Anybody here using a VPS account? Is it worth the trouble? I administer 30+ sites and it seems like a good way to lower my costs and build a little more income -- but I don't want to be ignoring web design and web updates to deal with administrative stuff.

Yes, I am using a VPS-Base package using my own Plesk Reloaded license.

The support is excellent! The hostmysite techs are very accommodating, even with my "non-standard" vps-base setup (using my own license for plesk). Most of my troubles have been resolved within a few hours.

I am running 10 sites off my vps at the moment, I keep a couple other sites at another location for redundancy. There is very little down time, and most outages are preceded with an email warning of maintenance.

The only constructive comment / wish is:

I often run out of memory doing simple every day tasks i.e. installing some perl modules, doing yum updates - these packages should come with 128 mb more memory (328 mb min) as standard and they would be great.
I find myself rebooting my vps every few days, as various tasks eventually crash do to memory issues. This would not happen as much if there was a little more base memory.

Having a VPS will give you more control over you websites, mail, DNS etc. With 30 sites, you should benefit from the consolidation of your sites to one of these accounts.