[mikeyur]

I'm a huge fan of WebFaction.com for hosting. I host my personal stuff and sites I'm tinkering with on there, it's shared hosting but acts like a VPS (gives you application memory), and they also have a bunch of 1-click installers for Wordpress/Rails/Django etc.

For a personal site I'd probably do something static with your blog hosted on posterous - but wordpress w/ wp-supercache plugin works pretty well. Grab a theme off of ThemeForest (or one of the 80 million other theme sites) and tweak it a bit.

I think everyone should have some basic server admin experience, but having to update a personal server can be a hassle. I login to my hosting control panel probably 3-4 times a year, max. It's just a convenience thing, they patch it and make sure my site stays up.