Webhosting

I'm thinking about buying myself some webhosting. There are several things that I really want to try that require having a decent webhost.

I've poked around a bit, looking at free hosts and most of them seem to be pretty hokey. They give you cheezy subdomains or strange addresses and they have horrible user interfaces loaded with obnoxious adds. Even if I could get past all that, most of them won't allow me to install the kind of software that I want to use.

Anyhow, I found several hosts that have good reputations and that seem to be pretty user friendly.  They give me 10-20 GB of hardspace and a thousand GB of bandwidth. Most of them come with professional blogging software (pre-set up if so desired), FTP, domain name(s), free tech support and uptime guarantees among a host of other features and services.

Here are the ones that I'm looking at:

• Blue Host
• AN Hosting
• DreamHost

If you know anything about these guys, have other recommendations or any advice I'd really appreciate your input.

The other thing that's appealling about these guys is that they're quite affordable, costing $6-8 per month which works out to less than a hundred dollars a year.

This looks like a really cool toy to buy and yet...

My miserly superego points out that I don't have an abundance of disposable capital to work with right now. Between the costs of tution and Tokyo living I'm living pretty close to the wire. Can I afford webhosting when I balk at the cost of buying fruit at the grocery store?

*UPDATE* I looked a bit more into AN Hosting and they are offering 50 GB of hard space, 1000 GB of bandwidth and all sorts of goodies for $7 a month, with my first two months free. That seems like a sweet deal. $70 for a year of sweet webhosting... It's so tempting.