Under 10 sites on VPS

Will it negatively affect rankings?

[Egbert Souse]

Several years ago I understood that google penalized sites that were owned by the same company, if they linked together and if the sites were similar in nature, but not duplicate content.

We have several sites all with separate IP static unique IP addresses, all interlinked, all different content, but in the same general category. For example major category cars. One site on ford, one on chevy, one on vw, one on honda, etc. I am thinking of going with a VPS to save money, and avoid the hassles of someone doing something stupid and drastically slowing down the server. If I put all of those site (under 10) in the same VPS, will we be penalized by google?

Or would I be better off with shared hosting accounts on various servers all over the place.