[noahc]

Do you want managed or unmanaged?

I would say webfaction is by far the best managed host bang for the buck.

If you're looking for unmanaged then linode is probably the way to go.

[robotchampion]

Never used unmanaged. How hard is it for newbs to install, update, patch and all that?

[noahc]

Just a heads up a LAMP stack on Ubuntu can be done in under an hour and half. I recently setup a LAMP stack and never setup a LAMP stack before in less than two hours.

I have some sys admin and nix experience. If I were you, unless you knew you wanted to learn how to setup and scale apps (sys admin), I'd go with webfaction

[eminkel]

If you know how to setup a PHP/SQL development environment you may be able to setup a server. It's not that difficult.