Thanks,
VPS = Virtual Private Server, in short it simply means we have our own web server to process the data and we would like to keep it this way, it gives us full control of the data and minimal dependencies on a third party.
We intend to have a few of these Arduino's spread around various locations where the internet connection would be made available to us, but we would have no control over it. For this reason sending the data out as a web client to our own web server makes sense. The data will be submitted with timestamps and will be used to create human read historical reports, so as long as the Arduino timestamps the data on collection I'd be happy submitting the data as infrequently as every hour.
Something I have noticed is that my timestamps in the previously posted code seem to be all over the place, do you know why this might be?