And when I say "serious" I mean work-related.  

A library association I'm involved with wants their own website and domain (com, cc, org are fine).  I like GoDaddy.com and Yahoo Web Hosting, but...

What I also want to do now is get some cheap space of my own with my own money so I can maybe mess with some page designs, or even MySQL and PHP (maybe a simple BBS?), so that before we have an official site, I can already have some real working examples.

So what host is best for theses purposes?
(The webspace my university gives me doesn't enable scripts of any kind)

PHPnet seems pretty nice. They offer a fair amount of space/bandwidth, a free domain name, databases, subdomains, email addresses, etc. Their annual payment plan is only about $35.00.

http://dreamhost.com

Cheap hosting and free domain name.

Quote from: PecanClock;1269588http://dreamhost.com

Cheap hosting and free domain name.

hybridsoft.net used to be hosted there but because of dream host, hybrisoft was down most of the time.

My recommendation is SurpassHosting, but I think it's more like $81/year for a domain and hosting...

The location of joliet_jane's signature would suggest that she's already addressed her hosting woes, folks.

The IRC server and the radio/internetcult.org server are hosted by http://www.voodoohosting.com/ and I'm quite happy with it.

DirectAdmin is a little funny, but once you get used to it it's quite good. I'm running SMF (SimpleMachineForums), which is a pretty great free BBS.

Quote from: TremcladClock;1269816The location of joliet_jane's signature would suggest that she's already addressed her hosting woes, folks.

Yes, but not quite.  PhpNet seemed like a good solution for me ($3 a month), but the association hasn't decided yet.  They'll have more complicated needs than I, so they may want something else.

Quote from: ouıqןɐ;1269990DirectAdmin is a little funny, but once you get used to it it's quite good. I'm running SMF (SimpleMachineForums), which is a pretty great free BBS.

I was looking at that and other free BBS's, but now that you've mentioned it, I'll just focus on that one.

GoDaddy is terrible. Their admin panel is a complete mess.

I like hostgator.com . They use cPanel and you can upload your own php.ini files

Quote from: ouıqןɐ;1269990I'm running SMF (SimpleMachineForums), which is a pretty great free BBS.

I got my SMF up and running all by myself

Child's play for you, but totally new for me.

Quote from: joliet_jane;1270817I got my SMF up and running all by myself

Child's play for you, but totally new for me.

Pfft, yeah right. I knew my way around the admincp in vB and phpBB pretty well, but I learned SMF by installing it. I've learned quite a bit since then, though, so if you need any help don't hesitate to give me a holler on IM or PM or something.