SUMMARY (by type of service)

personal website/low-traffic hosting: nearlyfreespeech.net

budget shared hosting: dreamhost

cheap VPS (Xen): vpsvillage (a brand of grokthis) (one step more expensive but still considered "cheap VPS" ($20/mo): haven't fully researched yet but maybe slicehost, linode, knownhost, serveraxis, powervps, rimuhosting, or others)

midrange web application shared hosting: ?haven't researched much yet; maybe grokthis?

(were i to host a "standard" site (i.e. mostly static, a little dynamic, but not using too much CPU, really high uptime not a concern), i'd use dreamhost. were i to host a "very dynamic" Python site (such as the filters site), i'd start out using grokthis, either VPS or shared)

dedicated server: ?haven't researched much yet

domain name registrar: moniker (if i get the discount i'm seeking), otherwise namecheap

DETAILS

TYPES OF HOSTING

shared hosting (fixed monthly fee), shared hosting (pay as you go), VPS, dedicated, colo

shared hosting (fixed monthly fee): Tens to hundreds or thousands of clients share a server. They each pay a fixed monthly fee.

shared hosting (pay as you go): Like the above, but instead of a fixed fee, clients pay according to how much bandwidth and disk space, etc they use per month. nearlyfreespeech.net is the only one i saw that does this. This seems to be the best deal if you have a low-traffic site.

VPS: virtual private server. A bunch of clients still share the same server. But using virtualization technology (seems to be usually Virtuozzo, VMWare, Xen, or OpenVZ?