Many hosting options

Basic hosting

Hosting can either be very simple, or very complex. It really depends on a few basic factors.
Are you expecting a dramatic amount of traffic right away? Or a gradual increase from nothing? What kind of scalability do you expect? If you don't know the answers to these questions, have a look at the traffic for some of your competition to get an idea of what you might expect. Is your site going to be database driven? Or mostly a static site?
The other main consideration would be features. Small sites just starting out will do wonderfully with a cheap shared hosting plan. There are literally thousands of options out there, I suggest going with one of the larger corporations though, less chance of them disappearing (along with your site!).
Larger traffic sites can look at co-lo hosting, getting one or more machines hosted at a facility designed to manage the hardware. Very rarely would I suggest you host your sites in house. Only if you have dedicated sys admins, a proper server environment with full backups for power and connectivity. The last thing you want is for a natural disaster, or accident to turn your site off! While these things can happen at other facilities, they are usually designed to keep running even in event of natural disasters.
For truly massive sites (although I don't think you'd be reading this, as you've got teams of people like me to tell you these things) it's exciting to setup clusters of machines, working with masters and slaves (machines) and distributed environments around the world. Good fun! Sadly not relevant for most of us though.

My personal site, which I have a very simple page with very little design or information I host with GoDaddy.com. My only reasoning for going with them as a host, was that my domain was registered there. Please give it more thought than me! I hate the interface trying to get into my account. I have to click through a half dozen pages of ads assaulting me, dreadful interface trying to guess where my next link will pop up. Truly a painful experience. Luckily most of the time I simply ftp straight to the server, and skip that user interface nightmare. I have setup a bunch of "testing" sites there, where I post sites I'm working on for various projects, since I like to keep my home network truly hidden.

Friends and associates have found success hosting personal sites with 1and1.com, although I've never personally used them, I hear they are good!

Please don't judge me by my home page! Ever heard the adage "The cobblers children have no shoes". That's my site! I spend so much time on sites for clients, and for new ideas etc, I never actually update my own. Please have mercy!

BFN