Static or dynamic? Budget?

Look into this: http://www.pairlite.com/

I host many many sites with Pair and love their customer service and uptime. You can find cheaper, you might be able to find better (but I'm happy with cost and quality).

I host at pair.com and register my sites at pairing.com.

I run my main site on them and get 4,000 unique visits a day (a lot less than that if you cut out the log spammers and the search engines) and about twice that in page loads. I've never had a problem.

I can give a lot more advice if you give more details. Comments? You want to moderate the site? You want it to had a database, etc.

I have my personal domain & site on https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/. It's essentially pay for as much as you use so I spent less than $15 in 2011 on it excluding my domain. It looks like I used less than 2GB of bandwidth over that year. Other than some fairly static pages, I use it for my feed reader (tiny tiny rss) and bookmark program (sitebar), using a mysql database for both. I'd be happy to chat about it if you want more info.

Thanks for the info, both of you. I think my web site is going to be more along the lines of what you're doing, bluesapphires.

I'm thinking that it's going to be a static site about a project of mine, and while friends and family will find it interesting and fun, I can't see how it could have any interest beyond that. So low budget and home grown.

In the future I might be interested in a dynamic site for some other projects that might have broader appeal.

What I find daunting is just the large amount of choice one has right at the get-go. I work in manufacturing information technology, so I'm pretty tech savvy, and work with SQL and scripting etc., but have no web experience.

I appreciate your help, and offers for future advice!

I use namecheap for domain registration and a small orange for hosting. Nearly free speech might be even cheaper, I need to look into that one.