My brother in law recommended a wonderful hosting provider:  DreamHost.  They offer a wonderful deal.  If you are willing to pay $190 upfront, then you get two years of hosting, which comes out to be a little less than $8/month.  For that, you get all this:

146 Gigs of disk space (increases by 1 Gig a week.  So, as long as you produce less than 1 gig a week of content, then you should be safe :-))

1.4 Terrabytes of data transfers.  This increases by 16 gigs a weeks.  Again, I don’t see myself pushing those limits anytime soon.

unlimited number of MySql databases, email addresses, announcement lists, discussion lists, and most importantly, Domains!!

That is right, for less than $8/month, you can host an unlimited number of domains!!  No need to have a dedicated box or pay extra per domain.  That means you can host all of your sites, your families, sites, your friends sites without any issues!

They support PHP4 and PHP5.  (Can’t imagine myself using PHP4 at this point…) 

Full Unix Shell.  You can SSH over to the box rmoe files around, compile some programs, get into your mysql server, etc.

Crontab access…  So you can schedule programs t run.  Maybe to send out a news letter, do backups, do some cleanup, whatever.  This is a big thing for me!

Ruby on Rails support… After I master MySql, PHP and Apache, I’m going to learn Rails.

Subversion adn CVS repositories.  This gives you version control.  Used correctly, it should let you revert back to an earilier version.

SSL support, Data backup, access to the log files, one click installations of popular programs like WordPress.  www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html