Suppose that I want to buy zkissane.com, that it's available, and that I want to put my own website there. From start to "now that you have a machine that responds to zkissane.com, you can install a webserver, whatever else you need, and start writing your HTML/PHP/Rails/JSP/*", what do I need to do to make that happen?

Also, what kind of pitfalls should I watch out for?

Posting on a forum that your current sysadmin (whom you've never paid for your current hosting) reads?

:)

I've heard good things about http://www.dreamhost.com they're pretty cheap. If you're looking for something a little more industrial, I've heard good things about http://www.textdrive.com

You're probably going to be looking for a provider that has:

- A decent control panel, some of the better providers have control panels that even automatically set up some common software packages (yes, yes, shells are good too, but a control panel often makes the difference between "I'll get to that one of these days" and "<click> done".)

- Rates spelled out in advance on things like going over on transfer

- Customer service that doesn't require a phone call. Odds are they'll be more expensive, and less useful than people who provide a forum

- Most of the good providers have registrar agreements of one kind or another these days, so you should be able to go to them, say "I want to set up new hosting with a new domain name", and they should be able to completely take care of you (one-stop-shopping)

It's hard to tell the fly-by-night places from the decent ones, you might want to check out what other people are saying about whoever you're thinking of at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ too.

You can do it all yourself:
1. Buy the domain from a registrar (godaddy.com ~10/year)
2. Get a static IP from your ISP (price depends on provider)
3. Setup the server on said IP (install apache2, etc)

Pretty easy OR a great learning experience. Its easy to google most problems you may encounter. Also, since you have complete control over the server, you can add remove and format to your heart's content. Ptifalls being if you screw something up, no dedicated support.

If you don't want to setup your own server, you can buy space and a dedicated IP for not too much money. Of course, it depends on what you are using it for. I pay for a 'server' and domain name (~$12/mo for server, ~$15/year for domain registry). I don't really do much with them anymore except to upload pictures (so I don't have to mess with things like photobucket, etc).

Unfortunately, if you want a decent amount of space, you'll want to do what jay said and setup your own. Mine is only 1.5GB webspace, which is plently for hosting even a very large website with lots of light content, but of course no good for a fileserver, etc. These are what I use:

http://readysetconnect.com/ VERY easy to use, amazing control panel (cPanel), excellent customer support, shell access, many auto-install scripts, lots more (has changed hands once since I bought it as AlteraHosting in 1999, however the transition was nearly flawless)

http://dotreg.com/indexn.html (domain registry) I know there's many cheaper ones out there, but I've used this one for about 6 or 7 years now, and the difference in $10/year and $15/year isn't enough for me to switch.

http://www.dreamhost.com/

shit I should switch

I'm quite fond of http://www.canaca.com