suggestions for LAMP hosting providers

Hello All,

I'm a bit of a newb to tinkering with linux, but I want to set up a blog to document my experience, and I thought it would be great to set up apache, mysql, etc as part of that learning experience.

To keep it easy (for now), I prefer to find a reliable and economic provider for my domain registration, hosting, and if I'm lucky, a quick way to get up and running with a blog.

What kind of access to the site should I be looking for? I see references to "cpanel" with some providers, but I'm not familiar with that. Is it possible to us an SSH client to access all my files on the hosting provider... or should I not worry about that?

I've used GoDaddy and .NET for my business website - and I absolutely cannot stand GoDaddy. There web admin pages are a real PITA.

Any suggestions?

(Yeh, I know I could do wordpress, blogger, etc, but that wouldn't be as much fun!)

Additionally, what scripting languages should I familiarize myself with - PHP, perl, etc - which do most linux web developers use?

Thanks in advance

Linode.com I've heard good things about.

nearlyfreespeech.net

Thanks Linode looks like it's just the thing I'm looking for!

You're very welcome.
AND they have an extensive library for managing servers, etc at http://library.linode.com/using-linu...tration-basics