What hosting do you have or like to use?
- dedicated servers
- virtual hosting
- another (please post your answer at this thread)
Dedicated is more expendisve, but you get better services (generally). Virtual is pretty good, but if someone doesn't like another site on the same box and decides to DDoS it, you're SOL too. Other would be Geocities or something, which....no. Just.......no.
Nice thing about getting dedicated servers is that you (usually) are able to telnet/SSH/RDP in.
But again, price. I wish I had a dedicated...but I'm too poor.
I currently own and operate two dedicated servers which are, dual 2.8GHz Xeon processors, 2GB RAM, 4x 73GB SCSI HDD RAID 5. By far the best choice is dedicated servers, if you can afford them.
Generally, it is all a personal preference. If you can afford it, then colocation is by far the best option, in my opinion. The only risks you take there is hardware failuer won't be covered by the provider, and the servers are 100% self-managed, and another thing is, you have to build or ship out a prebuilt system to the datacenter of choice.. The dedicated option is good for the first time user, that doesn't want to use a VPS or a shared reseller account. If you are just starting out, I would suggest going in the following order: Shared Reseller / VPS / Dedicated / Colocation.
I have an account on iago's Linux server, darkside. I've got SSH and thus SFTP, and with a bunch of research I can usually figure out how to do whatever I want. I'm able to run programs and stuff.. so yeah.. finding a friend with a server is the best route in my opinion.