IMHO the best thing to do is to take a cheap housing. Here in Italy where prices are much higher than in the USA you can get a decent host with a big disk, few GB of ram, 1Mbit of guaranteed bandwidth for 100 EUR / month, including the price to hire the server.

It's very important to have a good Linux distribution like Debian or Ubuntu where you can install/upgrade things in few seconds with apt-get.

Also it's important to have root to be able to install different apache modules, install cron jobs, be able to manage the firewalling in case of attacks (I saved myself from a DOS thanks to a Tcl script + iptables one week ago).

Virtual servers are cheap but the performance may not be bright.

p.s. I suggest to use a very low TTL for your DNS records so you can switch ASAP if there are problems. Also to try to "packetize" your application is important in order to make sure you can install without too much problems your code in a different host in little time.

Actually, I've found the performance of my Xen VPS much better than a dedicated server at The Planet. Most likely that's because the dedicated server had just one IDE disk and the Xen host has a fast SCSI RAID array. Dedicated hosting gets pretty expensive when you get into SCSI drives and RAID but it's really important to consider your performance and reliability needs.

Scritti inglese molto bene! Complimenti.

grazie ;) ma parlo molto male.

Allora, deve abitare in America, Britania, Canada, etc. se vuoi parlara bene. E' troppo difficile imparare da solo. Ma se pua scrivere bene, va bene cosi'.

Btw, you can see that I write like a child. "Scritti"? Scrivi! :-(

Mi ci vorrebbe una vacanza per girare un po' il mondo infatti ;)

Btw, your Italian is fine!