What are the advantages of a WordPress hosting over a regular one?

There's a lot of hype with all of these WordPress style hosts. Yes, they will take care of some of the upgrades and "security" but this also adds limitations on themes/plugins, etc.

Quite honestly if you're familiar and comfortable with maintaining WordPress, stick with a regular hosting account.

I used Hostgator and switched to Synthesis about 9 months ago.

On Hostgator, my server kept "falling over". I then moved from a cheap shared plan to a VPS. As near as I could tell, my performance went DOWN. When I discussed this w/ Hostgator, they said I had to buy more "VPS". So I had them crank up the VPS to one of their higher levels. My server still "fell over". ( I was getting about 100-200 visitors/day ). One of my problems was that I just needed a little extra help. Hostgator really isn't able to provide - not good or bad - they just could not afford to baby me.

So I switched over to Synthesis. They did everything for me on the setup side. All I did was upload the WP dbase and files.

I'm running about 1500 visitors per day and am pretty much problem free. If my site goes down, they have a "red alert" and they are ALL over it. That service is 24/7.

I pay more, but the extra help is worth it to me. According to tools.pingdom.com my site is faster than 85% of all sites on the web.

I'm pretty happy with the service and am a big believer. BTW they made me switch off of shared (due to disk space, not visitors) and when I went VPS my performance went up. That was a nice surprise.

I still use hostgator for my email. I'm not upset with hostgator, I view it as simply needing a little more help on the administration side.

Synthesis does not really maintain WP. You can upgrade to the latest WP. The biggest thing for them is they are very strict on rewrites, inactive plugins, use of web cacheing. They also use NGINX and have lots of the PHP staying in memory, so there are restrictions around that. They do keep an eye on security things and communicate it well to all of us.

If I do it again, I would still probably start with a shared account on Hostgator, then as the site grows, transition it to Synthesis.

But the other folks are right nothing wrong with Hostgator.

I think it's all fluff...I doubt there's a real difference.

The main difference I can see is speed of site - ie site loading up to 4 x faster

A Wordpress style host is just a hot targeting Wordpress users. They are just targeting a niche. Every decent webhost nowadays should support Wordpress sites very easily.