Host the damn websites using simple CMS like wordpress.

Exactly what MafiaBoss said. I'd recommend a reseller account since it does usually work out a bit cheaper.

Yep, you are thinking way too much for such simple sites. I'd put them on a shared hosting or a VPS and start making money...not loosing my time in thinking about hosting..