Sorry to post so long after last reply, but having same issue on same host (Bluehost). There are philosophical issues there for another time (e.g., if they don't support you doing the upgrades, then they should not allow the software under shared hosting).
I just upgraded to 3.3 and it runs fine with the Antelope tables... Barracuda is a recommendation. HOWEVER, another thing that is recommended for 3.3 is to upgrade the Unicode support to utf8mb4. And THAT requires the Barracuda format (at least for the CLI script to run, because I got "Error: 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci' requires the file format to be set to Barracuda. An attempt was made to change the format, but it failed. Please try doing this manually."
Here are the tech questions. Can ALTER commands or some other command to convert to Barracuda be run for each table without setting the Globals?
Also, the showsql option of the CLI script to change to Barracuda only shows 8 tables that need to be modified. There are 278 tables in that DB. If those tables are converted, will the collation script run, when there are 1353 columns in the 278 tables that are listed by the collation script list option?