If you want to get into designer/developer mode for clients you are likely going to have to learn to host your own servers (note: I don't mean physically, I mean services like Rackspace, etc). If they're a couple static (ie: no server-side language) pages that won't get hit very often, you might use github's pages functionality.
I'd go with Rackspace over linode due to the great feedback I've heard about Rackspace, whereas I've heard relatively little about linode. Personally I use Heroku as they have a free tier that helps when just "getting stuff out there". The problem with Heroku is they don't have explicit support for PHP, so that could be an issue for you. If you're going to go after big client work, Amazon Web Services (EC2) familiarity is a nice checkbox to tick.
Remember a server is just a computer. If you can set it up to run on your computer, you can set it up to run on a server.
P.S. Get used to being in over your head. It's the fastest way to get up to speed, just learn how to swim underwater.
I'd say use Ruby/Rails if you want to create webapps and PHP/etc if you want to create Wordpress sites. Someone more experienced than me in these languages can comment further.
Heroku.com supports Ruby and from using it with Clojure and node.js apps, I highly suggest this route even if you enjoy setting up your own servers. You can also use providers like Amazon EC2/Joyent/Rackspace and set up your own box to be either a LAMP stack or Ruby/Rails.
There is a long list of Databases to choose from these days, including: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Riak, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc.
Truly the answer you're looking for is "Just start somewhere". The amount of tech you can choose between is dizzying and you'll eventually get to a point where you can make your own decisions if you just keep hacking.