Thanks for the replies.
The problem I'm going to have, is that I'll be, more likely than not, on a shoe-string budget for awhile.
One of the primary reasons I want to host my own site is to be able to choose the software that goes on it. It is easy enough now to be able to find a Linux server for hosting (my sites are currently hosted on Linux servers - CentOS, I think). But it is very hard to try to find a hosting company that uses *BSD. I found one that used FreeBSD, but they were a little pricey.
I would like to choose which services, databases, etc. are being employed (I guess I'm a control freak).